That duality was in full effect at the Lowry. Walking on stage to rapturous applause, he opened by telling the top tier of the theatre that he had a surprise for them – "it’s four years since that * collapsed," he smirked, before launching into the glorious Coles Corner. What followed was a combination of that utterly dry humour and those awesomely wonderful tunes, both of which underline not just Hawley’s recent rise to fame, but also the disbelief that it’s taken him this long to get the credit he deserves. Not that he’s used to the hero worship yet. Having spent a couple of decades on the way up, he’s accustomed to a more vocal audience, so unusually made the request for hecklers, unwittingly opening the door to local hero Christopher Eccleston to stretch his vocal chords from the wrong side of the stage for a change. Hawley took it all in his stride. It’s that humble nature of his that allows the praise and heckles to simply wash over him. The gorgeously intoxicating The Ocean is explained as being a song about his wife, a lyric that’s "a lot more romantic than I’ll be when I get home. It’ll be a two minute job." Make no bones, his feet are firmly on the ground. Bringing on Clive Mellor, a Manc harmonica player he met in the pub, for the encore, he launched into a couple of belting covers, So Lonesome I Could Cry and That’s All Right. Mellor’s harmonica was breathtaking good and but for Hawley’s stunning guitar work to close the latter, he could have found himself upstaged. Not that he’d have minded. After all, his thoughts were beginning to drift elsewhere. "Just a couple more then we can all go down the pub," he told us before an epic Run For Me. Listening to his dirty jokes between songs, you knew he meant it too. | 
