Richard Hawley
3Olympia, Dublin
★★★★★
“He’s a hopeless romantic,” my friend Stevie whispers after the first of a superb set of forlorn love songs from Richard Hawley. I’d agree, if he weren’t so damn good at it. He’s a peerless romantic.
With so much love in the air, it could make for a night as schmaltzy and saccharine as a Poundland Valentine’s card, full of sentiment and scent as cheap as patchouli, but Hawley is from Sheffield, in the Republic of South Yorkshire, “a city where they call you love”, a far-from-stainless northern English metropolis built on steel but tempered by self-deprecation, without the swagger of Liverpool or Manchester, whose “ways are not the smooth ways of the south, but hard, and used to keener weather”, in the words of the Yorkshire Ir
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