Richard Hawley - Tonight The Streets Are Ours

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3...according to our Ant on Thu 02 Aug, 2007.

After listening to the Liars it's almost unbelievable to think that crooner Richard Hawley 'Tonight The Streets Are Ours' is out on the same label. Such is the diversity of Mute. An independent musical institution if ever there was one. It's not my thing at all this but it's good for what it is. Phil and I are reminded of The Divine Comedy and Elvis Costello. He's smoking a cigarette on the cover. The smoothie.

CD Single
1.    Tonight The Streets Are Ours
2.    Vickers Road

CD Single
1.    Tonight The Streets Are Ours
2.    I Sleep Alone (Live At Sheffield City Hall)
3.    Coming Home (Live At Sheffield City Hall)

7" Single
Side 1
1.    Tonight The Streets Are Ours
Side 2
1.    Vickers Road

Richard Hawley will release the first single - Tonight The Streets Are Ours - from his new album Lady’s Bridge, out August 20th.

CD1 and the 7” features the heart-rending track Vickers Road, a song of family life in Sheffield before the steel works closed down while CD2 contains acoustic versions of I Sleep Alone and Coming Home recorded live at Sheffield City Hall in December 2006.

Richard on Tonight The Streets Are Ours:
“I saw this programme on TV about ASBOs and by the end of it I almost shoed the telly in. For me it’s quite angry so I wanted to turn that into a positive cause I don’t agree with destroying things – well sometimes it’s a good idea. I was sort of imagining the choir in Angels With Dirty Faces, the James Cagney film. There’s a fairground quality to it too. I changed this track quite a bit. It’s huge now.
I just think that old people and women and kids should be able to go out on the streets and not be worried about being battered. It’s partly that and the middle section of the song is about how much people need each other, we can’t exist on our own we have to co-exist with each other. But mainly it’s about the brutal ignorance and insensitive way this fucking pile of shit government has decided to deal with anti social behaviour. The future of any country is in its kids and if a shit load of them are basically taught to just be consumers is it a surprise that when they can’t consume because they’re poor that they just go ‘well, we’ll take it anyway’? An ASBO doesn’t do anything, it’s just a piece of paper that says ‘go away’.“