Richard Hawley - Lady's Bridge

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Phil on Fri 17 Aug, 2007.

Richard Hawley the Sheffield crooner is here with his new album Lady's Bridge on mute. Lie back, Kick back and get transported through to a time of buttered scones and kindly smiles. (think Nick Berry from Heart beat). With a voice like velvet and the backing of a full orchestra we are treated to a bevy of cultured tunes that would get your granny dancing and your parents smooching. Its got the Walker Brothers stamp all over it . Rather than breaking boundaries, its more re-visiting them and doing a bit of regeneration, building a fountain where the cracked deliberated chimney once stood.. a few flowers here and there. An all round family pleaser... a PG rated beechams soother. Comes with bonus 30 DVD.

CD Album
1.     Valentine
2.     Roll River Roll
3.     Serious
4.     Tonight The Streets Are Ours
5.     Lady Solitude
6.     Dark Road
7.     The Sea Calls
8.     Lady's bridge
9.     I'm Looking For Someone To Find Me
10.     Our Darkness
11.     The Sun Refused To Shine

DVD : Running Time 34 mins 30 secs
1.     'Now Then' exclusive 30 minute film made by Warp Films including:
     Exclusive filmed excerpts from rehearsals of:
     Lady's Bridge
     Roll River Roll
     Valentine
     Lady Solitude
     Tonight the Streets Are Ours
     Our Darkness
     Mystery Train
     Interview footage with Richard
     Exclusive behind the scenes footage from the making of the videos:
     Tonight the Streets Are Ours, Valentine and Serious
2.     Video for 'Tonight the Streets Are Ours' directed by Warp Films collaborator Tom Geens

Richard Hawley will release his highly anticipated new album Lady’s Bridge on 20th August on Mute with the usual formats plus deluxe editions. Lady's Bridge, his second album on Mute, is Richards’s strongest and most accessible album to date and follows the gold-awarded and Mercury Music Prize nominated Coles Corner.

Lady’s Bridge is filled with enough classics to last you a lifetime. Great music doesn’t need hype, it makes its own friends. And Lady’s Bridge will find plenty. As they did in Coles Corner, ghosts haunt Lady’s Bridge – the dying embers of past romances in Valentine, the 16-piece string orchestral lush opener, there are the victims of the Great Sheffield Flood remembered in Roll River Roll and the glorious The Sun Refused To Shine, the lonesome wanderlust of The Sea Calls and Dark Road. There is tenderness (the lovely Our Darkness which finds our hero returning to the sanctuary of home) and grit too, the first single – Tonight The Streets Are Ours is quite possibly the most beautiful song about the brutality of the British governments Anti-social behaviour policy you are ever likely to hear.

The album’s title Lady’s Bridge is a Sheffield landmark and the oldest bridge to cross the river Don. “I used to walk across it nearly every day, it was a gateway from the poor bit of town to the rich bit” - Richard Hawley. The album was recorded at Yellow Arch Studio in Neepsend, Sheffield in the dilapidated building that Hawley had helped out with the restoration of almost four years ago. Yellow Arch gives Hawley what he calls “that Sun Studio red light factor” and the pressure of turning up with the bones of an idea and leaving with a masterpiece.