Biography The Hawks

The Hawks were a post-punk/new wave band from Birmingham, UK formed in 1979 and featured the combined talents of Paul Adams, Simon Colley, Dave Twist, Dave Kusworth and Stephen Duffy.

History tells us that every once in a while, a group of people can come together with one dream and do beautiful things with it, burning brightly but too briefly before sputtering out. But just because history throws up a cloud of white noise, that dream doesn’t necessarily have to die. We know that Stephen Duffy had been a founder of Duran Duran, one of a number of bands to emerge on Birmingham’s fertile, exciting and often confusing post-punk scene. When TV Eye, the Second City’s Stooges-inspired garage punk band split, Dave Twist (drums) and Kusworth (guitar) and Paul Adams (guitar) approached Duffy (vocals/guitar/piano) and Simon Colley (bass) from that first Duran line-up to join their new project. So began Obviously Five Believers, who in turn became The Subterranean Hawks, before settling on The Hawks.

Adored by most who saw them, they recorded constantly, spawning one highly collectable single, ‘Words Of Hope’. They lasted from 1979 until Christmas 1981 “falling apart in a myriad of acrimony,” as Duffy wrote in 1984. “Success makes the best excuses and the Subterranean Hawks had none... They proved that it was impossible and implausible to be a rock'n'roll band in the eighties.” Impossible, perhaps, in a city that never developed the support networks, the label entrepreneurs, of a Manchester, Liverpool or Sheffield – but The Hawks undoubtably had most of the signifiers already in place for the ‘Scene In Between’ that would emerge later that decade.Years passed with the various members each finding degrees of success: Duffy solo, and later with The Lilac Time; Kusworth with Nikki Sudden and numerous other bands, often alongside current Black Bomber Twist. In 2019, when Duffy and Kusworth last met, Duffy, as custodian of The Hawks’ ‘tape archive’, promised that the recordings would one day be released. Sadly this was not soon enough for Kusworth who tragically passed away suddenly in September 2020. Duffy has remained as good as his word, however, in bringing these ten songs to release, in honour of his friend. Having languished on cassette for 40 years, they’re now set free, sounding the best they’ve done since the day they were recorded, thanks to the judicious mastering of Grammy-winning engineer John Paterno. The album was finally released in September 2021.

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