Richard Hawley
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Friday September 26, 2025
Though Richard Hawley’s initial solo unveiling came with 2001’s self-titled mini-album and the same year’s Late Night Final (what, one wondered, had Hawley been doing in Britpop middleweights The Longpigs and playing session guitar for All Saints when he had songs and a voice like that up his sleeve), 2005’s Coles Corner would be both his commercial breakthrough and the establishment of a set of musical principles on which much of his career has been built ever since: the strum and twang of 1950s rock and roll and chased innocence of pre-Beatles pop lovingly recreated with a River Don-wide romantic streak, its author huddling from the rain amid a warm analogue glow.
Tonight, to mark Coles Corner’s 20th anniversary, Hawley is playing the album in full at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, the forecast tentatively promising to be rain-free. It seems strange to be revisiting a record that was so steeped in dewy-eyed nostalgia in the first place – where tracks felt like faded pictures from the family album, names and dates scribbled on the back – but it soon becomes apparent that Hawley isn’t thumbing these songs with too much reverence or sentimentality.
Though the title track is started with a familiar sweep of strings, instead of recreating the album’s sumptuous twinkle under the central London stars, its tailoring has been adjusted into something more pared-down, lighter on its feet, and snappier. Dressed in a white bomber with black trim and sunglasses, Hawley and his band deliver Just Like The Rain with a wild kinetic shuffle that veers towards bluegrass, before tearing into Hotel Room with a fillings-rattling skiffle attack.
If you feel you’ve been transported to the 1950s rather than the early 2000s, the small stage’s white marquee and simple lighting further lend a post-war, end-of-the-pier atmosphere. During Darlin’ Wait For Me’s tremolo shimmer and brushed snare pitter-patter you can almost hear the motor being started on a Bedford van backstage, ready to whisk the band to another Larry Parnes-booked engagement at the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome, or the Embassy Theatre, Skegness.
Keeping the sea in mind, The Ocean has been Hawley’s habitual set-closer for much of the past two decades, but here, sequencing dictates it comes five songs in (an energy-expending formation change the 58-year-old will bemoan once it finishes). This evening, the power within the song’s slow-building surge is focused into a simmering, tightly wound knot that feels like it could explode at any moment. When Hawley eventually lights the touch paper with extended squalls of Hendrixian guitar at its climax, it’s a musical time lapse not dissimilar the scene in Back To The Future where Michael J Fox derails Johnny B. Goode with a load of Van Halen-like fretboard workouts.
It's moments like these that make tonight feel like much more than a cockle-warming visit to an old friend. Hawley’s music may still not bear the mark of much made after Britain joined the EEC (coming later on, 2019’s Along has a thumping Mike Leander glitter stomp to it), but over the years he and his band have mastered those mid-20th century touchpoints so well they can re-alchemise these songs at any moment – a subtle dynamic shift, time signature change, different guitar tone, or slight re-instrumentation bringing fresh life and verve to the songs. Witness Shez Sheridan’s slip slidin’ pedal steel tour de force on a Johnny Cash-like (Wading Through) The Waters Of My Time, or how I Sleep Alone steadily gathers pace until it thunders off the rails like a runaway freight train.
Unlike support act Tom Hickox, whose explanations about the inspirations behind his songs (Cold War Romanian voiceover artist Irina Margareta Nistor, painter Roy Turner Durant’s obsession with the singer’s grandma) are almost as long and entertaining as the songs themselves, Hawley promises to try and keep his between-song “chatter” to a minimum (“I do talk shit” he admits at the start.)
He still finds time to reveal some of these songs were written when he was only 17 and had just left home (again, why he waited until two years shy of his 40th birthday to share them is mind-boggling), dedicates Born Under A Bad Sign to longtime friend and collaborator Danny Thompson, and brings out a black and white Rickenbacker gifted to him by Paul Weller “so I don’t have to play all that Ted shit.”
Hawley draws Coles Corner to a close with Woodie Guthrie’s Who’s Going To Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet, and explains how the song was taught to him by his mum, who in turn learned it from his godfather, Joe Cocker, a close family friend back from when “he and my dad used to fit radiators for the Gas Board together”
The rest of the set serves up some post-Coles Corner career highlights (Tonight The Streets Are Ours, Open Up Your Door, a glowering Standing At The Sky’s Edge, and last year’s White Horses-cribbing Prism In Jeans). While they’re all played with a full-bodied relish, the more straightforward their resemblance to their recorded counterparts make the final section lack some of the intimacy and impulsiveness of the chunk of the gig which should have – on paper, at least – been the most predictable. Perhaps tellingly, sideman Colin Elliot has switched from upright to electric bass for this bit, but either way, those early rockabilly reinventions show that few can refashion something fresh from pop’s past like Richard Hawley, even when he’s doing it to his own records.
Richard Hawley, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Friday September 26, 2025, Setlist:
Coles Corner
Just Like The Rain
Hotel Room
Darlin’ Wait For Me
The Ocean
Born Under A Bad Sign
I Sleep Alone
Tonight
(Wading Through) The Waters Of My Time
Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?
Tonight The Streets Are Ours
Don’t Stare At The Sun
Standing At The Sky’s Edge
Prism In Jeans
Open Up Your Door
Alone
Is There A Pill?
For Your Lover Give Some Time
Photo: Richard Hawley at Metropol, Berlin, November 29, 2024. (Credit Frank Hoensch/Redferns/Getty