A workman in his prime

When I first set eyes on the inappropriately named Mr. Workman (he is a man of play, fundamentally and inevitably), he’s drinking cough syrup from the bottle. He is quick to explain that his voice has been giving him trouble due to hectic touring, and that I am not to read druggy rock significance into this behaviour. It’s strictly medicinal.

He’s right to take care of himself; Hawksley Workman’s voice is a Canadian national treasure, a bestial, angelic, soaring, thundering soul-trumpet which, on his latest album (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves, hurtles through a musical gamut including – but not limited to – Brechtian cabaret, snazzily-worded glam, impassioned indie, Attractions-style happy punk and shamelessly theatrical prog rock. A true musical Renaissance man, he also plays all instruments on the record save the odd horn and some female backing vocals. And he wrote it. And produced it.

But it’s his live shows about which he is most enthusiastic in conversation. He has toured both as a two-piece (he and a pianist) and as a full four-piece band. “Right now I’m in love with the band,” he says when I ask whether he has a preference, “because I’ve toured [in the past] for months and months with just a piano, and to some audiences in some situations it seems more like a novelty: not something to be taken seriously, because there’s more theatre in it. I did a lot of musical theatre stuff as a kit, and I bring in an element of that.”

This is a big clue to Workman’s extremely distinctive style. Both on record and in concert, he is extraordinarily energetic and dramatic. As well as the vocal acrobatics (which are of the three-octave stripe), he also tells stories, swaps instruments – he was trained as a drummer – and does a unique line in tap-dancing assisted by ‘stomping sticks.’

Unusually for this business, his talent and showmanship are actually receiving the credit they deserve. “In the span of a year,” Workman enthuses, “I went from an audience in Paris of a handful of journalists, to over a thousand people.” Last year he supported the Frames in Dublin in his “theatrical” two-piece guise. He recently played his first full-band gig in Whelans (which was, at the risk of betraying a trace of subjectivity, unconscionably superb) and is continuing to tour in North America and Europe, a process which began almost 18 months ago.

“I love to perform,” Workman explains rather unnecessarily, “but I am really, really excited about going home too. I’ve just bought a schoolhouse near where my grandmother was born [Ontario, Canada] and I’m moving my studio there.”

Is he ready to record album number three?

“I find that touring is like gathering leaves and coins and broken glass and rolling it all into a blanket. I really need to get home, carefully unroll the blanket and take a survey. Of proper songs I have a handful. Mostly I have the desire, the idea, the smell and colour and taste of new material.”

While not concocting evocative similes or making brilliant music, Workman has also found time to appear in a film about composer Harold Arlen, write a volume of poetic letters (Hawksley Burns For Isadora) and produce albums for a plethora of other Canadian and American bands. This gently demented troubadour gives all the signs of being an incendiary artistic arrival; here’s hoping for plenty more fire.