IN CONVERSATION : Hamish Hawk ‘I Wanted To Be Honest’

It’s humbling to be inside Liverpool’s Olympia theatre during daytime hours, empty of an audience. Carved plaster elephants judge from the walls of the 2000-capacity auditorium, the guilt ghost of animals cruelly paraded in Victorian times. It feels like the set of an old movie, a sense of history firmly present. And yet, we are here for a very in-the-now reason, to meet up with Edinburgh’s Hamish Hawk on a run-up-to-Christmas tour with fellow Scots, Travis. It’s the third time within months Hamish has visited the Liverpool region, this venue the biggest so far, flat out promoting third album A Firmer Hand. He’s had substantially more press interest with this one, he confesses as we settle down to talk. A regular presence on end of year lists, and a 6 Music album of the 2024 thanks to long term champion Steve Lamacq, he’s fattened out his audience both on his own and touring Europe in support slots. Not bad going at all.
Hamish Hawk is both a man and a band these days. Hamish firmly in charge of the lyrics and he, drummer Stefan Maurice, guitarist Andrew Pearson and bass player Alex Duthie co-songwriters on the music. And what a wholesome bunch they are, with a rider of Walkers crisps and a Lindt chocolate advent calendar each. The bonding of the group as a brotherly unit enabled Hamish to put down the guitar and become the physical up front performer he is today. Go to a Hamish Hawk show and you will witness a man working that damn stage with no mercy. He denies he dances, but we really must insist he is wrong on that point.

A Firmer Hand, though. Much was made over the summer of it as a deeply personal record. Pivotal. Honest. Darker. Big change. The songs themselves conceal nothing, but coyness in coverage was noticeable. Even the press release accompanying the album did not state in black and white that, after a decade of growing considerable songwriting chops with romantic, warm pulse poetic lyrics, Hamish presents in A Firmer Hand an album of dramatic, unambiguous songs exploring his relationships with men.
Writing about the carnal in song is always – um – hard, I put to him. Artists like Jacques Brel, Tim Buckley, the Lake District’s Wild Beasts and contemporary French band La Femme, get it spot on. But hitting the sweet spot is a rare skill. And we at GIITTV absolutely add that to Hamish Hawk’s considerable talents.

‘Through the previous records, I occupied a space that was the thrill of the chase. That cocktail of emotions, jealousy, young love with an arched eyebrow, ironic. I’d never dealt with sex explicitly or eroticism at all.’ He admits initial coyness might have come from himself, despite the suggestive nature of some song titles. I think you’d prefer a firmer hand indeed!
‘I was very nervous about the record not only in terms of the subject matter but creatively speaking, is this too far away from what came before it? I didn’t know how I was going to talk about it, the vocabulary I would use. To my friends and my family, my sexuality is something I have openly embraced and discussed over the past several years so personally speaking that’s not an issue to talk about but professionally is something that I had never been challenged on.’
He found a way of politely establishing boundaries about aspects of his personal life he doesn’t want to share, quite a skill to learn. ‘I wanted to be honest.’

‘Questionable Hit’ may well be one of the least sexual songs on the album, a barbed observation of his experiences with the wider music industry instead, yet ‘If they think you’re a fruit, men won’t want to be you’ leaves no room for confusion.
‘That’s a direct quote,’ says Hamish softly, after a pause. He wrote Questionable Hit when putting together 2023’s Angel Numbers and in it found a new, scathing voice which didn’t fit in that record. ‘It’s also quite a sad song. A family of emotions I hadn’t dealt with before.’

‘Machiavelli’s Room’ is by far and away the most erotically charged on the record. Stefan gave him a looped piano demo and Hamish imagined possibilities. ‘It was quite affronting to me,’ he says of the song as he wrote. ‘I had that excitement but felt quite threatened by it, not only because it was homoerotic but violently sexual. There was a challenging attitude to it, I didn’t know what to do with it at first.’
Was it throwing down a gauntlet to yourself?
‘Absolutely,’ he nods firmly. ‘I thought, “ok the songs need to be cut from this cloth. A Firmer Hand is the most intentional record, these are the themes I’m going to explore, and if I feel myself drifting beyond the limits of those themes, I’ll reel myself back in”, which was more stimulating for me.’

‘Juliet as Epithet’ is an emotional listen, recollections of regret. ‘I smother the chances I get/And when they hurt to remember, I forget’, he sings. It’s the most purely personal song and most private, he says. ‘I’m 33 now, in the past few years I’ve lived very comfortably in my sexuality. My 20s weren’t like that. I didn’t know how to navigate or make sense of it. For a long time I was trying to give names to it, shape it or control it, understand it. Had a few encounters that can be informative, empowering, emboldening but simultaneously they can take you right backwards and make you feel-’ he sighs, ‘-hollow. Juliet was an exercise in excavating and dragging all that up again and. It was upsetting to write.’

We talk about Scott Walker a little; Hamish’s warm baritone is reminiscent, and his lyrics are witty and dark, with plenty drama to suit. On A Firmer Hand his voice is deeper, for sure. ‘What I love about Scott Walker is that I find him impulsively funny, hilarious. Some of the things he’s managing to deliver in that voice!’
‘Hello Mr Big Shot…I’ve had a tiring day/I took the kids along to the park!” he sings with a flourish and massive grin.
What we did not expect tonight is Hamish delivering us a line of Walker’s 1968 song of a double life ‘The Amorous Humphrey Plugg’.

He loves Elvis Presley too, the ultimate stage showman. ‘Elvis Lookalike Shadows’ from Angel Numbers reflects with remarkable accuracy how one’s connection with one of the most famous men on the planet and his work, can be emotionally intimate. On ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ from A Firmer Hand, we find Elvis borne in mind too, the ‘get up there and sing’ line famously spat out by loathsome manager Tom Parker.
‘Elvis is endlessly fascinating because it’s amazing to me to think he did exist. I essentially fell down a rabbit hole watching a great many Elvis live performances and you get the impression every single movement of every muscle and bone in his body is pre-determined but it’s not, it’s so natural. I was watching his Ed Sullivan performance and there’s a couple of moments where he looks into the camera. Bob Dylan famously said he saw Buddy Holly live and he looked at him directly and I think he said in his Nobel Prize speech, “and in that moment he handed something to me”. And he really believes that. “From that moment I knew that my life was not going to be like the lives around me in this dancehall”.’

‘Big Cat Tattoos‘ Hamish says, came with promise of potential. Poking fun at the passion for shoegaze is smirky fun. ‘What I felt was needed was mischief, almost a naughtiness,’ Hamish laughs.

Listening to the album though, is not a frivolous exercise. The humour reveals, not conceals. He admits A Firmer Hand is not the easiest listen, but giggles at the memory of a journalist armed with an early pre-release copy approaching him at the merchandise stall and with a worried face, asking if he was ok.
I put to him he’s very charming onstage, with thank you-s and smiles. ‘I like to entertain. It’s never been my gut instinct to challenge or frighten or test anyone’s limits, but having these songs in the set now and having them to work with, it creates a really creatively stimulating contrast where I come onstage and I might well be charming then I’ll play Machiavelli’s Room, or Milk An Ending.’
He remembers studying Anton Chekhov at school, noting the emotional intensity followed by something absurd making sad things sadder the funnier thing funnier. ‘And I’m trying as much as I can playing with that and what fruit that might bear.’
‘Autobiography of Spies‘ is cinematic, and we can’t help but mischievously imagine what fun it would be if a Hollywood spy movie picked for the soundtrack without listening to the lyrics…
‘James Bond wandering into a sauna!’ he laughs. ‘It’s as florid as A Firmer Hand gets yet its pared back, not too verbose, as concise as possible yet poetically interesting for me to write. I tried to shave the fat off a lot of these songs. Autobiography Of Spies was especially difficult to do that to. But I got there.’

After a time, Hamish has a soundcheck to do. As he escorts us out, he sketches out the 2025 Hawk landscape of European dates in January, UK tour in February, festivals over the summer and the US later in the year. ‘My life has changed over the last few years, it’s quite bewildering. It’s great but bewildering is the word!’
His set that evening in the sold out theatre is fabulously intense. He goes at the 30 minute slot hard. Gazes intently into the lens of our photographer’s camera. The money shot of the night. A local in the audience shouts questions at him in beery banter.
‘Where you from, mate?’
Hamish stops, cracks his microphone lead like a whip, and flashes the most glorious sunshine smile. ‘Where are we from? Why, Edinburgh Scotland!’
He gives the fellow a smart bow and the cheekiest of winks, before snapping straight back into the uncompromising, no holds barred what-so-fucking-ever. Looking upwards for a second, those white trunked elephants still stare down. They’ve seen all sorts over the past hundred plus years. And are bloody well loving this. We are sure of it.

Photo credit: Michelle Marshall