Richard Hawley: Wearing red at Live At York Museum Gardens to honour the Liverpool footballer Diogo Jota, who died in a car crash on July 3. Picture: Andy Hughes
FUTURESOUND Group could not have put together a better show for Live At York Museum Gardens 2.0 than Richard Hawley with strings attached and more besides.
Not one, not two, but three support acts after the addition of droll Scottish singer and songwriter Hamish Hawk, who was billed for a 5.40pm start but made his entry at evening news time, Bowie- dapper in dark jacket and cream trousers.
Keep your eye on Hawk, a frontman as natural as Jarvis Cocker, as witty and observant as The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon in his lyrics, with a line in gay love declarations rather more overt than in the days of Gershwin’s The Man I Love.
Hamish Hawk opening Saturday’s line-up at Live At York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973 has probably the best opening couplet to a song ever penned: “To write a cathedral, I’ll need a ballpoint pen/It’ll sound like ‘Common People’, written by Christopher Wren”. Yes, he’s that good, and there were plenty more where that came from in a 25-minute set, over all too soon.
B C Camplight – B C stands for Brian Christinzio – is a favourite of The Crescent, York, who took to the outdoors as a man on a mission. Living in Manchester now but still very much a son of New Jersey, he has followed up 2023’s relationship break-up record, The Last Rotation On Earth, with A Sober Conversation, “doing well”, he says, since its June 27 release.
A big jack-in-a-box behind – and often not behind – his piano, B C was bursting with vigour and vitality, putting it all in the open after confronting childhood trauma and being clean from drugs for two years. His songs were candidly tragic-comic, liberating too, his arrangements unpredictable and thrilling, not averse to kicking up a storm but, equally, as adroit as Squeeze or Teenage Fanclub at gorgeous melody.
B C Camplight: Arms outstretched at the piano at Live At York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
From the red rose of Manchester to the white of Yorkshire, or Leeds more precisely, in the Mercury Prize-winning form of English Teacher. What’s this for a choice of walk-on music? The volume suddenly sounded louder – as if we were at the Cardiff Principality Stadium – for a blast of Supersonic to tease an entry of the magnitude of the omnipresent Gallaghers’ revived love-in.
If that took chutzpah, so did starting with their best-known number, the one that Lily Fontaine ends with “I am The World’s Biggest Paving Slab/And the world’s smallest celebrity”: a typical Leeds shrug of a sentiment, in keeping with bands from The Wedding Present to Yard Act.
The world’s smallest celebrity? It will not stay that way for Fontaine and her rising, rousing band whose backdrop stated “This Could Be English Teacher” in another splash of Leeds humour in a nod to their debut album title, This Could Be Texas.
This could be the future: Lily Fontaine of English Teacher, the Mercury Prize-winning Leeds band making waves at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
Schooled at the Leeds Conservatoire, they are musically skilled, able to swap between instruments, like the drummer switching to piano, or Fontaine from guitar to keys, but there is nothing arid or academic about their compositions.
Fontaine’s lyrics fizz with attitude and cultural smarts, the songs jab and jab, then deliver the knock-out punch, and now ‘Paving Slab’ has a rival with the unveiling of Toothpick, a sugar rush of a new song that will surely stick around.
Richard Hawley would play for 90 minutes, whereas Elbow performed for two hours on Thursday, but if that was the price of cramming in four acts, rather than three on the opening night, so be it. What Hawley delivered in his more concentrated, sublime set surpassed the lulls in Elbow’s graceful ebb and flow.
One of Richard Hawley’s myriad guitars in close-up at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
Better still, unlike Elbow, Hawley used projections. Sometimes showing him close up in his humorously abrasive yet also heartfelt conversation between songs. Sometimes showing his band members and the aforementioned string quartet. Other times complementing songs with nostalgic, black-and-white photographs of Sheffield, its streets, buildings, shops, even his parents by the sea, along with footage of musicians of the past. Later, those projections would spark into life as images of fire and flashing, speeding lights.
This concert was the first of a series to mark the 20th anniversary of Coles Corner, or to cash on it as he joked. His fourth and arguably still his supreme solo album has had its double CD re-issue put back a month to August 1, but on Saturday night we could revel on those songs of romance, longing, water and loss once more, with its echoes of the past running deeper than a South Yorkshire spin on Roy Orbison.
The string quartet augmenting Coles Corner with Richard Hawley at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
Ever the dandy at 58, Hawley was dressed in red; so too fellow guitarists Shez Sheridan and Bryan Day. He had not suddenly started supporting Sheffield United, explained the Sheffield Wednesday fan, but this was his tribute to Liverpool footballer Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva, football united in grief.
If those Made-in-Sheffield songs, played in album order, were not already tugging at the heart strings, that moment of collective commemoration could not have been more fittingly conducted. From title track opener, through Just Like The Rain and Darlin’ Wait For Me, to the epic The Ocean, song surpassed song.
Richard Hawley working his guitar magic at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes
He dedicated Born Under A Bad Sign to his father, with whom he had first played at The Leadmill at 16, and onwards he crooned and we swooned: I Sleep Alone, Tonight, and Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Face?, learnt from his mother and played solo as a goodnight lullaby.
It was already ten o’clock, and so Richard had to cram in as many Hawley highlights as he could by the 10.30pm curfew. Moonlight greeted She Brings The Sunlight, and we danced giddily to Prism In Jeans and felt the heart pound to Open Up Your Doors before Heart Of Oak made a mighty finale. Hawley at his best, Futuresound’s excellent gig management at its best too.
Red light bathing Richard Hawley and his band in the finale to his Live At York Museum Gardens concert. Picture: Celestine Dubruel
Richard Hawley’s set list at Live At York Museum Gardens
1. Coles Corner; 2. Just Like The Rain; 3. Hotel Room; 4. Darlin’ Wait For Me; 5. The Ocean; 6. Born Under A Bad Sign; 7. I Sleep Alone; 8. Tonight; 9. (Wading Through) The Waters Of My Time; 10. Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Face?; 11. Last Orders; 12. She Brings The Sunlight; 13. Galley Girl; 14. Prism In Jeans; 15. Open Up Your Door; 16. Alone; 17. Heart Of Oak.
Precision in jeans: A close-up of Richard Hawley’s choice of stitching at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes