Hamish Hawk

The baron of baritone places a steady hand on the tiller and saunters back into our lives with a suite of exultant chamber pop songs that swerve off in surprising and glorious directions, merging the polish of Scott Walker's dazzling 80s period with Tom Waits' garboil and lifting it all even higher with the grandiosity of modern recording techniques.

An album of pulsing chamber pop chansons, propelled along by his charismatic baritone & filigree lyricism. “Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out”. In a café just around the corner from his Edinburgh flat, Hamish Hawk is contemplating his extraordinary new record, A Firmer Hand. “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. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.” At this stage, where only a handful of close associates have heard the finished album, Hawk is still unsure of what the reaction might be from fans, critics, even family. He jokes that A Firmer Hand is the first of his records that his parents might not enjoy. “But the fact that it makes me nervous tells me it was the right thing to do.” It takes only a couple of listens to be sure that it was a risk worth taking. And just a couple more to determine that A Firmer Hand is the best and boldest record Hamish Hawk has delivered to date. “It’s a bit of a coming of age record,” he says. And a record for the ages.