‘Hindsight’ is a 73-minute 17-track chronological compilation drawn from fifty years of music-making by this underrated Cornish-born singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who, since 1973, has been based in rural mid-Wales.
The vinyl album is released in an exclusive pressing of 500 numbered copies in a lovingly curated gatefold package which includes artwork from good friend Jeb Loy Nichols plus a 20-page booklet containing a 5000-word autobiographical essay.
The compilation charts the 80 year-old’s development from raw beginnings in 1969 up to the present day with a winning mix of folk, blues and Americana.
Andrew Hawkey’s collaborator and regular producer Clovis Phillips has restored, remixed and remastered his personal archive of recordings, many salvaged from half-forgotten and unreleased cassettes.
Two versions of Between Two Horizons bookend the album, the first recorded in 1969/70, the second confidently re-recorded in 2022; “I’d forgotten what a good little song it was” says Hawkey.
As Frightened as the Next Man was written 50 years ago and expresses concerns of environmental meltdown. If the singer was frightened then, he must be positively terrified now!
A break in the melancholy mood comes with an eight-minute live cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s Help Me by Pat Grover’s Blue Zeros with whom Hawkey played keyboards and harmonicas for over twenty years.
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In a similar upbeat mode, the ragged glory of Just One Night of Love, from his debut album Halfway Alone (1982), has a driving beat to rival Them’s ‘Gloria’.
The raciest track is a 1983 studio collaboration with a Welsh woman named Jane Gilbert who hornily taps into her inner Jane Birkin with the semi-whispered entreaty to Take Me.
Another one-off is the cinematic, Desert Moon, a solo instrumental that showcases the artist’s virtuosity.
In the main, this is the kind of loner acoustic folk that surfaces from time to time as buried treasure. Hawkey acknowledges this when, with tongue in cheek, he says his five decade journey could be dubbed middle-class hippie/settler field recording.
The album stands as a reminder of how much great music too often exists below the radar. Through this release, Andrew Hawkey has done the world a great service by making the (re)discovery easier.
Andrew Hawkey’s website
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