Goldhawks: Hometown: London.

Goldhawks release their second single, Where In The World, on Vertigo on March 29th.  The single comes amid busy touring for the band with a bunch of headline shows and various club dates. Goldhawks, heavily tipped as One To Watch in 2010, are a live band not to be missed - they wowed the masses last year with a brace of shows at CMJ in New York and a sold-out residency at London’s Ginglik. Their debut album Trick Of Light follows on 7th June.

It only takes a few bars of Where In The World to tell you that you are in the presence of Big Music.  This west London five-piece are not in the business of half measures, not interested in anxious, apologetic, half-baked landfill indie. Goldhawks make their ambitions clear from the start: the giant opening guitar riff sets its cap at arenas, not the toilet circuit. The Where In The World video, shot over a freezing UK Christmas in Cornwall, features UK surf champion Seb Smart, braving the high seas intercut with the band performing.

Goldhawks, named after a west London road, presumably in a bid to access some of the romantic allure of America’s mythic highways, are a typical London band, or at least they’re typical of a certain type of London band. One of those London bands who you hear practising in rehearsal rooms all across the capital or touting their wares in suburban pubs; one of those London bands who sing in American accents of “a world going up in flames”, of keeping “the fire burning”, over ringing guitars, rousing piano, bolstering basslines and thunderous drums. When their songs aren’t invoking cliches – there’s one called Keep the Fire, if you hadn’t guessed – they use instantly recognisable titles such as Running Away and Higher Ground that connote, respectively, escape from dull reality and the quasi-religious ecstasy induced by, um, meeting a person you quite like. Mundane experiences are routinely elevated to the epic, and revolt is something to shout loudly about.

It’s all incredibly familiar, but that’s maybe deliberate. Those aforementioned song titles are pointedly borrowed from 1970s soul pioneers Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder. The songs themselves sound like the work – hard work – of instrumentalists making every effort, sweating and toiling like mad, to achieve a grand sound, the carousing, crashing Big Music of the Boss, of 1980s U2 at their blustery, bandana-wearing peak/nadir (delete according to taste), and of Simple Minds after they stopped being Euro-centric modernists and focused instead on playing second fiddle to Bono and Co. This is the terrain occupied by Goldhawks. There’s a Joshua Tree in the distance and the streets have no name. It’s so mock-heroic and hackneyed it’s almost, in this world of confusion and change, a blessed comfort.

It only takes a few bars of Running Away, the debut single from Goldhawks, to tell you that you are in the presence of Big Music.  The west London five-piece are not in the business of half measures, not interested in anxious, apologetic, half-baked landfill indie. They make their ambitions clear from the start: Jack Cook’s giant opening guitar riff sets its cap at arenas, not the toilet circuit. When the song ends three-and-a-half minutes later, you’re left in no doubt as to the scale of Goldhawks’ ambitions. Or the sheer depth and breadth of their frontman’s vocal range and charisma.

There are singers for whom being on a stage is merely an extension of life off it. You know the type: constantly wired, permanently performing. The transformative effect of music is something apparently alien to them, because in their fevered brains, the music never stops, the buzz never fades, the spotlight never dims. So the last thing you do when you catch such a singer live is think, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting this’. The face they’re wearing up there at the mic is pretty much the same one they had on as they reached for their socks that morning. You don’t need to join the dots – there aren’t any dots to join.

It’s the quiet ones you really need to watch, as the saying so accurately has it. And that’s certainly true of Bobby Cook, Goldhawks’ lead singer. Stroll past him on his home turf of Shepherd’s Bush Green and you might struggle to place him as the frontman of a new band that have got fans blogging like crazy about some already semi-legendary live shows. Okay, the shades and skinny jeans might point you at least partially in the right direction. But a few minor sartorial details cannot prepare you for the giant leap you’re required to make when you brave the packed-like-sardines hordes at one of Goldhawks’ gigs. That bloke up there, breathing fire and brimstone, swaying to the beat, tearing the songs from his soul: yup, it’s Bobby. So, to paraphrase Talking Heads: how did he get here?

Rewind two years and, under his own name, Bobby was releasing a single, Deja Vu, whose sweeping strings and acoustic shuffle saw him quickly bracketed alongside others on the dawning London skewed-folk scene. He and his band played alongside acts such as Laura Marling and Noah and the Whale. “We never really fitted into that scene,” says Bobby now, “although I love all those bands. But our songs just kept getting bigger and bigger.” Already, expectations were being confounded: people whose curiosity had been aroused by Deja Vu’s gentle acoustica found themselves faced with a very different prospect live. “The songs were getting much heavier,” Bobby remembers. “On the one hand, I was drawing on a passion for Ryan Adams. But then I’d find myself being inspired by the likes of Tom Petty and Springsteen. And it was obvious to everyone that this big, majestic sound wasn’t just down to me. People would come up after the shows and be like, ‘Mate, what’s your band called?’, and I’d say, ‘Bobby Cook’. And they’d always go, ‘No – your BAND’. And I thought, wait a second, I’ve got to do something about this. Because we were already a band, this band, by that point.” Even so, they took ages to find the right name, he admits. And when they found it, they realised the inspiration had been under their feet all the time: Goldhawk Road, the busy London street Bobby and his brother and bandmate Jack had grown up on.

Name sorted, Goldhawks hunkered down, burnishing songs such as Up On the Altar and Higher Ground into the epic live favourites they are today, and making their music as “huge” as it sounded in Bobby’s imagination. The work, and the wait, was worth it. Listen to tracks like Where In the World and Keep the Fire and it isn’t difficult to see why people emerge from the band’s shows in a state of such euphoria. More like revivalist meetings than gigs, Goldhawks’ live performances have reminded older hands of the zealotry and ferment of Echo & The Bunnymen. To their own generation, Goldhawks represent something that can often seem like it’s in very short supply indeed: music that has nothing to do with striking attitudes or ticking commercial boxes, and everything to do with what Bobby calls his only reason for making music in the first place: because he has to, he’s “got no choice”, as he puts it; and because “making a happy song out of a sad situation” is both the hardest challenge and the greatest reward.

Goldhawks have met that challenge, with one of the most stirring debut singles to blast out of London in many a year. And the reward? “We’ll see,” laughs Bobby. He says this quietly. But you can hear his ambition, loud and clear.

Goldhawks are: Bobby Cook (vocals), Jack Cook (guitar), Colin Straton (bass), Graham Smith (drums), Nick Mills (keyboards) Most likely to: Be known colloquially as the G Street Band.

Tour dates

9th  Feb London, Borderline (HMV Next Big Thing) http://www.seetickets.com/
18th Feb London, Cargo (NME Brats with Detroit Social Club) http://www.seetickets.com/
26th Feb London, KoKo (Club NME) http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/
13th Mar Nottingham, Rescue Rooms

Links: www.myspace.com/goldhawks