Hamish Hawk
Liquid Room, Edinburgh 

IT’S not often that a band front-loads the set with new material that completely outshines their previous hits, but there’s an intensity to the new tracks of Hamish Hawk’s A Firmer Hand that has made a better synthesis of their special combo of confrontational rock, introspective insecurity and homoerotic lyrics that upstages the oldies.

Indeed, in the narrow confines of Edinburgh’s Liquid Room the five-piece sounded even more powerful and disciplined than the recordings suggest, and Hawk’s Curtis-like twitchiness juxtaposed the neutral cool of his bandmates to fascinating effect, disclosing the pose of isolated agony and mental defiance that lies at the heart of his best songwriting. Can anyone else make the word “disingenuous” slip effortlessly between verse and chorus? 

Hawk’s deep baritone is an effective instrument, communicating words whose strangeness he relishes, over the ecstatic wash of Andrew Pearson’s guitar. If I have a reservation, it’s the banter between the songs that undermines the atmosphere and the art with a cringe-worthy eagerness to please and tease.

Nevertheless, the insecurity of the gay man is now the explicit theme and the music has benefited from this three-album drama of coming out. It’s as though Lloyd Cole were telling you his darkest secrets, at last. The propulsive art rock of Men Like Wire, Nancy Dearest and Big Cat Tattoos, to name but three, have found a perfect fit for a big sound to propell a fascinating and bitter point of view. He’s forever jilted and ignored, and using the music as revenge in increasingly satisfying ways.

It’s also ahistorical and a strange fusion of Quentin Crisp and Shuggie Bain that works lyrically and is more or less entirely self-absorbed, devoid of any wider political or social reference. 

This limited but undoubted new success makes you wonder where the band can go next, and whether the contemporary Scottish genre of gay auto-fiction (see Juano Diaz and Douglas Stuart) is merely the cultural child of SNP LGBT populist policies, and will ever encounter a world beyond the confines of its own narcissism. 

Here’s hoping, because there is real musical muscle on display.

On tour until Febuary 22 2025. For more information see hamishhawk.com.