“Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out.” In a café just around the corner from his Edinburgh flat, Hamish Hawk is contemplating his extraordinary new record, A Firmer Hand. “The thing that links all of the songs is a sense of the unsaid, whether out of guilt, shame, repression, embarrassment, coyness, whatever it might have been. I realised: I am going to say these things, and not all of them are going to make me look good. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.”
At this stage, where only a handful of close associates have heard the finished album, Hawk is still unsure of what the reaction might be from fans, critics, even family. He jokes that A Firmer Hand is the first of his records that his parents might not enjoy. “But the fact that it makes me nervous tells me it was the right thing to do.”
It takes only a couple of listens to be sure that it was a risk worth taking. And just a couple more to determine that A Firmer Hand is the best and boldest record Hamish Hawk has delivered to date. “It’s a bit of a coming of age record,” he says. And a record for the ages.
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A Firmer Hand is the third in a run of superlative Hamish Hawk albums which began in 2021 with Heavy Elevator, and continued last year with Angel Numbers. Hawk has been making music with serious intent since 2014, when he self-released Aznavour as Hamish James Hawk. Championed early on by King Creosote and Idlewild, the following year he recorded the 10-inch Mull EP before forming Hamish Hawk & The New Outfit, a unit which morphed into his current band. He gigged incessantly, sometimes with the group, mostly solo. In 2018 he released the album From Zero To One, followed in 2019 with another EP of piano ballads, Laziest River.
There are unforgettable flourishes on all these records, but Heavy Elevator and Angel Numbers raised Hawk’s heartfelt, headstrong, unashamedly literate work to new levels of excellence and exposure. Championed by 6Music, bolstered by rafts of rave reviews, and honed by relentless touring, songs such as ‘Caterpillar’, ‘Calls To Tiree’, ‘Think Of Us Kissing’, ‘Money’, ‘Angel Numbers’ and Hawk’s signature tune, ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973’, have by now proved their staying power. Each new endeavour has moved the story forward, creatively and commercially.
“Heavy Elevator was so exciting at the time, it felt like what we put together was really comprehensive, a considerable piece of work,” he says. “That certainly did change my life, especially at the end of lockdown; it felt like a transformation or a release of some kind. But Angel Numbers changed my life more, just because what followed has been so incredibly positive.”
In the time since Angel Numbers was released to widespread acclaim in February 2023, Hamish Hawk has barely stopped. On the UK dates following the album release, the jump in venue size from previous tours was sometimes fourfold. “I felt the pressure,” he admits, but rose to the challenge. (If you haven’t yet witnessed Hawk’s intensely physical, sometimes unsettlingly abandoned approach to live performance, you are missing something very special). There was a visit to SXSW in Austin, and a summer of festivals, including supporting hometown heroes The Proclaimers at two huge shows on Leith Links, a rare occasion when Hawk could sling his guitar over his shoulder and walk to work. A Music Venue Trust tour in August was followed by an autumn European tour. At the end of 2023, Angel Numbers appeared on several album of the year lists, including MOJO, and on the SAY shortlist.
Early in 2024, Hawk appeared at Celtic Connections as part of Roaming Roots, celebrating modern Scottish song in stellar company, including one bona fide musical hero, Tracyanne Campbell from Camera Obscura. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Scotland Sings Bacharach tour, sharing a stage with, among others, Blue Rose Code, Karine Polwart and Justin Currie. “Sitting with all these people as an equal, it was a giddy experience for me,” he says.
To top off an unforgettable 12 months, in February 2024 came a landmark event: a sold-out headlining show in front of 2000 fans at the legendary Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow. A year after the release of Angel Numbers, the show was tangible proof that the landscape of Hawk’s career had changed irrevocably. “I’m so grateful for the opportunities Angel Numbers has given me,” he says. “It has been a runaway success, the likes of which I couldn’t have imagined.”
It left one inevitable question hanging in the air: What next?
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In the midst of all that activity, in April 2023 Hawk and his band went into the studio to record the 12 songs which appear on A Firmer Hand. Like its predecessors, the album was produced by Idlewild’s Rod Jones at Post Electric studios in Leith, Edinburgh. Once again, the songs were written by Hawk with Andrew Pearson (guitars) and Stefan Maurice (keyboards and drums), who form the core of his band alongside Alex Duthie (bass) and John Cashman (keyboards).
From the outset, they wanted A Firmer Hand to be an inside job; a true group album. “Everyone who plays on it is in the band; there are no additional musicians, it’s just us. That’s different from Angel Numbers, which got to the point where it was kind of chamber-poppy in its execution. We were actually thinking about recording it live. In the end we only did drums and bass like that, but we could stand in a room and play all these songs.”
Musically and lyrically, the album is leaner, tighter, punchier. It is also the most eclectic and ambitious Hamish Hawk album to date. Forthcoming single, ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ has a propulsively funky energy. Irreverent, spare and loose, it lands somewhere between Talking Heads, Franz Ferdinand and the Pet Shop Boys. ‘Disingenuous’ evokes the taut rockabilly-roll of early Smiths, throwing in some distorted Hank Marvin guitar-play for good measure. ‘Christopher St.’ is a gorgeous miniature, a brief, freeze-framed memory captured in a formal piano setting. ‘Men Like Wire’ is twisting indie-rock with a rousing chorus. Elsewhere, the styles range from noirish twang to pulsing electronica.
“We don’t deal in genres,” says Hawk. “My career has been an exercise against that. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I’ve always felt quite comfortable with the fact that the songs on the album will be cohesive, insofar as they all involve the same people putting them together. I think I give the listener a fair credit: whatever this album is, they’ll hear it. It’s designed by me and the band to be something you can spend a lot of time digging into.”
Hawk is now well established as a lyricist of rare range and acuity. He works hard at it, sweating over every syllable. With a cast of cameos which includes Jacques Brel, Frankie Valli, Tommy Cooper, Franz Kafka and Niccolo Machiavelli, A Firmer Hand is not short of lines to savour and scrutinize. Yet it is also a record which, as he puts it, relies less than ever on the “raised eyebrow” to makes its mark. A people pleaser by nature, Hawk appears unwilling to gladhand this time around. Though his obsession with crafting the perfect couplet remains undimmed, and comes with an admirably high success rate, at times on A Firmer Hand there is a tendency to say more by saying less.
“There’s less artifice on this album than there has been,” he says. “I really have tried to shed artifice at every stage. I feel this one is more curated, but in some senses it’s also the most natural and personal. It’s really revealing, and more serious. There is humour in there, but it’s a bit blacker and drier. It’s a grittier record.”
Two songs laid a path to determining the tenor of the album. The first, ‘Questionable Hit’, emerged right at the end of the recording of Angel Numbers. A companion of sorts to ‘Think Of Us Kissing’ in its unflinching account of music industry mores, the impact of its barbed lyric is all the more ferocious for playing out over a tune of lilting melodiousness, delivered in Hawk’s cooly seditious croon. “I felt even at the time, Oh, that’s an interesting voice,” he says. “It’s self-deprecating, but quite vicious. When I was writing it, it felt there was something different in this attitude and the tone. It’s not frightened of saying the thing that it’s trying to say. It’s not hiding behind metaphor, it’s quite jagged.”
This directness, this fearlessness, fed into ‘Machiavelli’s Room’, perhaps the most powerful and personal song Hawk has written. Over a pounding drum tattoo and a relentless minor-key piano attack, he reveals new colours in his palette: aggressive, explicit, unreasonable, sickly hues.
“That was the song that revealed the album to me, and it really intimidated me,” he says. “Stefan had sent me the demo, which was just an endless loop of the keys. I wrote those words, and they properly frightened me. That first lyric: ‘When I cradle him / Yes, when I cradle him in my arms / Curse the gathering storms, burn their uniforms, if they do them harm.’ I thought, ‘Oh God, is this what I’m going to be writing?!”
“I really feel like that sometimes: I’m not in control here, I’m just trying to grab bits from the ether. I realised, OK, this is what I’m going to be singing about. Over the next few weeks as I wrote ‘Machiavelli’s Room’, it hit me that I could not shy away from this. It suddenly became clear that with a song like that – as long as it is, as stark as it is, as minor key as it is – the record had to evoke the same sort of spirit.” He smiles. “The phrase I keep using is warts and all. Once it made itself known, I thought, I have to stick to this. I can’t hide anything from it. I can’t clean it all up for consumption. It felt uncomfortable for me – and that’s exactly how it should feel. That’s a really strong position.”
Through the writing of ‘Machiavelli’s Room’, followed by the arrival of songs such as ‘Milk An Ending’ and ‘Juliet As Epithet’, A Firmer Hand came into focus as an album directed towards Hawk’s relationships with men: friends, lovers, family, colleagues.
“I thought, This is the body of the record. Male desire is definitely an incredibly strong part of it, but not all the songs are about romantic or sexual partners. Some of them are business partners. Some are personal friends. Some are family members. It’s quite a sexually heated record, I would say, but I think that’s probably because of how hot those particular songs are. The sexually explicit ones tend to be the most brazen! When you’re in the throes of that sort of feeling, you don’t often pair it with self-doubt. It’s animalistic, and kind of freeing. I’ve never really dealt in eroticism before, the previous records are pretty free of it.”
Indeed, listeners accustomed to the artfully arched eyebrow and romantic scenes of flirtation and seduction which play out in previous Hawk songs, typically framed by the male gaze directed towards a female subject, will find A Firmer Hand demands a shift of perspective. “This album isn’t like that,” he says. “However, I want to make clear that there was never a point in writing any of my previous work at which I was hiding anything. I wasn’t making anything up before. I don’t tend to invent things out of nowhere. I’m not that sort of writer, I’m more of a diarist. This is an autobiographical album in the same way that the others are.”
A Firmer Hand is “a very masculine album, dealing in masculine currency.” ‘Men Like Wire’ is thrillingly conflicted, portraying desire as a sickness, ‘fulfilling as a dry heave’. The erotic prowl of ‘Milk An Ending’ is suffused with sexual danger and a palpable sense of self-loathing. ‘Autobiography Of Spy’, with its noirish nods and winks, was one of the last songs written for the record. “I slaved over that,” he says. “I’ve got about 20 verses I didn’t use.”
In the song, Hawk parallels the obsessive, self-involved double life of a Kim Philby type with the thrills, and pitfalls, of leading a secret sexual existence. Now they see you. Now they don’t. “So many of my friends who have lived that life, it’s unbelievable how much is traded in history or utmost secrecy, especially when young. It’s a common part of that experience to essentially get yourself in quite a lot of dangerous situations.”
The irresistible new single, ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ is lighter, an on-the-nose character study of some hyper-masculine big shot, with his ‘Colonel Tom Parker signet ring’ and ‘all the modesty of big tech in boom.’ A figure fit only for derision – ‘and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet…’
For all its focus on often aggressive masculinity, when A Firmer Hand is soft, it is softer than anything Hawk has done before. ‘Christoper St.’, all 90 seconds of it, is almost unbearably fragile. The album’s tender, hypnotic opener, the shimmering “Juliet As Epithet”, was written in Melbourne while Hawk was visiting his brother, spending his days walking the city alone. “I loved writing that song so much,” he says. “It’s exceptionally true to life, and so close to me. There’s a line: ‘I called him wild eyes, and just that once he called me Juliet.’ A lot of straight men will find that sort of thing emasculating, [but] there’s quite a lot of that in gay culture, calling you ‘girl’ or whatever. It becomes a point of pride and comfort and safety.”
A couple of other songs, says Hawk, possess a feminine energy. One is the crackling post-punk of ‘Nancy Dearest’, lit up with perhaps the album’s most irresistibly windblown chorus. The other is the pulsing, linear ‘The Hard Won’, which builds from an appealingly insistent keyboard motif. The album’s final song, the crude pun of the title a wholly conscious one, it serves as a kind of reckoning, making uneasy peace with Hawk’s many, messy parts. ‘No explanation’ is the last phrase we hear. It is okay to just be, rather than to define or justify.
“The album isn’t one story,” he says. “I’m saying things that I’ve needed to say in my life, and I’m giving myself space to say them. The whole point was working through some of this stuff and talking about it. It’s not clean. It’s quite messy.”
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Earlier this year Hawk signed to So Recordings. His new labelmates include Placebo, Seasick Steve and Enter Shikari. “It’s a cool family,” he says. “We’ve still got full control over everything but when you do everything yourself for a long time you forget what labels are for. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve loved being ‘self-published’, but it feels like we’re now at the stage where we just need a bit more capital.”
In late May and early June he will tour Europe solo, supporting Villagers. There will be festivals in the summer, followed by a full band outstore tour around album release in August. European dates will follow, as well as a UK tour in early 2025 and some other tantalising plans which as yet can’t be announced. “I’m excited to play these songs live,” he says. “We’ve already worked some of them into the set.”
Just as Angel Numbers sent Hawk on the kind of journey he could have barely envisaged when it was released, so A Firmer Hand will carry him even further. Making the album presented many difficult and confronting choices. Some of the rewards will only be revealed with the passing of time. Others are already making themselves known.
“This record has made great demands of me, both artistically and personally, and I imagine it’s going to continue to do that over the next few months,” he says. “But just as my other songs have taught me things over time, I have a feeling that what this album will teach me after its release is going to be more valuable to me than any previous set of lessons. It feels like a necessary revelation. I think releasing this album might actually have a positive effect on my life.” A coming of age record, indeed. Graeme Thomson