After years of negotiations finally the release of the Hawks album featuring the combined talents of Paul Adams, Simon Colley, Dave Twist, Dave Kusworth, 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, Daves Twist (drums) and Kusworth (guitar) and Paul Adams (guitar) approached Duffy (vocals) 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 '79 until Christmas '81 "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 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...
