Journalists seem determined to make lists about everything these days.  It’s a simple and really rather lazy way to fill column inches whilst kicking off a debate amongst readers and self-appointed authorities on everything down the  pub.  There’s even a bloody magazine now which is based on what’s the best this that and the other.  Writers used to write and leave the countdown to Fluff Freeman.

In many ways, music is the most important art form there is.  It’s more accessible to the punter than any other means of expression, and our reactions to it are arbitrary, reactive and formed largely without the need for learned or knowing discourse on the form.  The award of Best This That And The Other is, therefore, a meaningless – if occasionally entertaining – distraction.

So, to wade onto these pages and declare that Richard’s Hawley’s new single – the first to be taken from the Truelove’s Gutter album – is the record of the year is effectively an opinionated and personal objective opinion without actual true bearing.  But it very probably is.  Fact.

Richard Hawley's new album Truelove's Gutter

For Your Lover Give Some Time is a heart-breaking and quite staggeringly beautiful exploration of a love affair on the wain.  It’s a tale not of melodramatic soap opera love gone wrong, nor is there the mud-slinging borne of cuckoldry.  Instead, this is the everyday tragedy of love losing its way through the interference of daily drudgery.  The tragedy is ours to share – we’re too busy living our lives to give the real time we need for those who hold our lives in their hands.

Hawley’s poetry here is achingly sad.  The opening tells of a usually joyous occasion tempered by the almost overwhelming impression that the gesture was now meaningless – almost leaving the birthday present purposefully discarded on the train, whilst later he wanders into bitter-sweet memories of romantic evenings of togetherness (Here’s is a toast to you Helen / To all the cinemas we ran in from the rain / Laughing clutching soaking newspapers to your face / And for your love you gave some time).

What’s so wonderfully raw here is that Hawley’s song is relevant to us all.  This is not ludicrous star-crossed sweethearts stuff, this is about how love really works and can be genuinely lost through a shared inattention.  It is startling and almost horrible listening in a way – it tears at the very guts of everything we hold dear as we realise that this could very easily be us.

Give this record some time.

For Your Lover Give Some Time