Obviously 5 Believers

The history of pop music is filled with lost bands who never got a break due to either bad timing, cloth-eared record companies, or rotten luck. In the case of the Hawks, they were hit with all three. The group was formed in 1979 by members of the Birmingham band TV Eye, including future Jacobite Dave Kusworth and two refugees from the early incarnation of Duran Duran. One of them was Stephen Duffy, and he's responsible for the singing and songs on Obviously Five Believers, a long-overdue collection of their songs. The band wore leather, had long fringes, and seemed more in love with the Stones than the Pistols, which made them outcasts on the U.K. indie scene. While they only released one single during the short time they existed, they spent a lot of time recording songs, which gave Duffy loads to choose from when putting the collection together. Lodged somewhere between the brutal romanticism of the Only Ones and the swaggering bonhomie of Johnny Thunders, much of the music here sounds like a spiky cousin to the Postcard Records sounds being cooked up at the same time. The glorious should-have-been-a-hit "Bullfighter" even rollicks along on a wiry funk beat like a louche cousin of Orange Juice. The Hawks have a tougher approach, though, and the song shows off one of the elements that makes the band so exciting, i.e. their juxtaposition of post-punk angles and rock & roll looseness. Some other good examples are "Serenade in Blue," which comes across like a giddy Josef K with roughneck guitar solos and barrelhouse piano tossed in for kicks, the harmonica-led ramble of "Something Soon", and "Sense of Ending," a song that swerves into dance-punk edginess but tempers it with slide guitar sweeps and Chuck Berry riffing. The songs that cut a more direct path fare just as well. The traditional punk ballad "All the Sad Young Men" sounds like the Saints at their most melancholy, "What Can I Give" tilts over to the rock & roll side of the scale in not unpleasant fashion, and the very Buzzcocks-ian "Big Store" is a crunching slice of dashing post-Dolls rock featuring Duffy really selling the snarky vocals and the guitars whipping up lots of grungy noise. It's a fine capper for a brilliant set of songs from a band that truly deserved to be set free from Duffy's tape archive. While the people most interested might be fans of his and Kusworth's later work, it should be at the top of the list for anyone who loves the sounds of late '70s post-punk, especially that point where it broke free of punk's constraints and began heading in weird directions -- even if that direction was good old rock & roll itself. ~ Tim Sendra