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Sunday Times Culture Section
MUSIC
Interview: Richard Hawley on the Sheffield musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge
How the singer-songwriter turned his back on Britpop to make music in his native city
Decca Aitkenhead
‘Compromise is such a filthy word’: Richard Hawley
NEIL H KITSON
The Sunday Times, March 10 2019, 12:01am
When a theatrical producer called Rupert Lord showed up at the last night of Richard Hawley’s 2012 tour with a proposal for the singer, Hawley “pissed myself laughing”. The former Pulp member had walked away from Britpop fame more than a decade earlier, back to his working-class roots in Sheffield, where he has made eight hauntingly elegiac solo albums for a fanatical cult following of blues and folk fans. Gruff, profane and, in his own words “curmudgeonly”, a musician less suited to stage musicals would be hard to imagine. “I hate them,” he agrees.
Has he ever seen, say, The Phantom of the Opera? “No, none of that crap.” His son likes them, he adds, starting to grin. “When all his mates were in the park, smoking weed, drinking ale, at 15, he’s singing Maria in the shower. And I’m just looking at my wife, going” — he laughs — “‘What the f*** did we do wrong?’”
So when Lord, creator of the Olivier-winning 2002 stage hit Our House, pitched the idea of making a musical, “It had more than a faint whiff of ridiculousness. But then I thought about it, and I quite liked the improbability factor. I mean, who could have possibly ever thought of that? And when he told me what it was about, I thought, ‘Now we’re talking.’”
Standing at the Sky’s Edge, named after Hawley’s Mercury-nominated album from 2012, opens this week at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, directed by Robert Hastie, of Sheffield Theatres, the team behind Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and key players in the reinvention of musical theatre. It tells the story of the Park Hill housing estate — a brutalist concrete sprawl that looms over the centre of Sheffield, begun in 1957 as a towering emblem of the postwar utopian dream of social housing — and follows the lives of three successive sets of tenants in a single flat.
The original residents are a working-class Sheffield couple, followed by Liberian refugees in the late 1980s, who in turn make way for a middle-class woman from London in the present day. Interwoven through their personal stories is the decline of the city’s steel industry under Margaret Thatcher, the rise of yuppie regeneration and the housing crisis gripping the nation today, to a soundtrack of Hawley’s solo albums and original material.
What the musical emphatically does not feature is sentimentality, jazz hands or soapbox politics. “In one of the first proper meetings, I said, ‘If ever you’re thinking it’s going to look like the opening of the Olympics, with t**** wafting about with scarves and shit, I’m done. If it’s any of that, I’m gone.’”
Hawley comes from a long line of steelworkers. “And I wasn’t having their world deified. That world would have been quite sexist, it would have been quite chauvinist, it would have been probably borderline racist, if not further. So I think that sort of deification of the miners and steelworkers is dangerous.” How does he remember their world? “With a lot of fondness. But it’s not sentimental.”
The history of Park Hill is, in many ways, the story of Hawley’s life. His grandparents lived in slums, cleared to make way for the new estate; his father was a trade union leader under Thatcher, and the singer can still recall the mood in the city when she was elected. “There was a definite sadness there, a feeling of ‘shit’s going to happen now’.” The mood wasn’t wrong. “I remember my dad running home down our road — it was pissing it down with rain, and he had the local sports paper over his head. I remember him coming in the house, shaking himself off, and he was just saying to my mum, ‘We’re all out.’”
The atmosphere in the city when the strike was defeated was, Hawley recalls, “desperation — there was an ominous vibe. I could just see my mum and dad crumble in front of me. My mum and dad split up over it, just the pressure of having no money.”
We have met in a rather bijou cafe near the Crucible, but soon decamp to Hawley’s local, an old-fashioned folk pub called Fagans, which appears to function as his second home. A lifelong socialist, “I see the effects of all these dumb-ass decisions that these f***wits come up with in a board meeting, the fallout of all that they just don’t see until they’re forced to, like with Grenfell.” He’s about to say something about Brexit, but stops himself. “I didn’t intend this interview to be finger-wagging,” he grins, and orders another drink.
Hawley was equally determined that the musical should not be po-faced or didactic, either. “But there was no need to worry, because everybody took on board what I said and stuck with it.” It is, in fact, both moving and extremely funny — thanks in part to Hawley’s input. He worked with the scriptwriter, Chris Bush, advising on dialect and local humour, so I ask him to sum up the Sheffield sensibility. “Hard-as-f*** lives, but self-deprecating humour. I think what’s kept me sane is just having the ability to laugh at myself.”
What’s kept him sane above all, though, is his decision to eschew the London music scene for the city he cherishes as his creative muse, where he lives with his wife of nearly 30 years — she is a mental-health nurse — their three children and two dogs. Hawley was raised in Sheffield’s rich musical tradition: his father played with Eddie Cochran and John Lee Hooker, and his uncle once backed the blues legend Little Walter. His family educated him in vintage roots music and imbued a folk ethos that informs his work today.
Yet after spending his teenage years on the dole, Hawley joined the indie band the Longpigs as guitarist, took lots of drugs and toured the world, before teaming up with his old friend Jarvis Cocker in Pulp. At least a bit of him must have found that thrilling, surely?
Youthful exuberance: Hawley, second left, pictured in 1996 in band the Longpigs
MARTYN GOODACRE
“Of course! Yes, because you’ve been picking tab ends out of an ashtray, you know, thinking, ‘I’ll make a cigarette out of them in the morning.’ Then suddenly you’re shooting around London in a taxi, wearing a fur coat, and you’re hanging about with blah blah blah. But it’s a very ugly place, and I know it kills you.”
Even so, Hawley’s talent as a singer- songwriter and guitarist is so exceptional, I wonder whether he doesn’t sometimes look at more commercially successful artists and think: “But I should be more famous than you.”
“No, not once. I remember being at some awards thing, and a lot of the younger ones were asking me for advice. They were, like, ‘It’s really heavy, and it’s a pressure’, and this, that and the other. I was saying, ‘Well, which bits are a pressure?’ One of them goes, ‘You know, when you’ve got people taking your picture all the time when you go in the Met Bar and all that.’ I say, ‘I’ve got exactly the solution you need.’ I took them to a boozer around the corner, full of loads of old blokes who were probably on their last legs, and no one gave a f***. I said, ‘That’s what you do, pal.’”
Not many, I point out, find it easy to resign from their own celebrity. “I think a lot of it is to do with my own belligerence. But also because I was guided from being quite young in a different way, by people who’d rather sit in a pub and play a piano and see the beauty and the greatness in that. So there was a line, not drawn in the sand, it’s a f****** concrete bunker, and I will not cross it. The end.”
His new album, Further, will be released in June, preceded by a UK tour. At 52, how does he feel about hitting the road again? “The best thing about it for me is playing live. I love that. Getting there is a pain in the arse, but it’s great.” He smiles. “You know, I’m not ashamed of pretty much any note I’ve played. I’m not saying I’m the best thing since sliced bread, but there’s a way to do things without too much compromise. Because compromise is such a filthy word, you know. It’s much worse than a lot of expletives.”
Standing at the Sky’s Edge is at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from Friday until April 6. Further is out on BMG on June 7. Pre-order via the ST website. Hawley performs at EartH, London N16, on May 6 and 7.
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