Log #62 - Two Very Different Crooners

First up this week we have Sheffield crooner Richard Hawley. Hawley was a member of 90s Britpop band The Long Pigs who I know absolutely nothing about. I think his greater claim to pre-solo fame may have been his subsequent stint in Pulp. For both bands he was on guitar duties. I wonder if his lovely baritone voice lay undiscovered until he branched out as a solo artist in 2001 with debut Late Night Final. I also wonder how many other bands have failed to unearth vocalists within their ranks that could possibly have been better than their chosen lead singers - Jarvis Cocker was undoubtedly a great front man but was he the best singer? 

Richard Hawley with Jarvis Cocker playing for Pulp

Such comparisons are at best unfair and at worse irrelevant. I argue the singer is the most important component of a band's character, and therefore the most irreplaceable.  Could Led Zeppelin or the Arctic Monkeys for example have continued without Robert Plant or Alex Turner respectively? What about drummers John Bonham and Matt Helders, or bass players John Paul Jones and Nick O'Malley? Sure the musicians have their own characters and styles and are essential components of the group, but a different singer is more immediately noticeable than a different drummer or bass player. Take Black Sabbath - when Ozzy left them they pretty much became reincarnations of the Ian Gillan Band and the Ronnie James Dio Band playing Sabbath covers. When the original band reformed with Ozzy, but minus drummer Bill Ward, they sounded like Black Sabbath again.

Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley are different types of singers fronting bands playing different types of music.

Richard Hawley in his more natural habitat

Coles Corner is a real place as pictured on our head album cover above. In a bygone era courting couples would meet on the corner outside the old Coles Bros department store in Sheffield. Here we see Richard waiting with a bouquet of flowers below his own name in lights. Today the actual corner building houses a very unromantic HSBC bank and Starbucks. I don't think Richard Hawley, or Coles Corner, is famous enough to warrant fan pilgrimages to the location like a Ziggy Stardust or Freewheelin'!

Coles Corner, Sheffield, yesteryear and today

I know what it's like to live here in Sheffield and therefore it seems perfectly logical to write about it.

The music is old time romantic - rich velvety vocals, reverberating Gretsch guitar, and lush strings. Check out The Ocean. Lovely. A pop star, like many, not accustomed to modesty, the aforementioned Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, on acceptance of the 2006 Mercury Prize for best album, stated that Hawley, whose album was also shortlisted, had been robbed.

Hawley would be nominated again 6 years later for his atypical electric guitar freakout Standing at the Sky's Edge album. I would have felt sorry for folks attending gigs during that tour expecting Coles Corner!

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1. Beck - Guero

2. Beck - Mutations

3. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

4. Richard Hawley - Coles Corner

5. Nick Cave - The Lyre of Orpheus

6. Autechre - Untilted

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In a similar vein to Coles Corner we have Marvin Gaye's classic album What's Going On. (By the way shouldn't that be a question? Maybe not). It took me years to get this and a few more years to get it, literally. It's nice background music, easy listening. More depths to be discovered over the years no doubt. Rarely does an out and out classic fail to deliver in the long run.

Marvin Gaye and that raincoat

A few more plays of the Autechre album and it starts to make a bit more sense. I'm still trapped in the metal shipping container but I can get some sleep despite the chill as my mind locks into some semblance of repetitive beats and patterns.

Relief this time comes in the unlikely form of The King of Goth and Doom, The Prince of Darkness, Nick Cave - a possessor, like Hawley, of another deep baritone, but somehow very different, voice. But this album is anything but depressing... surely one of Cave's most accessible and pleasing albums and representing (along with its twin release Abattoir Blues) a high watermark in his creativity. Great songs with brilliant melodies including pop songs like Breathless, piano ballads like Easy Money, bloody narratives like the title track The Lyre of Orpheus, rock anthems like Supernaturally, and banked choir epics like Carry Me and O Children. This album pretty much has it all. In fact I can't get over how good this is - is there any other songwriter of Cave's equivalent working today? Get yourself a copy right now!

Eurydice appeared brindled in blood

And she said to Orpheus

If you play that fucking thing down here

I'll stick it up your orifice!