Hamish Hawk has, it could be said, been on a voyage of self-discovery, following what looked like an identity crisis in his early career.
New album ‘A Firmer Hand’ has been described as his third long-player, but that’s just counting releases which will be most familiar to fans around the UK and beyond – 2021’s breakthrough album ‘Heavy Elevator’ and 2023’s critically-acclaimed ‘Angel Numbers’, both received rave reviews and radio support. The Edinburgh-based artist has now had seven singles playlisted at BBC 6 Music.
And Hawk has also recently been announced as support to Travis on their December tour. All a far cry from his early career, where he was mentored by alt.folk legend King Creosote, before coming under the wing of Rod Jones, Idlewild guitarist.
Add to this the fact that the young Hamish also also worked in a record store, Edinburgh’s Assai, and his new bosses were impressed enough by a self-released EP to be to release album ‘From Zero to One’ on the shop’s own label.
It’s therefore apt that August saw him playing various record store shows across the UK.
However, Hamish Hawk is a band, technically – the frontman initially performing as a soloist, with friend Andrew Pearson releasing his debut EP, then putting together a backing band, The New Outfit. Confusingly perhaps the ‘backing band’ then transformed into ‘Hamish Hawk’ the group, but the music is very much a collective effort – with now-guitarist Pearson contributing a lot of the music, as does keyboard player Stefan Maurice”.
However, it’s Hawk himself who supplies the words, which come a-spilling out like a Scots Jarvis Cocker, often in an abstract way, perhaps most famously in ‘The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973’.
But the new album is more personal. Hawk says: “Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out. 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.
“I thought, this is the body of the record. The fact that it makes me nervous tells me it was the right thing to do.”
“Once I’d given myself over to the idea,” he continues, “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.”
“The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.”
“It’s a bit of a coming of age record,” he adds. And a record for the ages.
‘A Firmer Hand’ is out now. This article originally appeared in the Edinburgh News.
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