Richard Hawley is walking the dog in the woods near his house, and if he sounds like a satisfied man, he has every right to be. The Sheffield songwriter’s fifth full-length collection Truelove’s Gutter is a contender for album of the year, a sombre and beautiful piece of work that feels like the culmination of a decade’s craft and graft.

“Yeah, I’ve probably been working towards this record all me life, to be honest,” Hawley says. “I didn’t mean it to be a reaction against soundbite-land, but when I finished touring in December last year I went into a sort of media meltdown. I stopped watching TV and going on the internet loads, and mobile phones and electronic devices that kept me away from people who were immediately around me. Because I’d been away so much I really wanted to focus on my children and my wife, (as in) ‘For Your Lover, Give Some Time’. It occurred to me how much time I spend absorbing little bits of things rather than actually getting to eat the whole meal.”
Ah, the joys of eating a bowl of soup. Or reading a book in one sitting.
“Exactly. Those things take time to do. I suddenly realised, ‘Oh shit, I haven’t even told anybody I love them today. I sent an e-mail to someone, but never told a physical person anything nice, or had a discussion.’ And it really did my head in, that. It goes against the grain with me. There is a whole world immediately in front of you that actually you don’t see much of. Even just having a laugh in the pub or whatever. I’m in the woods right now walking my eight-month-old collie pup, and I’m as happy as a pig in shit. These woods are really ancient, thousands of years old. I’m not a hippy, don’t get worried, but there is a vibe here that I really like. Scuse me a second, I have to throw a stick for my dog.”
While he’s doing that, let’s consider a few of the new record’s highlights: songs like ‘Ashes On The Fire’, as honest and moving as an old C&W standard sung by the jarred old geezers in James Kelman’s stories. Or the gorgeous opener, ‘As The Dawn Breaks’, a kitchen sink operetta with Hawley’s open-voweled Elvis/Orbison croon set against a landscape of roof slates and washing lines.
“There’s nothing guarded on this record,” Hawley says. “It’s very bare. I didn’t want to make something that didn’t have any depth or a sense of truth about it. There’s a pub in Sheffield called Fagan’s that I go into, a really, really old pub, it’s been there for 150 years, and every night they have musicians playing in there, and they are very unselfconscious, and that is something that’s very important to keep, to just make music for the joy of itself. There’s a great quote from Bob Dylan where he says you have to take someone to places that they’ve never been before. That’s an interesting concept.”
Beyond that, songs like ‘Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul’ and ‘For Your Lover, Give Some Time’ are gentle and wise.
“Well, that was something I wanted to do: I’m not trying to judge the people in the songs I’ve written about, I’m trying to understand them. And those things take time to do. There aren’t often Eureka moments, it takes time to absorb things. The kind of music I grew up with was... I don’t want to sound like I’m attached to the past, but it was sonically more interesting. I couldn’t figure out how they’d done it, and a lot of things that are made today I know immediately how they did it. Even Pink Floyd’s early records, it was a complete mystery how they got those sounds, and it’s beautiful when you can’t figure things out, and again, it’s someone taking you to a place you’ve never been.”
Mystery is the key word. When you listen to ‘Blue Moon’...
“Which version?”
Elvis’s Sun recording.
“That is unreal. ‘Cos he misses the middle eight out of that song, he just plays the four chords, C, E Minor, D minor, G, and when he goes into the falsetto the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He was such a young man, and it’s so beautiful. The words become so much more profound: ‘You saw me standing alone’. And it was live, man! He played the beat of it on his guitar case, with Sam Phillips’ home-made echo, two tape machines running consecutively, with the second tape machine running very slightly slower, so he created that slapback sound. Echo machines didn’t exist back then, and the ones that did were really, really expensive, and that kind of making a problem into an asset, it’s the punk thing, I love that. Genius and beautiful at the same time.”
Well, you don’t have to be handsome to have charisma.
“Thank Christ!”