Paul Hawkins & The Awkward Silences first formed in the Summer of 2006 with a temporary line-up featuring myself on lead vocals, Ian Button on drums, Tom and Amy from David Cronenberg’s Wife on keyboards and bass respectively and Thee Intolerable Kidd on guitar. From July – November 2006 me, Ian and Kidd (with Tom as a semi-regular member) became the first line-up of Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences, with the “e” from Thee Intolerable Kidd’s name being added into the bandname.
In around about August me, Kidd and Ian did a set of 8 band recordings and 2 solo recordings One of the solo recordings – I Had a Friend of Sarah Vincent – actually became the main guitar and vocal tracks for the We Are Not Other People version and I’ve completely forgotten what the other solo recordings was. The 8 band recordings were released as a free album called a Skinful of Silence (a title I later re-used for a singles and b-sides compilation on Fleeing from Pigeons Records) that we gave away at gigs. Sometime after the first line-up of the band split-up, the recordings got lost.
However over the last month or so Thee Intolerable Kidd has found and remixed the recordings and I’m now delighted to be able to put them up on Outsider Pop for people to hear. They’re a bit rough and raw in places but there’s a real intensity to the recordings and I think they sound great in themselves and interest me personally as a snapshot of the time when I moved from being an acoustic singer-songwriter to being in a band for the first time.
So without further ado, here are the 8 original Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences recordings:
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – My Baby Left Me For a Travellin’ Show
In many was this was the early Silences’ signature song and it was certainly the point where I realised what Kidd could really do on the electric guitar (for my money he’s up there with the best guitarists I’ve ever heard). The point 40 seconds into this where the experimental noise of the opening gives way and the chords kick in is one of my favourite moments on any Awkward Silences recording.
Hearing this 4 years later I still do think this is a great version and kind of makes me wonder why we ever stopped playing this song live. I think the problem with this – along with several other of these recordings – was that at that point I wasn’t used to singing with a band and the vocals denigrate into me (even by my standards) shouting without melody. That aside, I think it’s a damn good version of what’s probably one of my best songs.
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – The Cavalry Aint Coming
An early version of a We Are Not Other People song. At this point I’d played this a couple of times at open mics it hadn’t yet found it’s identity. The band’s version here is much slower than how I’d originally written it (which was roughly similar to how the album version ended up) but I think it works really well. It’s got a kind of sea shanty feel to it, which reminds me a bit of The Coral’s “Shadows Fall” which I something I certainly see as a good thing. I think Kidd’s wailing backing vocals really add to the feel of it too. In fact this is a far, far better version than I remember!
The lyrics I sing at the start are taken from another of my ‘lost’ songs called She’s Coming Home Today. To be honest I know exactly where it is but it’s not my finest hour and might stay buried for the timebeing!
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – Dont Blind Me With Science
I clearly really liked the A-W-K-W-A-R-D-S-I-L-E-N-C-E chanting at this point. Maybe I should reintroduce it? Like Travellin’ Show, this song had already been on the Misdiagnosis at this point but it was this version where we worked out how to do it live and this became the template for all our future performances and for the recording we later put out as a single – Kidd changed the rhythm slightly and it immediately worked much better than my version.
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – Evil Thoughts
It was as we were recording this that Ian found the keyboard part which became the signature riff of this song (it’s actually Kidd playing drums on this one) . I’d written it a month or so earlier and it was probably an important turning point from people seeing me as someone who’d turn up and play something slightly weird and vaguely amusing to people starting to understand the intensity and bleakness that underpins a lot of my songs.
I’d clearly only played this a couple of times by this point as I hadn’t changed the second part of the first verse by this point (the lyric in here I now only sing if I’m doing gigs with children present and I don’t want to swear). Originally there were actually three people I had “that conversation” with but it immediately became apparent that the one about the Mother was the one that really touched on something for people and I used that three times instead. That conversation with my Mother actually happened but is taken slightly out of context (it wasn’t so much the alcohol itself but my tendency to fall asleep on buses, wake up and blithely wander into dangerous situations, which doesn’t happen so much these days) . It’s strange looking back on why I wrote this song and realising how things change – I later realised the girl involved was right and we didn’t really have much in common whereas I actually now feel I was pretty harsh on the guy concerned who I later realised was genuinely nice guy!
All in all I think this is a good version. Suffers really badly from shouty vocal syndrome though!
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – Bingo Little
and
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – You Can’t Make Somebody Love You
These are two versions of the same song – the You Cant Make Somebody Love You lyrics ultimately won out although I’ve done multiple different versions of those live and even a version called You Could Somebody Love You too (I have it on my computer may put out as a download in the future). Bingo Little is a reference to my favourite minor character in Jeeves & Woostter, who constantly convinces himself his unrequited lust for a girl he’s recently met is true love only to dismiss those feelings as nonsense when he falls into unrequited lust with the next girl he meets. For some strange reason I feel I identify with that guy!
The simple structure and primal rhythm of this makes it ideal for guitarists to really go for it and Thee Intolerable Kidd really delivers with some great improvised solo sections, especially on You Can’t Make Somebdoy Love You. These are the only two recordings I’ve ever played bass on incidentally. I always have this idea in my head that I’m the one who always tries to keep things tight and structured and it’s the band who pushes the improvised stuff so it’s quite amusing to find it’s actually me who refuses to stop at the end of the recording and pushes it to the six minute mark! I really like that recording and it sounds like we were having a lot of fun. Which I think we certainly were!
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – Do Anything You Wanna Do
This is a cover of an Eddie & the Hot Rods song I used to listen to in my teens whilst growing up in a small village near Bristol and seemed to encapsulate how I felt at the time. It stuck with me and I’d always wanted to cover it. This one’s unusual in that Ian plays the lead guitar and Kidd takes the drums and, for the first half of the song, the lead vocals.
This is possibly my favourite song from these sessions. There’s a real wistfulness to it that really captures the spirit of the song (or at least the spirit of the song as I see it) and to me the recording just sums up a lot of how I felt at the time – I was 24 years old and, having spent about ten years dreaming about being in a band, was finally in not just any band but a band with brilliant musicians.. I really felt we had the world at our feet and it would only be a matter of time before everyone else cottoned on to what we were doing.
In the end I think the intensity that made what we were doing so powerful was the exact reason it didn’t last. It’s near-impossible to sustain something like that and within five or six gigs we’d got to a point where our gigs were so raw and so primal that there wasn’t really anywhere else to go and the line-up imploded but those four months remain four of the favourite months of my life (as are various phases with subsequent line-ups) and this song really captures that feeling.
Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences – I Will SurviveMIX2
This is of course a cover of a Gloria Gaynor song. I’d started doing it at solo gigs and then we started doing as a band. It’s one of these things that could easily come across as an ironic-comedy version but I’m hoping it doesn’t – take away the image of scorned and drunken women purging themselves at a karaoke night and you’re left with something genuinely powerful and affecting. Looking back I’m really proud of this version. Six minutes is maybe a bit long but I’m not actually sure what I’d cut from it give the chance – I think it really works.
