Hamish Hawk is ending the year as he started it – in awe of his surroundings. “I was saying: ‘Are you sure you have the right guy for this?’” recalls the Edinburgh singer and songwriter. “Eddi Reader had just been on stage and I’m singing a Franz Ferdinand song with an orchestra. “I was actually a little bit bewildered by the whole thing.”
The whole thing was this year’s Roaming Roots Revue at Celtic Connections, a two-night mid-January come-all-ye featuring a roster of names from the Scottish music scene covering some of the best songs to emerge from the country in the past 50 years. Annually, the gig, which is hosted by Roddy Hart and his band The Lonesome Fire, has grown to become a popular staple in the festival’s calendar, built around a different theme each year.
Anyone there on either night knows one thing above all else: Hamish Hawk stole it. “To be asked to come and perform with this group of people – Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro, Traceyanne Campbell from Camera Obscura, Louis Abbott from Admiral Fallow – was really special for me,” he says.
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“These are all people whose music I have loved for years.” Roaming Roots was Hawk’s crossover. His cover of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out, performed with the RCS Symphony Orchestra, was the perfect choice. Whether he means it or not, he exudes a semi-performative sense of arcane theatricality on stage, which elevated the knowing art school cool of Franz Ferdinand into fresh new air.
He punched and pounced around stage, eyed bulging like a 1930s horror star, pushed and pulled by orchestral strings and brass. Television cameras loved it, as did a good many watching. In coming weeks, Hawk will cap a remarkable year by performing with Travis at their much anticipated Glasgow gig at the Hydro and will pinch himself in December as he did in January. “My sister played their music a lot when I was growing up,” says the 33 year old.
“This is a band who headlined Glastonbury the same weekend as David Bowie. Despite reaching that level they are still so humble, and one of the things I’ve been astounded by while touring with them in the last few months is how many songs you just know all the words of. They are such a singular band. “We’ve played with Simple Minds, Franz Ferdinand, The Proclaimers, and I’m really humbled to be playing the Hydro with Travis. They’re a special band.”
Hawk won’t be holding back. Like Travis frontman Fran Healy said in these pages when supporting The Killers, Hawk is preparing to swoop on his new pal’s crowd. “Being a perennial support act has taught us not to behave like a support act. The people in the audience might not have bought tickets because you’re on the bill, but you should still go out there all guns blazing and give it all you’ve got. Try your hardest to blow the main act off the stage.”
The son of a midwife and advertising design executive, Hamish Hawk’s real name is Hamish Hawk. “Hamish Hawk is not a Ziggy Stardust,” he says, laughing. “That’s who I am.” At school in Edinburgh he took drama, played his guitar at home, and applied for what was Glasgow’s RSAMD (now Royal Conservatoire). He didn’t get in so studied International Affairs in St Andrews instead.
It was while hanging out in Fife that he met Kenny Anderson, or King Creosote, to give him his Ziggy Stardust name, and doing sporadic gigs around the Fife university town that he found his way into music. Anderson has become a key mentoring figure in Hawk’s life. The singer released his third album A Firmer Hand in August this year. A step-change from his previous two LPs that deal, in his own words, with “the raised eyebrow and high romance”, the latest record has a harder edge to it. There are scathing, bitter moments.
"It’s darker, more erotically charged, with a violent eroticism,” he says. “It’s also more sardonic.” The supporting promotional material from his record company referred to it, obliquely, as a record where skeletons fell out of the closet. Hawk is less cloaked about it. He says: “It’s stuff I hadn’t mentioned before, either out of coyness or shyness or worry or concern. Embarrassment. Shame. Guilt. That’s what this album is. It’s an exploration of those themes and those subjects which make me feel all that, and since its release I feel really strengthened by it. I’m really happy with how it has turned out. A song like Machiavelli’s Room is a catalyst for the whole album. It’s a strong, direct, aggressive, erotically charged song, very revealing.
“I couldn’t lie and say I had no anxieties about releasing an album that is so bare-faced in dealing with homoerotic desire and lust. I was anxious about it but there was never a question in my mind about recording it or releasing it. I made my bed and I am happy to lie in it.” Hawk talks of his past relationships with women, but refers to himself now as “a queer artist”. He says: “It’s new to me. My previous work wasn’t defined along those lines, and this new album dealt with those subjects. So it becomes a focal point.
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“There was a period in my life when I was having a great time dating women, with a very quiet voice in the back of my mind suggesting something else. Over time the voice grew louder and louder and the excuses I made to cut short relationships began to ring more hollow to myself.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity and privileged to have fans who come up to me after gigs to thank me for speaking honestly about it. It’s not about always being proud and empowered, it’s about times I’ve felt low and ashamed. It’s a knotty subject. It’s been a hugely important moment for me and I feel really proud of it.”
Hawk will return to next year’s Roaming Roots Revue line-up in January, and will headline his first Usher Hall gig in February in the capital. “The very idea that I’m playing there is ridiculous to me,” he says. “But we’re on this crazy train and we have to keep going.”
Hamish Hawk and Travis are at Glasgow’s Hydro on December 21. Roaming Roots Revue, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, January 26 & 27. He plays Aberdeen Lemon Tree, February 9, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, February 22, and will support Simple Minds at Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, June 27. hamishhawk.com
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