Delights Number 1- Coles Corner
My loneliness hangs in the air...
There will have been a place in your hometown which everyone knows. A place where, should you have been fortunate enough to meet somewhere for a date, you’ll meet them there. In Glasgow it was Central Station under the clock, or outside Boots at the corner of Union Street and Argyle Street. In my hometown of East Kilbride, in the eighties it would have been by the Centre bus station. Wherever yours was, if you were anything like me, you approached with a mixture of hope, anticipation, nerves and terror. I’d already convinced myself that, if she turned up, it was going to be a disaster. It usually was.
When I first heard the title track to Richard Hawley’s Coles Corner, this all came flooding back. A beautiful, soaring soundtrack to the potential of that first date. ‘I’m going down town where there’s music. I’m going where voices fill the air.’ The opening strings tingle with regret though and the song, to me, is a homage to loneliness in a way I haven’t heard since ‘How Soon is Now’. The yearning to meet someone, the trapped frustration of growing up in a small world, desperate for escape. ‘Maybe there’s someone waiting for me. With a smile and a flower in her hair.’
How much are we conditioned for these moments through the music we listen to at that point in our lives? When we first begin to discover music of our own, independent of our parents’ record collections, is it a conscious choice to seek out songs that speak to the way we feel, or do they find us? My obsession with The Smiths has never really gone away and I still hear ‘There is a Light...’ with a tear in my eye. That mournful isolation captured in the thought that, whatever happened, you were going home alone. ‘I’m going down town where there’s people. The loneliness hangs in the air. With no-one there real waiting for me. No smile, no flower, nowhere.’
‘Coles Corner’ is the title track to one of the albums I always turn to. There’s not a bad song on it. Having first encountered him and his band supporting Nancy Sinatra in about 2005, I’ve bought every album since. Songs like ‘For Your Lover’, ‘Valentine’, ‘Ashes on the Fire’ and ‘Nothing like a Friend’ are all favourites and portray that mournful sound redolent of Hank Williams, clearly an influence on Hawley. But it’s ‘Coles Corner’ which takes me back to those times, counting the minutes until your date. What should I wear? What should I say? For a while, as Lou Reed sang, ‘I thought I was someone else, someone good.’ Oh, the horror, the horror…
It’s a staple of his live show and I’d be disappointed if he ever didn’t play it. I think I was at one of his gigs when I got a little music box which I play from time to time. It simply reminds me of the beautiful melody. And a time when I was lonely.