{"id":98872,"date":"2025-10-23T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/98872\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T09:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:00:09","slug":"songs-of-magnificence-at-the-olympia-in-dublin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/98872\/","title":{"rendered":"Songs of magnificence at the Olympia in Dublin\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t know what you were doing when you were 16, but Richard Hawley \u2013 according to the man himself \u2013 was already writing songs as marvellous as  Just Like The Rain.\u00a0The 58-year-old reckons it proves he was always miserable and that tune is also just one of the jewels that adorn 2005\u2019s masterwork,  Coles Corner.\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Hawley only makes good records but this is one of his great ones and the current tour celebrates its 20th anniversary. Accordingly, the first half of Wednesday night\u2019s show at a properly packed Olympia Theatre in Dublin gave us the record in sequence. The gig opened with the beautiful strains of the title track where his string quartet, squeezed onto the stage with his five-piece band, melded perfectly with the double bass to prop up his velvety baritone. It\u2019s a voice that would make Sinatra sweat.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Further proof of the pulchritudinous of his pipes comes with album centrepiece  The Ocean. His singing starts from beneath his boots but halfway through as the strings swirl about him the voice opens up sending it all gloriously widescreen around that majestic central riff as the waves of both the lyrics and the music crash down upon his rapt audience.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">But Hawley doesn\u2019t just possess a voice other singers would sacrifice limbs for; he\u2019s also one of those rare guitarists who can both make it howl and add just the right subtle phrase that lifts his already airborne compositions, and he\u2019s helped in no small part by the astonishingly sympathetic playing of his band.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/4831389_10_articleinline_Hawley6.jpg\" alt=\"Richard Hawley on stage at the Olympia. \" title=\"Richard Hawley on stage at the Olympia. \" class=\"card-img\"\/>Richard Hawley on stage at the Olympia. <\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Once the album is finished with a beautiful reading of  Who\u2019s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?, a song taught to him by his godfather Joe Cocker \u2014 an old mate of his dad\u2019s who also had an eye for his mother \u2014 we get several highlights from his other records. The tremendous  Tonight The Streets Are Ours is what Morrissey might sound like with a heart,  Standing At The Sky\u2019s Edge sports a tectonic tremolo rumble, and the encore\u2019s  For Your Lover Give Some Time earns a librarian\u2019s dream of a hush.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Hawley\u2019s story-telling throughout is almost as good as the song-writing. He tells a touching story about passing on that Cocker-taught song to his own kids, and jokes that when Storm Amy hit his beloved Sheffield it caused \u201cmillions of pounds worth of improvements\u201d. He also praises his \u201clong-suffering\u201d psychiatric nurse wife who hilariously responds to a new song by asking him what\u2019s for tea?<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">He plays off the audience, deflecting various declarations of love and one bizarre instruction to pull his socks up. When he says it\u2019s a \u201cjoy, pleasure and honour\u201d to play for us, you believe him. Superb, as always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t know what you were doing when you were 16, but Richard Hawley \u2013 according to the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,6405,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-98872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-music-movies-reviews-munster","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}