LIVE REVIEW : RICHARD HAWLEY AT BRIXTON ACADEMY 03/10/2012

The gig thas almost wasn't meant to be. I had for some reason persuaded myself that he was playing the Shepherd's Bush Empire. When I arrived there I noticed immediatly that something was wrong as there was nobody around the venue and all the doors was called. Phone call to my girlfriend revealed that gig was in a fact at Brixton Academy (thankfully not on the other side of town !!!). I managed to make it there just 5 minutes before Hawley was due to sart.  The venue was almost full which shows that his profile is becoming bigger and bigger in the UK (especially when he played The forum a couple of months ago). Hawley was promoting his latest offering "Standing at the sky's edge" that is quite a departure from his usual style. Maybe as a reaction to the very orchestrated "Truelove's gutter", the new album is very guitar heavy with plenty of noise and feedback (you could almost call it shoegaze at some points). The stage was very nicely lit in colours that remind of the CD sleeve with half a dozen potted trees in the back (looked better than it sounds...)

 

Set-list relied heavily on new tracks and while the songs are good, you tended to get distracted by all the lenghty guitar workouts that close most of the songs. Hawley was im good spirits, bantering with the crowd and thanking us from coming to the gig and complaining about the people chatting at the bar "why would you want to pay 30 quid to chat for the whole night, they must be on the guest list). In the midst of the new songs, we got a couple of classics from the three previous albums ("Tonight the street are ours", "Hotel room", "Open up your door"). Hawley changed guitar for almost every song displaying models for virtually all manufacturers (Rickenbacker, Fender, Gretsch, Gibson...). The band was immaculate (they've been playing with Hawley since the beginning of his solo career) and they adpated perfectly to Hawley's "new style". For the gig at Brixton there was 2 backing vocalists but they didn't add much to the whole sound.

 

As special thanks we got a cover of an old blues song called "Waterboy" that Hawley introduced in a lenghty way, saying the song had been passed over to him by his granfather who had heard it played by an american singer during a strike in Sheffield in the 1920's. The gig ended with a triumphant version of "The Ocean".