Music > Interviews

Interview with Richard Hawley

05/09/12

Richard Hawley has been contemplating his own mortality recently; he told the Guardian that he’s had “the feeling that time is running away from me”. Formerly the Longpigs and Pulp guitarist, he shook off those titles – not tempestuously, but with natural progression – to become Sheffield’s most-loved troubadour, racking up 6 studio albums, the latest of which addresses the murky society we all find ourselves wading around in, in Britain. With unique observation and northern patter, he shakes us into realising we’re being politically “kettled”. He does so with passion and vigour; can a man still at his songwriting prime, who addresses issues with such vitality, really be contemplating his twilight years? 

Richard, you’re playing in Norwich this month… I’ve spent a lot of time in Norwich. My wife was born in Wales, but raised just outside Diss. She was brought up, in the main, in a little place called Shelfhanger, which is near Diss. There’s some right weird little villages around there! My mother-in-law lives in Norwich so we’ve been there quite a lot.

And you weren’t too far off in July when you came to Latitude Festival. You were rocking a broken leg at the time… I was rocking a broken leg, yeah! The pot’s off now and everything, so I’m becoming more and more mobile, which is great. I actually walked the dog for the first time yesterday; I could’ve wept, ‘cause you know when you can’t put one foot in front of another and your mobility’s taken away, it affects you massively. It’s right hard to keep buoyant and your spirits up because you just feel pissed off. Even opening a door – it’s taught me how brave and courageous anyone with a disability is to navigate themselves through an able-bodied world. It’s really tough and quite humiliating at times; it’s given me a new perspective and I’ll definitely be more understanding.

I’ve never broken a bone – - Long may that statement remain true.

And now I’m looking around an office of MDF, not being able to touch wood anywhere... Hahaha…

I’ve been reading how walking the dog gave you time to think – is it Fred, the dog – he’s the one we need to give thanks to for the album… Yeah, I was asked the other day whether I was going to give dog royalties, but he’ll be happy wi’ a bone.

Going back to Latitude, you’re a man who is known to enjoy the confines of his local pub, and you’ve even played in a cave, so how do you find the comparative sprawling madness of the festival circuit? Erm, some of it I like, some of it I don’t. Latitude’s a great festival, I really enjoyed playing that concert; it was surreal, mostly because I was off me head on those strong painkillers they gave me. It’s so painful, breaking your leg – I can’t overestimate the pain, it’s ridiculous – that you need [them] just to get through. I mean, I’m really glad I didn’t pull any gigs; I did all of that tour and didn’t wimp out. Nowadays some people would pull out for breaking a nail, and it was quite a severe break and I just thought, ‘fuck it, I’m going to get through this.’ We’ve waited for two years for this, and by hook or by crook, I’m going to get through it. Obviously I’ve got a great set of people who work with me; at times like that you really see the profound difference between two little words, ‘with’ and ‘for’, because when people work ‘for’ you, the dynamics are totally different, whereas when people work ‘with’ you, it’s a different ball game and that really came home, how strong the bond is between our band and our crew and the touring party; it was amazing how much they helped me, and I couldn’t have got through it without them.

It’s so good that you could fulfil it because you’re perfect for the Latitude line-up… Well I like the End of the Road Festival, that’s my favourite –

- I’ve never been. Oh, you’d love it, trust me. It’s in Dorset, in the Larmer Tree Gardens and it’s in a few weeks. It’s not too late – if you can get there, try and go, ‘cause it’s amazing. The festival site is probably about the size of Latitude, but with a third the amount of people. They light the whole forest up with white Christmas lights and my youngest son, Lou, still remembers when I took him at midnight, when he was two, through the tree-lit forest. He said, “Are we going to see Santa?!” It was a really great way of me introducing them to Daddy’s world, d’you know what I mean? They had a Rough Trade record stall, and of course the immortal girls from the Somerset Cider Bus, who came on stage at Latitude – it really was awesome!

I’ve been really intrigued by Festival No. 6 in Wales, because Portmeirion is such an incredible, unique little village – it’s one of your later dates, isn’t it Richard? Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that, I mean, I’ve been as a man fascinated by that place, not just because of The Prisoner, but also because of Clough Williams-Ellis, the guy who built it; he was a definite eccentric and it’s such a surreal, marvellous, strange little place where someone has collected all these frontages of buildings – and some of them aren’t buildings as such, just the frontages – and there’s like that arbour where there’s a gold statue of Buddha and stuff. For many years I’ve had – you know when you go into the gift shop and that and you can buy the original architectural plans reprinted, there’s like a map of Portmeirion you can buy and I bought one and it’s been on our wall for about 20 years.

It’s an eerie place, it’s like the world ended there. It’s odd – - It is odd, but I like it. It’s kind of almost life in a half-life. You know the show from the 60s, The Prisoner, the Patrick McGoohan thing, it portrayed it like that – a kind of isolated, quite controlled environment. There’s something quite magical about that, and I love stuff like that because quite often, our worlds can be kinda dull, so I like the eccentrics that swim upstream, and go against the current and do something like that!

Talking of eccentricities, I wondered if you caught the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, and what you thought of it? It was a definite celebration of our eccentricities… Yeah, it was just before we went on holiday, we didn’t watch all of the Olympics; we saw a bit of the first week but when we went to Devon, there was no TV, no internet, no mobile signal and it was fucking great! The only thing we had was a battered old transistor radio and we tuned in for Jessica Ennis when she won, because she’s from Sheffield, and we all went mental in this little cottage in Devon. But yeah, we watched the Opening Ceremony and if you’re going to spend millions on something like that, it seemed to have a point to me, rather than random people wafting scarves around, or whatever.

Yes, the celebration of the NHS was completely inspired, and something I wasn’t expecting… Well my wife’s a nurse and my mum was a nurse, all my aunts were nurses, my grandmother was a nurse – I come from a family of steelworkers, nurses and musicians and it did bring a tear to my eye. We live in a strange society where the least deserving get the most, really. People like doctors and nurses – particularly nurses – get fuck all basically, and they do so much. And the NHS, if you sit back and think about it, it’s a beacon in the dark. I’ve travelled the world over, extensively, and the basic idea that we’re all contributing to something that will help everyone, you couldn’t sum up how I feel about the world in a more essential form. That’s just how I think, and the fact that it’s being threatened… that’s what made the Opening Ceremony really good because it’s obvious that the Tories would’ve hated that.

Yes, I was thinking of them watching and cringing. It was the easiest way of us sending a message – put it through Danny Boyle... Well this is it; like a lot of the things on the record, like ‘Down in the Woods’, I wrote that in response to the Tories wanting to sell off the woodland. They were planning to pay off the nation’s debt by selling England! Money doesn’t really exist, you know, people and places really exist and the whole idea of money being an end, rather than a means to an end, is something that’s fundamentally changed our society to the detriment. I can’t get my head round that thinking really, and the idea of something like the NHS, or the BBC really – both have their faults, but without them… I got an eye infection on holiday and went to the local hospital and without that, we’d be really fucked, d’you know what I mean? I think those things are essential; it makes us – it’s what defines us as a country.

Yeah, I have to say, I was a bit hungover at the time, but I did cry. You know when you’re feeling fragile and battered, and you have a little cry... I know that feeling! I’m familiar with that dossier, hahaha!

When the Olympic Ceremony was on, I remember thinking that it was almost a year to the day that the riots started all over the UK. It was weird because last year half of us were smashing windows of JD Sports and the other half were gobbling down apathy with our TV dinners. ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ sits somewhere in the middle of that, trying to engender a positive reaction, doesn’t it? Well I wrote it around about the time of the riots. Even before the riots, there was this feeling that something was gonna kick off. The one good thing is that there were riots all over the country, and in the North, but in Sheffield we didn’t have it and it wasn’t because there was an overbearing police presence on the streets, it wasn’t. It didn’t happen because I think people here generally care about their environment. If you push people to the edge, you lower their horizons, take away any chance of them being educated – even local libraries, if you want to read books and can’t afford them, you can educate yourself – those options are being closed down. We’re being politically kettled and they’re modelling this society on America, where if you’ve got money, everything’s alright and if you haven’t, you’re fucked; that goes against everything I personally believe in. Our society, we’ve managed to claw our way to some level of fairness with the NHS and a publicly owned TV station and stuff like that, that are really important. Just that thing that if you get ill, you’ve got a chance – everything’s gonna be alright because before, mortality rate was just horrific. For anyone to think that it’s OK to revert back to a pre-NHS state is a fucking moron. Not only that, they’re also evil, fundamentally bad at heart, money-obsessed people. It astonishes me that anybody is allowed to be a politician if they’ve got business interests. How can you possibly have a fair mind?

Yeah, like Mitt Romney – poor Americans being faced with him as an option… He’s a rampant capitalist and he’ll fuck things up for them.

He’s got Benjamin Franklin written all over him. Yeah, but you know, Benjamin Franklin was a good man.

I mean the dollar bills that he’s so associated with! Yeah, I know what you mean but it’s ironic that such a good soul, who partly wrote the American Constitution, who harnessed electricity and invented an instrument called the glass harmonica that I used on my last album – he was an amazing human being and it’s ironic that he ended up as the face of the dollar bill. It’s sad that what I’m gonna say now is becoming a cliché, but a kid who robs a pair of trainers and a mobile phone in a rioting gang gets three years in the nick, but a banker who rips us all off for millions and billions gets a fucking bonus. How has that come to pass? In a supposedly democratic society? Thatcher was a wannabe toff, but these lot are the real deal; they’re ancestors of gentry and they want it all back. It’s worrying.

But Richard, I read a quote from you recently that said you thought time was running away from you, but this sounds like a young man’s fight – you’ve got the energy and passion afforded to youth… Nah, I always believe in the young, you see? It’s the natural progression of things, but I also believe we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water either. Age can give you – if you listen and learn, ‘cause I know a lot of old fools – a knowledge that is useful, not just preaching. I’ve always tried to listen, and keep your eyes and ears open, and your radar on and it’ll make your heart definitely stay – I don’t know about younger, or older, none of those concepts, but it’ll keep you fresh, you know, and open to new ideas. Getting older, you know, I’m always very wary of closing doors and saying ‘they’re all like that’, you know. I hear a lot of old people generalise more, and I’m very wary of that.

To all of us who listen to your music, saying that you keep you eyes and ears open is already so evident. Being a magazine concerned with our own locality, I wondered if the time between ‘Truelove’s Gutter’ and ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ allowed you to see things in Sheffield that hadn’t presented themselves to you yet? Oh yeah, there’s always something new and old to find. It’s a funny thing, my grandfather when I was a little boy – and I come from a big family, lots of cousins – but he had a horrific time in the Second World War and it affected him his whole life; he had nightmares ‘til the day he died, but I was the only one, for some reason, that he felt he could unburden himself with, and tell me what actually happened. He told me those stories, which were horrendous and how any young man could survive that and not go totally fucking bonkers is beyond me. The strength of that generation, how they could have families and move on is an amazing thing, but I once said to him when all the bombs and all the bullets were raging, how did you survive that? He said, “I just stood still.” It really struck me as a good metaphor for what I’ve done my whole life; I’ve travelled widely and I’m not a little Englander at all, in any shape or form, but I don’t know what it’s like to live in L.A., I don’t know what it’s like to live in Norwich – I’ve got an inkling because of my mother-in-law, but I don’t know what it’s like to live in Paris, or Malta – I only know what it’s like to live in Sheffield, and how I feel – and I’ve discovered over the years, ‘cause I love the idea of local magazines as well, it’s a bit like the concept of independence in Britain. Like record companies or shops, the bigger or more homogenised it gets, the less interesting it becomes to me. But I write about what I know, and what I’ve discovered is that you’d possibly think that would exclude people, but I’ve found that if your concerns are colloquial, somehow that relates to common experience, that I’m not alone in thinking these things; there are a lot of people who are feeling the same thing and that’s apparent, I guess, with the relative success of the records. People don’t buy something they can’t connect to.

No, we are united in our independence, as much as we feel individual. There’s comfort that there’s lots of individuals. Well that’s it; I think that’s a great way of describing Britain and again, going back to the political side of things, I just worry that the age of the individual is kind of being threatened really by everybody towing the line and doing the same shit, you know. I love little independent record shops, second hand shops and bookshops, stuff like that. We used to have loads of them in Sheffield, but they’re slowly disappearing and there’s just a hardcore that are fighting it. Round where I live, for years and years and years, well, for two centuries, there was a little corner shop that my friends Pete and Sue ran, and their families had run for a hundred years, then this supermarket moved in at the end of the road. Then Texaco garage managed to put out – I don’t know how – something that stopped any local shop within a mile radius selling newspapers, so all these shops closed down. It was crazy. We’re living in a world where that is permissible, and nobody resists. It’s a worrying state of affairs; I guess that’s where a lot of the themes of the record, ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ are from. It’s a place in Sheffield, but it’s also a metaphor, literally, where we’re standing on the edge, politically, and you have to decide what side you sit on. I guess as a 45-year old man who’s lived through the Callaghan government, then the Thatcher era, then the Blair government and obviously now the numpty that we’ve got in Cameron and his chinless wonders that are finishing off the job those other bastards started really. I think it’s time now for us to decide, and there are simple things we can do to effect change. I sign a lot of online petitions if I believe in them with Avaaz.org and 38Degrees, and a lot of people think, ‘oh, it’s really simple, you don’t have to do anything’, but the funny thing about the internet – not that I have a great deal to do with it – is that a lot of politicians, not just in our country, but the world over, they fear what is said about them on Facebook and the internet more than they do in the media. So you can use those tools to kind of effect change, and that’s a good thing. It’s not doom and gloom; I know there’ll be a lot of people who read this who’ll probably be in agreement. We’ve got a long history of being eccentric oddballs, and long may we be so.

Emma Garwood

Richard Hawley comes to the UEA on 17th September, supported by Lisa Hannigan. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview on Outlineonline.co.uk