Looking at the stars

The Sheffield-based singer Richard Hawley talks about his fame, his hometown and his new album, Truelove's Gutter.

"Sometimes in life whether we like it or not, experiences leave us a little bit empty. That's nearer, in my opinion, to the reality of what' it's like to be a human being than the plastic dreams of meShow more

As the first hint of autumn chills the afternoon air, Richard Hawley steps out into his suburban garden and surveys the city that inspired much of his best music. Once one of Britain's great industrial powerhouses, Sheffield has long been synonymous with steelworkers, football and gritty Yorkshire humour. Much of the old heavy industry may now have gone, but the city continues to produce leftfield pop stars like Hawley, plus his friends and collaborators Jarvis Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys. Diverse musical generations united by sharp lyrics, deadpan wit and maverick attitude.

For Hawley, Sheffield is more than just his hometown. This city has been a muse, emotional anchor and constant source of fascination throughout his career. All his albums to date have been named after Sheffield landmarks or local references. He initially planned to break this tradition with his latest album, his sixth solo release. But then he discovered Truelove's Gutter, an 18th-century alleyway once used to dump refuse into the river Don. Title and music simply proved too perfect a match.

"I'd decided I wasn't going to use a title to do with Sheffield on this album," the 42-year-old singer recalls, "I felt I'd hammered the point home enough. I had actually thought of other titles for the album. But then I was looking through old street names in Sheffield and I found this old street, Truelove's Gutter, which is now called Castle Street. The minute I saw it, it summed up what I was trying to say on the record. I quite like the fact that it's not even from living memory, it's from a distant time, because to me this record doesn't really seem to fit in anywhere."

Truelove's Gutter is a deluxe showcase for Hawley's luxuriant, baritone crooner's voice at its most rueful and reflective. The lyrics are mostly observational vignettes of the singer's marriage to his wife Helen, and of friends who have fallen on hard times. "Some of the songs are personal, but a lot are observations of people I know," he says. "Not in a nasty, cruel way. I'm just trying to understand people rather than judge them."

Midlife melancholy is never far below the surface of these opulent, chrome-plated ballads. But the singer insists he is merely being truthful about the everyday dissatisfaction that most people feel - and not just people. "A friend of mine has this dog that lost one leg," Hawley explains. "It's perfectly happy running around in the park, chasing a ball. But no matter what happens, there's always something missing. Sometimes in life, whether we like it or not, experiences leave us a little bit empty. That's nearer, in my opinion, to the reality of what it's like to be a human being than the plastic dreams of media or advertising. That's what I was aiming for on this album, just to be honest about the state of my heart."

Clothed in lustrous, cinematic arrangements, the album also sounds different to any of Hawley's previous work. This is largely thanks to an exotic arsenal of rare instruments including the Cristal Baschet, the waterphone, the ondes martenot and the glass harmonica, an antique curiosity invented in 1761 by America's founding father, Benjamin Franklin. "At the time I started the record I didn't know what these instruments were called," Hawley admits. "I just knew I wanted to add a different sonic palette to the record, to enrich the sounds in a different way to anything I've done before. I didn't want to create another album of the same kind of thing. I really wanted to push myself as a writer and as a musician, and as a producer and arranger, and not just sit back and rest on whatever laurels I've accrued over the years."

As ever, Sheffield looms large on Truelove's Gutter. The first track on the album, As The Dawn Breaks, is Hawley's haunting farewell to the small terraced house where he and his family lived for much of the past decade. "We were only moving up the hill but it felt like ripping my heart out to leave it," he explains, "like somehow I was betraying something." As a successful musician, Hawley may mix in more bourgeois cultural circles nowadays, but he still identifies strongly with his working-class roots. "It's difficult, I don't work in a steelworks 14 hours a day," he concedes. "But I come from a family of steelworkers, nurses, soldiers and musicians. All the women in my family were nurses, and still are. I married a nurse - a sarcastic one, which is quite useful. So their lives informed my moral compass, as well as who I am. Those values are still important to me, definitely."

"Also, I do worry about the slow death of the working-class spirit. Without that sense of union between people, I think that has led to the worrying rise in political extremism. And even when people do get together, like the big march against the government going to war in Iraq, they still took us to war. People get frustrated when they're not listened to, and that can lead to blaming people. The wrong people, as history tells us."

Hawley is gloomy about the album's commercial prospects, which may just be typical pre-release nerves, given his solid track record. All the same, he does have a point: eight-minute mini-symphonies of sumptuous melancholy are not exactly an easy sell on contemporary pop radio. "A lot of musicians now, before they even pick up a guitar, are restricted by the fact that they have to appeal to radio," Hawley sighs. "There's a kind of fascism about that. It is strange, if you look at popular culture over the years, pivotal records like Hey Jude, Bohemian Rhapsody, Riders on the Storm by the Doors - lots of classic songs are actually quite long. Sometimes you can tell your story in a stanza or two, but unfortunately - or fortunately - I couldn't cram it all into a two-minute ditty. I didn't want to either."

The crucial guiding principle, Hawley argues, is for artists to remain true to their creative instincts rather than pursue some elusive populist formula. "When you make music, you can't do it in anticipation of what other people might think," he insists. "The minute you do that, you're lost, because you're making music for other people and not satisfying yourself. And whether an album sells a million copies or 10 copies, the most important thing for me is that, once it goes out, I've satisfied what I wanted to do. If you chase the rainbow of commerciality, you'll definitely never find it."

However gloomy he may sound ahead of the album's release, Hawley actually is a born comedian. His live shows can be hilarious affairs, as he punctuates his brushed-velvet retro ballads with dry banter and saloon-bar jokes. It seems hard to believe now but, prior to launching his solo career at the start of this decade, this natural performer preferred to shun the limelight as he played guitar for Sheffield rockers the Longpigs and for the final incarnation of his friend Jarvis Cocker's band, Pulp.

Rousing endorsements from a celebrity fan club including Radiohead, REM and Coldplay helped Hawley find the confidence to embark on a fully fledged solo career. Even now, between albums, he maintains a sideline as a guitarist for hire. In recent years he has played and co-written with a broad range of artists including Robbie Williams, Nancy Sinatra, All Saints, Elbow and Arctic Monkeys. When he lost out to the Monkeys at Britain's prestigious Mercury Music Prize ceremony in 2006, their singer Alex Turner sportingly told the assembled crowd: "Richard Hawley's been robbed!'"

Hawley remains good friends with Cocker, and has guested on both his solo albums to date. "Jarvis was doing his album at the same time as I was doing mine," Hawley nods. "He eventually recorded his in America but it was quite funny, in Yellow Arch Studios, he was writing and rehearsing his album at one end and I was recording mine at the other. We kept going in and listening to each other's bits and bobs."

Many local heroes who Hawley has worked with have now moved away from Sheffield. Meanwhile, he stays behind in the city that seems destined to remain his emotional and psychological anchor. For such a passionate champion of Sheffield, does he feel that deserters such as Cocker and Turner have betrayed their roots? "No, I think it would take quite a thick skin to stay, especially as successful as they are," Hawley shrugs. "I seem to have developed the ability to be a chameleon and blend into the background. But there are certain places in Sheffield I can't go any more. The curious change I've discovered is that you can no longer be the observer any more, you are partly the observed, and I was uncomfortable with that at first. I have a family, I live a relatively ordinary life, and I'm quite happy with that - I'm not interested in getting on a yacht to Rio. I'm just very conscious that success can make you lose yourself as a person."

The soundtrack to the approaching autumn, Truelove's Gutter is Hawley's darkest, richest, most ambitious album so far. When he stops apologising for it, maybe he will even learn to enjoy it. "I apologise for inflicting it on the rest of the world," Hawley smiles, only half joking. "But for me, it's important to develop and grow as an artist. I am interested in the art of songwriting. I find it a fascinating mystery. I'm certainly not complaining, I love the record, it's my favourite of anything I've done. I'm still just learning to write songs and I hope to continue to do that for the rest of my life. It's my life's work."