Glenfiddich MOJO Honours List 2011 | Richard Hawley Q&A

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Richard Hawley Q&A

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RICHARD HAWLEY Q&A

The New Voice finalists meet the bard of Sheffield

A few hours before the conclusion of the Glenfiddich MOJO New Voice competition 2011, our five finalists descended on the Newman Arms in central London for a question and answer session with the great Richard Hawley...

Photos: Tom Oldham




		ON CHOOSING MUSIC... "It’s about options – there was no other fucking option. I come from a musical family, my uncle Frank played with David Berry and The Cruisers and worked for the gas board and steel works at the same time and was the guitar player with Joe Cocker’s first band - Vance Arnold and The Avengers. I got interested in music when I was really young and when it came to the point where I wanted to take it a little bit more seriously, all the other options were removed because Thatcher got to power and for the likes of me and Jarvis, and a lot of the other people in Sheffield, that other option was gone. They didn’t exist for us. Before we’d even started, we had no chance of having any other career really."



		ON BANDS... "I’ve travelled the world, circumnavigated it looking for the answers and they were at the end of my fucking street. My drummer, bass player and guitarist lived at the end of my street. I got a band together and we share a lot of things financially; they’re my brothers. I know that when I’m stood at the front of that stage it’s not just my arse they’re looking at but they’re backing me all the way. It might say ‘Richard Hawley’ over the door but that music is created by us all together. You get people who will fight over nothing. It fucked the Longpigs up – drugs and greed. Certain members of the band, not me, would do anything, and I left the band because one of the songs got offered half a million quid by The Sun newspaper to use it on a TV advert, and I said no way."



		ON MUSIC & MONEY... "Don’t ever think that anything that exists that was recorded wasn’t recorded to make money. Never ever believe this purist bullshit about the early blues and all that. Nothing that was ever committed to vinyl was committed to vinyl without the idea of making money. Ever. All that purist stuff, I don’t buy it. I’ve tried my hardest to hang onto my integrity. Like Bo Diddley said, ‘Hang on to what you got and don’t let it go.’ I’ve done a couple of adverts for ice cream and Renault or whatever but that money was used, actually, to feed my band and their kids."



		ON EGO MANAGEMENT... "Once you move from beyond your bedroom, your ego is on display. All ideas are like a 50p - if you’re in the studio with an idea and you think it’s going one way it’s good to flip the 50p and look at the other side of the coin. If you can do that as an artist you will understand your own ego a lot better. I’m a guitarist with an ego, a songwriter with an ego, a singer with an ego, I’m an arranger and a producer. The producer always has to be the guy who wins because all those other little egos pull too far in one direction. You get so massively involved with your own music that to be able to stand back and go, ‘That’s crap,’ even though you’ve put weeks into it, is actually quite helpful."



		ON SONGWRITING... "If you look at poetry and we’re all sat round and it gets to William Blake and it’s like, ‘Right Bill, what you got?’ And he goes, ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright.’ Wow – tune, you’re there, because he’s got a hook that every motherfucker in the world knows about. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Shakespeare - it’s a hit. That’s why those things stay in everybody’s minds because there’s an aspect of something that it is... that’s got a hook. I had a long time to learn that craft of songwriting. I say ‘learn’, you never do. That’s the beauty of it, there are only 12 notes but it’s the biggest Rubik’s cube in the whole world."



		ON PRODUCING... "It kind of happened by accident because I just played everything on that first mini album [2001’s Richard Hawley]. That limitation became an asset. It’s like a punk thing; limitations become an asset rather than a hindrance. I just set up all the instruments in the round and just had a microphone on a boom. For me with the whole production I have a very specific thing in my mind that I’ve taken a long time to ruminate over. Choosing the right producer is like saying, ‘I want to buy a car, which one should I buy?’ It’s to do with what you want to achieve. If you want to be Kylie Minogue, you’d choose a totally different animal to Radiohead or Nick Cave. It’s kind of like that old cliché, ‘horses for courses.’"



		AND FINALLY... "One of the best bits of advice my granddad said to me was, ‘Have you thought what you’re going to do with yourself after big school?’ And I said, ‘I want to be like you and dad.’ And he says, ‘Oh, fucking hell. If you’re going to be a musician, the first thing you’ve got to accept is you might fail.’ At the time I was like, ‘Cheers! Thanks for the inspiration!’ But it was the best piece of advice I ever got because it depends on what you want to do. If you cut out a little hole in the carpet for yourself, you’re fine. But if you want to cut out the whole carpet, you might fail. Sharing and being kind in a humanitarian way are good, but that doesn’t mean you have to be naïve and get fucked over."