Sheffield steel

Richard Hawley has been on his fellow musicians' radar for donkey's years. Among the members of his not-so-teenage fan club are Jarvis Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys, Thom Yorke, Chris Martin, Robbie Williams, Scott Walker and Nancy Sinatra. With a new album under his belt, Hawley tells Brian Boydwhy he's glad people have had to discover his music for themselves

Robbie Williams and songwriter Guy Chambers (the main man behind Angelsand all of Williams's hits) enjoyed a highly lucrative partnership - until Chambers walked out. Williams needed a songwriter who was not only capable of writing an Angels but also someone who could take him to a higher artistic plateau. The first person he rang was Richard Hawley.

"My life would have changed overnight, especially financially," says the 40-year-old Sheffield native of the blank-cheque offer. "But it would have meant taking whatever scant wisdom I've developed in this short life and throwing it all away. I don't belong in that world. I don't want to write songs with Robbie Williams."

Musicians, if not the general population, have long been aware of Hawley's extraordinary talent. His fan club includes Thom Yorke and Chris Martin. Scott Walker once described him as "being up there with the all-time greats". Nancy Sinatra sends him Christmas presents, U2 once signed him to their Mother label (when he was in the band Longpigs), and Jarvis Cocker co-opted him as a member of Pulp and still works with him today. The South Bank Showgives him awards. The Arctic Monkeys were mortified they won the Mercury Music Prize ahead of him last year for their album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, the opening track of which had featured on their second EP Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys?And Arena magazine voted him its Man of the Year - an award that usually goes to the likes of Tiger Woods and Michael Schumacher.

Hawley has released one the best albums of the last 25 years (the breathtaking Coles Corner) and his equally exquisite follow-up ( Lady's Bridge) is out now. He's been called the indie Frank Sinatra, but he struggles for radio play and the only recognition he seems to get is from his girlfriend, who sends him text messages that read: Dear Arena Man Of The Year, can you pick up some milk on your way home?

Hawley has worked as a musician since he was 14 and remains a very in-demand session player. But it was only five years ago that, finding himself with some spare studio time, he recorded his first solo songs.

"I played them to Jarvis from Pulp and he was astonished," says Hawley. "He said: 'How come we've never heard your voice, you've got a great voice?' You see, that was always the problem with me - I was always happiest being the guitarist in the band. I really believed that to be a singer you had to be a bit of a knob-head. It was also because I was born with a hair lip and a cleft palate [since corrected, after many operations] and was very conscious of that and the fact that I'm not traditionally handsome. But it just got to the stage where I had these songs and I really didn't give a shit any more about what anyone thought."

His first few solo albums drew plenty of praise but little sales. That changed with Coles Corner.

"Radio wouldn't touch that album when it came out; it was a real struggle, I had no confidence anyway, and people just had me down as the guitarist from Pulp. With help from the Mercury and some really good reviews, it went on to sell 100,000 copies. I'm sort of glad that people had to discover it for themselves initially because all the music I've ever loved I've discovered for myself. Sure, I had all these famous people saying how much they liked my music, but that didn't sell it. It was a slow build."

What's most striking about Hawley's work to date is how much he romanticises his native Sheffield. Coles Corneris named after the city's equivalent to Dublin's Clerys clock, and almost everything he writes is influenced by Sheffield. "I love the place, it inspires me. I wish I had a Sheffield passport, that's how proud I am. It is, though, just a case of using the particular to illustrate the general."

With his smooth baritone voice and penetrative lyrics, Hawley comes across as an existential Roy Orbison or a slightly less battered Johnny Cash. His slow- to mid-tempo ballads (leavened by some excursions into rockabilly) exist in a different universe to the one occupied by Sheffield's two big name acts: Arctic Monkeys and Pulp.

"I am a throwback, I know that," he says. "My father was a musician and his influences influenced me. Sure, I went through the young rebellion phase of joining an indie band and getting played by John Peel and all of that, but the influences handed down by my dad are the ones that still register. I still find myself attracted to anything on the Ace label. I am a modern bloke, but most music now has no meaning. In the past, you had to be good. When that red light went on,you had to nail it. Now it's all ProTools. Music is wallpaper, it's all sound compression - it's just a series of ever louder peaks.

"I still have a vinyl single, Go with Me, by The Del-Vikings that I got when I was 10. This download generation are missing out on all of this. They've probably never actually held a real piece of music."

It might be a bit pat to say they simply don't make 'em like Hawley any more, but they really don't. When he was 14 he was touring Europe, playing rockabilly and r'n'b covers. He then hit the working men's clubs circuit and to this day can do a really biting put-down if someone dares to heckle him. ("Those clubs were the repository for some of the most brutal jokes ever told by human beings.")

Hawley went on to join a pre-famous Pulp before session work came calling. Over the years he's played, usually uncredited, on a range of records, including the opening riff on the All Saints' cover of the Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge.

"I'm proud to say that everything I've ever earned has come from music. Every brick in my house has come from music. Mind you, I still live in a semi-detached in Sheffield. There have been lean times, but I knew I could always get work on the cruise liners - people knock them, but they pay really well."

The big time came calling in the mid 1990s when The Longpigs, Hawley's band at the time, were signed by the Mother label and managed by Paul McGuinness. The band flickered brightly before an ultimately unsuccessful full-out assault on the US market left them in tatters. It also left Hawley with a drug problem.

"Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong with The Longpigs," he says. "The drugs were an issue. Let me put it as simply as this: nothing good ever came out of cocaine. I stopped taking drugs a long time ago. I had to, because I almost killed myself."

He credits his girlfriend and Pulp for helping him get off drugs. Just as The Longpigs imploded, Pulp came looking for Hawley to join them on tour.

"It was supposed to be for nine months, but I ended up hanging around for years. Those sort of tours - and the level of success they were enjoying at the time - can teach you a lot. I was warned very early on in my musical career that it's always best to be a musician who drinks, not a drinker who plays music."

If his solo career was slow getting off the ground, he attributes it all to his natural diffidence and his almost ideologically-held beliefs about what a musician should and shouldn't be.

"When I eventually got the solo albums out and then got a bit of notice for Coles Corner, I started to be asked on chat shows. I just refused point blank. I'll go on and do a song, no problem. But I'm not going to sit there like a herbert afterwards. I'm a musician, not a celebrity, and I loathe that world.

"I've only ever made one exception, and that was when some Norwegian TV programme rang up. They said they loved the record so much that they would get the Norwegian Philharmonic Orchestra in to accompany me, but they'd like me to stay and chat also. You can't say no to the offer of a Philharmonic Orchestra backing you. It turned out it was me, Bob Geldof and the Norwegian foreign minister yapping away about something."

And so to Lady's Bridge. In keeping with Coles Cornerand such previous albums as Late Night Final(the cry of Sheffield newspaper sellers for the evening edition of the local paper) and Lowedges (named after a Sheffield suburb), the new one takes its title from a local landmark. Lady's Bridge is the oldest bridge in the city.

"Not long after naming the album, though, the bridge was washed away by the recent floods," he says. "It could only happen to me. I feel a romantic attachment to the city, I can't stop writing about it. These are just a bunch of gentle but not pedestrian songs about the place, more vignettes than statements. I haven't tried to reinvent myself on this record. I tried that back in my youth and I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back.

"This is another Sheffield record. I know where I come from, and that helps me know where I'm going."

Lady's Bridge is out now. Listen at www.myspace.com/richardhawley