At the time of speaking to SNACK, Hamish Hawk’s new album, A Firmer Hand, has been out just under a week and is number 8 on the UK album midweek charts. One of the singles from the album, ‘Big Cat Tattoos’, was recently discussed on episode 20 of SNACK and Ravechild’s podcast, Everybody Wants To Play The Hits (EWTPTH), if you want to check that out. In this interview, Hawk describes the power of collaboration and the transition from working solo and self-releasing music to being a band, now releasing their first album as artists with So Recordings.
Your new album has been out almost a week. What has this week been like?
It’s been amazing, quite honestly. The band and I are on this instore/outstore tour up and down the country, playing in independent record stores. Before any album is released there’s always a kind of trepidation or nervousness – with this album especially, at least for me, because it deals with some quite sensitive and personal lyrical content.
I can speak for the band when I say this – we couldn’t be happier with the response. It’s been so warm, so positive, so truly supportive. We’ve been blessed for some time with a fan base that has a really solid foundation. We may have started small, and we started a while ago, but it’s just built itself up.
Now we’re at the point of being introduced onstage by Steve Lamacq, of 6 Music and NME fame, and he’s just a diamond of a person and as supportive as they come. He’s the real deal, so to have him give such effusive praise, and then to play to that audience and do signings, and just hundreds of people coming to talk to us about the record – I am genuinely thrilled by it. And, you know, in no small amount bewildered. It certainly feels like we have moved up a tier. We’ve had the best time, and long may it continue.
Thinking about the band and the process for this album, which song would you say came together most easily or most sublimely for you?
The first two songs I wrote for the album were ‘Questionable Hit’ and ‘Machiavelli’s Room’. I was quickly aware that they had quite a different character, a different voice, and a different attitude and tone to songs on my previous records. It became obvious to me that if they were to go on the album, they would have to sit next to songs cut from the same cloth, as opposed to songs that were wildly different. They came to define the record.
But I would say the song that felt most natural and, as I say, also challenging – the song that just consumed me – was ‘Machiavelli’s Room’. Every time I had a spare set of ears I would constantly play the demo to try and get more out of it.
Usually on my albums there’s one song that has a whole new family of images, completely new ideas I hadn’t touched on before that show a lot of promise for the rest of the album and for the rest of my writing period. That was ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ for me. It burst onto the scene with all this fresh stuff. That was a very exciting, fulfilling experience, because it all just comes out.
Tell me a bit about the role of the band – you, Hamish Hawk, and the band Hamish Hawk.
I started writing songs as a teenager, but I started performing in earnest and properly making a go of it in my early 20s. I’d done gigs and writing before that, but this is when it started to become quite serious for me and, slowly, over the course of my 20s, eat away at everything else; slowly consume my life until I just wrote songs.
I started as a solo performer. It was me and an acoustic guitar. I would write all of my songs sitting at the end of my bed.
I went on lots of support tours and did gigs all over Scotland and the UK, but it was just me and my guitar. It was King Creosote, the Fife-based folk musician, who suggested I get a band together to support him at Perth Concert Hall. It was about 2014. So I got a band together, and there were a few records which were essentially me on my acoustic with a backing band, but beefing them up and making them punchier and louder.
But then I started actually collaborating, working properly with Andrew Pearson, my guitarist, and Stefan Maurice, my drummer. I could stretch out and focus predominantly on the lyrics. They would furnish me with demos and it quickly became apparent to me that we were greater than the sum of our parts, that they understood what I was going for; I understood what they wanted for me.
This sounds like a really crazy word to use but to me, anyway, it feels transcendent. We come together, we’ve got different tastes, different personalities, different lives, and we smash together. The product of that is something none of us could have realised on our own. That’s not to say that we couldn’t realise things on our own that are of great quality, it’s just when you bring together these different outlooks and different attitudes, it’s amazing how it bears fruit. It’s like magic.
So my name is Hamish Hawk, but we are simultaneously a band called Hamish Hawk.
You said that the album ‘made so many demands’ and that you gave yourself over to it – how will we hear that in it?
That first record, Heavy Elevator, was the most comprehensive indie album we had released up until that point. It was the culmination of several years’ worth of writing. Something started: there was a spark with that.
It was from that record that arguably our biggest song, ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973’, came, and it felt like we’d struck something there. And then Angel Numbers continued in a similar vein, in the kind of way indie albums often do: when they develop, they become a little more florid, more chamber, poppy. Brass and strings and embellishments, a sort of window dressing. And for this record, A Firmer Hand, we made it a challenge to strip all that back. We wanted to ensure that all of these songs can be performed live as they sound on the record – just the band in a room. Limitation really can be the mother of invention.
Lyrically it made great demands of me. Laying everything out on the table – warts and all. It doesn’t matter what it makes me look like. It doesn’t matter how close to the bone some of these things might be. In some situations it can be quite graphic – in others quite cruel or vindictive. That’s the greatest demand – to essentially sit comfortably in the things I am saying and allow the music and lyrics to be. To say: ‘I’m not going to clean this up for human consumption.’
This is your first album signed to a record label, So Recordings. What’s that been like compared to self-releasing previously?
The band and I have been very lucky. Since we released Heavy Elevator, this team around us – management, agent, any kind of consultant – has grown really organically. We often say while we’re on tour that we are glad, in a way, that this isn’t happening to us 10 years ago. Because if it were, I think we would be really overwhelmed by it. It would probably exploit our worst tendencies or our flaws. We wouldn’t have much control over it, and we’d probably relinquish ourselves along with our control; we might lose ourselves in it.
I do have concern for younger artists, because I know that machine. It’s done me in, a few times in the past, and fortunately I have a team around me now who are totally in it for the passion of the music. We have each other’s backs. We’re friends, you know?
It’s grown organically to the point where now, So Recordings have gotten involved, with a very light touch. With A Firmer Hand we’re being pushed to another level and we are being massively supported by So Recordings. We’re really glad to have them as our label home. It does feel like the groundwork we’ve laid for ourselves remains in place, and so it’s that extra nudge that we needed.
Onto the tour for the new album then!
It’s been a great week and the album seems to be going well. It’s funny: when you’re about to release a record, or you’ve just recorded or mixed it, you don’t know what the record really sounds like. You don’t have the best perspective on it because you can’t see the wood for the trees; you’re too involved in the process. I’m absolutely delighted with the response – we feel the album’s been vindicated and we’re really proud of the work.
But, as artists, what we set out to achieve with this record was achieved in recording it, in writing it. That’s such a gift to realise. Because, in the end, for all the pomp and ceremony of releasing records, you can forget what you’re really doing, which is writing songs and playing songs and enjoying doing that.
To buy the album, or tickets for the tour, visit https://hamishhawk.com/
Main Photo Credit: Simon Murphy
