Music Interview: Stephen Duffy

MUSIC
Sean Hannam
Mar 15, 2022

The Hawks were together for 18 months. We made some tapes with Bob Lamb, who then went on to make records with UB40, in his little flat in Kings Heath – he was an absolute genius with his four-track machine.

Bob had been in the Steve Gibbons Band – we all looked up to him, as he’d actually done things. He’d toured the States with The Who and he had lots of Rolling Stone magazines – we were very enamoured with him.

As a band, we didn’t have any idea of what we were doing – we didn’t make demos of songs and then think we’ll listen to them and look at how we could make them better to be a record.

The tapes aren’t demos – they’re just field recordings. We recorded the band and then I sang over the top of it.

We didn’t even get our first single cut properly – we sent the tape off, but we didn’t master it.

I just don’t understand what we thought we were doing – we didn’t think about making records. We were just living, and we were quite happy doing what we were doing and making a bit of a racket. It was kind of like the ‘slacker’ thing before ‘slacker’.

But then all the other bands got record deals and were on Top of the Pops, so we started to think ‘well, what exactly are we doing?’, which is when I left, in Christmas 1981.

I had two ideas about what I was going to do – one was to be a folk singer with an acoustic guitar – and the other was to do an electronic thing.

By the summer of 1982, I’d bumped into John Mulligan [of Birmingham new wave band Fashion] recorded ‘Kiss Me’ and I was signed to WEA – it was that quick. The idea of me becoming an acoustic folk singer went out of the window for a few years.

What music were you into when you were in The Hawks / Obviously Five Believers? Both names have links to Bob Dylan…

We were in with that early Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes scene and we were listening to the same sort of things they were – ‘60s stuff. There was a heavy Velvets, Stones and Dylan thing going on. We were also into Beat poetry.

We’d been kids in the ‘70s – it was funny how quickly we’d gone through all of that stuff, then punk and post-punk, and had already got back to the ‘60s before most people had even forgotten about it.

Where did the name The Hawks come from?

When I was in Duran Duran, we had song called ‘Hawks Don’t Share’. We were going to be called The Subterraneans after the Jack Kerouac book, but then Nick Kent [music journalist] put out a record as The Subterraneans, so we had to change our name – we became The Subterranean Hawks. We shortened it to The Hawks, which I thought was a terrible name. I wanted us to be called Hawks Don’t Share, but people said to me ‘why do you keep coming up with these incredibly long names?’

I thought that was cool – then when Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark came along, I was proven completely correct.

The Hawks had a jangly, melancholy sound at times. Were you The Smiths before The Smiths?

Yes. When The Smiths came along, in 1982, it did occur to me that I had gone the wrong way by doing the electronic thing – I was never really suited to it. I didn’t have a feel for it, like I did for playing the acoustic guitar.

Somebody said that we were either hopelessly old-fashioned, or incredibly ahead of our time. Our greatest fan was Nikki Sudden from the Swell Maps, who David Kusworth went on to work with. The only review we ever got in our lives was in ZigZag [magazine] – Nikki wrote it.