Spirit of a distant era, crafted for today

The Arctic Monkeys have put the city of Sheffield back on the rock map, but the brash young band isn’t the only pop-music story brewing in the northern England steel center.

The other one is almost the dead opposite of everything Monkey. At 39, Richard Hawley is roughly twice their age, and while the Monkeys burst into full-fledged stardom in what seemed like the blink of an eye, the singer-guitarist toiled for decades as a sideman and collaborator.

And while the Monkeys’ sharp, brittle rock revels in its Englishness and its adolescence, Hawley’s current album “Coles Corner” is a dreamy throwback -- a deliberately paced, reflective set of songs with a mature perspective and a lifeline to vintage American rock and pop of the lonesome, nocturnal variety.

Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers and country music mingle in his mix, and Hawley sings in a low, emotional voice amid strings, steel guitars and heavy reverb. “Hotel Room” is almost a near-homage to Santo and Johnny’s 1959 melancholy masterpiece “Sleepwalk,” one of his favorite records. In the title song, Hawley consecrates the spot in Sheffield that’s become a traditional meeting place for the city’s lovers -- including his parents.

Hawley hasn’t crashed the charts with “Coles Corner,” which was released in September by Mute Records, but he’s never been in a rush. He didn’t get around to making his own record until the late ‘90s, and even then he lacked the confidence to let anyone hear it for a year.

Now he’s collecting endorsements from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and members of Coldplay and R.E.M., along with growing critical attention. On a brief, testing-the-waters tour of the U.S. this month, Hawley found himself singing to fans who knew the words to his songs.

The album, his third, has sold a little more than 3,000 copies here, but if things continue to develop and he catches a break or two, he could have what it takes to rescue traditional, romantic music from such overwrought practitioners as James Blunt.

Whatever happens, Hawley feels he’s made his point.

“I kind of thought this might be the last roll of the dice, man, and it really made me focus on what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it and how I wanted it to sound,” the musician said this week, recalling how he recorded the album on his own, without a record contract.

“I just made the record I’d always wanted to make.... I wanted to hear something with some proper heart ... some passion,” he added, sitting in the dimly lit lobby of his Hollywood hotel Tuesday before a show at the Knitting Factory. “I just don’t hear it at all. And I just thought, ‘You know what, this ... record might never see the light of day, but I’m gonna make the record I want to make....’

“It’s too important to me. Music is as necessary as oxygen as far as I’m concerned.”

Hawley might be Mr. Sensitive on record, but in person he’s more like a good-natured, opinionated pub patron with a taste for salty language. There’s a blue-collar directness in his manner (his father worked in a steel mill) and a retro touch to his bespectacled look. As he sipped a cup of tea, he overcame any travel-weariness with an intense appetite for talking about music.

He came by his passion naturally, growing up in a family of rock ‘n’ roll-loving musicians. He became obsessed with the Sun Records sound, began playing professionally in the early 1980s and eventually joined the Longpigs. It was a fairly popular band in England, but for Hawley it was a musically irrelevant job.

“I might have played with this, that and whatever band in the past,” he said. “But believe you me, when I was on that tour bus, I’d be in the front listening to Hank Williams while all the other [jerks] were in the back listening to Smashing Pumpkins or whatever.”

That lifestyle also led Hawley deep into a drug and alcohol habit. He quit cold turkey, he said, and then got a hand from his friends in the band Pulp, who hired him on as a guitarist.

But it was when he finally took advantage of some spare studio time and took the plunge by recording his own songs that he hit the path toward his current sound. He knows that it’s something from another era, and he doesn’t shy away from that aspect. At the Knitting Factory that night, he and his bandmates wore sharp jackets and had their hair slicked back, suggesting a dance band at an English seaside resort circa 1963.

“I always passionately hoped that the record wouldn’t be seen as this kind of anachronism,” Hawley said, adding that the praise from Yorke et al has helped him see that he’s not “living in the Dark Ages.”

Hawley’s music also fits vaguely into the current comfort-music trend that’s been spearheaded by Coldplay.

“I don’t like belonging to gangs,” Hawley said. “I don’t feel the need.... I’m like the people that make knives and forks in Sheffield. I’m fiercely independent.... But yeah, I think there is definitely a need for something. I can see it in people’s faces when I play to them. You can see that there’s a lot of people out there that need a sense of feeling safe. A certain music will actually make them feel secure, I suppose....

“I’m very wary of saying at the moment people are scared.... But of course we need that feeling of comfort. That’s what makes us human. Ultimately people need to be loved and have the ability to love somebody else. If it ain’t about that, I don’t want to know what it’s about.”