Musician Richard Hawley: ‘A great Irish man taught me not to be a victim’

He was born with a hare lip and cleft palate. Out of almost existential necessity, he learned to divide the world into those who were cruel about his cleft palate and those who weren’t. Every day he was bullied.

“It was a daily battle,” he says. “When I was younger, I got really good with my fists. It was one of those things you couldn’t avoid. You were either a victim, or people stayed away from you because they knew you weren’t an easy target.

“There was a great Irishman who helped me a lot. My uncle Eric’s cousin, she married Brendan Ingle, the great boxing trainer based in Sheffield,” he says of the now deceased Dublin-born boxer (who went on to train, among others, Prince Naseem Hamed, as well as being given an MBE in 1998 for his work with young people in the Sheffield area).

“Brendan and Eric were very good friends. I used to go down to see Brendan when I was little. He taught me how to fight. But he also taught me how to use your brain and to run if you can.”

Before he turned 17, Richard had undergone 27 operations to repair his condition.

“These days you can have one operation and it’s all sorted. It was a lot harder then.”

The final operation was cosmetic, to get rid of the scarring on his upper lip. He refused the operation and said the scarring was part of him. His mother gave him a cuddle and told him he’d grown into a good man.

“These are the trials you have to go through,” he says of his childhood. “I don’t piss and moan about it.”

How did he get through it?

“I guess the thing that got me through it all was having a loving family,” he says. “And also, lots of people were kind. They would always be supportive. My family made it a point to tell me that: ‘You are no weaker than anyone else, but you are also no better than anyone else.’

"That was important. These are the things that make us as people. I’ve not grown up a bitter man as a result, and I am very, very thankful for that – because it would have been easy for me to grow up and resent the world, you know? But I don’t at all. Not in any shape or form.”

Born on January 17, 1967, Hawley grew up in Pitsmoor, Sheffield, in what was one of the roughest parts of South Yorkshire. His father worked in the local steelworks and also played in a band. He started leaving guitars around the house for his son when he was seven in the hope that he would pick one up.

“I remember him telling me a story that he knew I was going to eventually play it because he could hear strumming on the guitar. But that was actually me whacking the guitar strings with my Action Man’s head.”

Two years later, Hawley wrote his first song. His father got home from work late to find him sitting up in bed playing a guitar.

“I didn’t know what the song was I was playing. He listened to it and he said: ‘It’s yours.’ He gave me a kiss and turned the light off. I lay there in bed thinking: ‘What the f**k does he mean, that it is my song?’ I didn’t realise you could just write a song.”

He formed his first band, Treebound Story, while still at school. He later formed much-touted indie band Longpigs in the 1990s. They split in 1997. That year he co-wrote ‘Clean’ with Robbie Williams. The ex-Take That! superstar would later offer him a job as a songwriting partner. Hawley turned down the opportunity to become an overnight multi-millionaire.

He joined fellow Sheffield band Pulp on tour for a time in 2000. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said of him: “In a way, Richard exists in his own time.”

In 2001, he released his debut solo album Late Night Final on London-Irish label, Setanta Records.

Hawley’s voice, which has baritone echoes of Johnny Cash and Scott Walker, is something to marvel at, as are his lyrics. When his album Coles Corner was pipped for the Mercury Music Prize in 2006 by his friends Arctic Monkeys, Monkeys’ singer Alex Turner announced at the ceremony: “Someone call 999! Richard Hawley’s been robbed!”

Those words reflect the sense of admiration and respect that so many artists have for him as a writer and singer. The diverse list of those he’s worked with bears this out. In 2008, he sang ‘The Fix’ on Elbow’s album The Seldom Seen Kid. In 2009, he wrote ‘After the Rain’ for Shirley Bassey. The same year Hawley’s Truelove’s Gutter was voted album of the year by Mojo magazine. The following year he played on ‘No Tears to Cry’ on Paul Weller’s album Wake Up the Nation. In 2012, he sang vocals on ‘You & I’ with Arctic Monkeys. The same year he co-wrote ‘Weary’ with Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie Presley. In 2013, he was nominated at the Brit Awards as the Best Male Solo Artist.

It seems a long way from the young kid who didn’t know songs could be written at all.

“I’ll be 55 in January,” he says. “I still come up with melodies and ideas and songs every single day of my life. I’m not really sure whether it’s a gift or a mental illness. I don’t analyse it too much. It’s the way I am. If I went into psychoanalysis maybe they’d be able to figure it out, but what’s the point?”

He lives in Sheffield with his wife Helen and their three children. Does he leave guitars around the house for them?

“It’s too late for that. They’re all older now. They do their own thing. My wife and I always taught them that the most important thing is to learn how to be yourself. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’m still looking.”

He hasn’t released anything since 2019’s Further, his eighth studio album. Is there a new record in the pipeline?

“We’ll see. I never talk about things that are going to come out. I talk about things that exist. I might never write another record again. You can’t take that for granted. I know I’ve got a lot of new songs. I’m not really an ambitious person in that way. I’m not driven by what a lot of other folks are driven by.”

That philosophy comes from his background. His late father – who died in 2007 of lung cancer – instilled in him the importance of being honest and true to yourself in life. “He basically hammered it into me: ‘Don’t be a c**t.’ It was much more complicated than that, obviously, but they were working-class values. It’s about being aware of others, not being selfish.”

He also inherited his rock ‘n’ roll outsider look from his father.

“My dad was a first-wave biker teddy boy. He was a f**king headcase – in a good way. He was a rebel. All my uncles were like that. They were into rock ‘n’ roll. They were working to live, rather than living to work.

"Right up until the 1970s, the hippy thing never came further than Watford. You wouldn’t work in a steelworks with long hair. You might get it caught in the machinery.”

He recalls the year he went to comprehensive school – 1979 – was the same year that Margaret Thatcher came to power.

“And as soon as she got in, if you were a Northern boy or girl, you knew instinctively that whatever plans she had, they didn’t include us. The target was here because Sheffield was the socialist capital of England. We used to have a red flag flying above the town hall which is long gone.

"We were definitely the hammer blow falling. It was the steel workers first. She rehearsed on us and then the miners next.”

Has Brexit brought a similar mood of isolation to the north of England?

“With Brexit, a lot of folks think we live in isolation, but we don’t. I don’t believe we do anyway. On the planet now, it is not a time to turn your back on the rest of the world. If we don’t work together, we are f**ked. That is so obvious to me.

"We can sit here and analyse why people voted for Brexit, but at the end of the day I think they were lied to. People like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are horrible, horrible b*stards. I have nothing positive to say about them and their ilk.”

Away from politics, the Yorkshire balladeer has a winningly mad sense of the odd.

“During lockdown I needed a daft thing that I could achieve. So, I watched every single episode of Star Trek – ever. A lot of them are f**king shit. It took over 28 nights to watch them.”

How was his wife with this?

“I only watched them when she’d gone to bed, because it would have driven her crazy.”

Richard Hawley plays Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, May 6; 3Olympia, Dublin, May 8; Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, May 10; Cork Opera House, May 11; Black Box, Galway, May 13; and St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, May 14