The musical shift of Standing at the Sky's Edge is a hazardous strategy, not least because it plays against a lot of Hawley's strengths. Don't Stare at the Sun is the kind of thing that made Hawley famous: a lovely, lambent ballad about, of all things, taking your kids kite-flying. Seek It offers a bathetic love story that plays out among vandalised buses, set to a chiming riff so beautifully simple it could have come from an old Searchers single. Elsewhere, as one lyric puts it, "slivers of light hang in the dark". The lyrics frequently conjure up a bleak and forbidding world, summed up by the way one track warps the title of the Merry-Go-Round's 1967 classic Time Will Show the Wiser into the noticeably less optimistic Time Will Give You Winter. Rather than a journey into inner space, the album sounds elemental and bracing: the guitar comes in gusts and squalls. ![]() Either way, Hawley sounds not beatific, but bug-eyed. In a certain light, the protagonist could be proposing an illicit affair, but it seems more likely he's trying to rekindle a bit of youthful passion by luring his wife away from the kids for an al fresco leg-over. They could steady their nerves by noting these sentiments are set not to the standard countryside-conjuring musical backdrop of acoustic guitar and whimsical woodwind, but a furious, distorted riff that sounds not unlike the Stooges' 1969 embellished by layers of corrosive feedback. Long-term fans might be forgiven for feeling a little faint at the news that the one-time Roy Orbison of the River Don appears to be both getting it together in the country and letting it all hang out. And yet, here he is, four songs into his seventh solo album, singing a song called Down in the Woods, on which he admonishes lovers of television and the motor car and offers "stolen love under a canopy of trees" as an antidote to the ills of modern life. He once recorded a live album in a cave in the Peak District, but there's a suspicion he was drawn there less by the desire to commune with nature than the cave's name, which gave him the chance to call the resulting CD Richard Hawley Live at the Devil's Arse. With his quiff and drape coat, his omnipresent cigarette and his air of a man who's recently left the snug in his local and is in some hurry to return there, he just doesn't seem like the bucolic type. But it has to be said, it's had more likely adherents than Richard Hawley. "If somebody is competing against us, we can say we've been in business for 15 years, we have a long track record of treating people well, and we've never pushed for unsustainable growth.From the members of Traffic abandoning Birmingham for Berkshire, to Fleet Foxes' longing for a simpler life where " green apples hang from the green apple tree", the lure of a pastoral utopia is one of rock's most pervasive myths. Wilkinson hasn't quite matched Buffett's reputation for a long-term, responsible ownership just yet, but he's already enjoying an edge in negotiations. The fast past of technological change means Wilkinson and his team can't accurately predict whether their purchases will stand the test of time, he said. On the other hand, Berkshire aims to buy businesses that it's confident will still be around in 30 years. In contrast, Tiny only needs to buy a business with a few million dollars in earnings to materially boost its profits. When it comes to acquisitions, Berkshire - which earned $255 billion in revenue last year - is severely limited in what companies it can buy that will meaningfully move the needle on its finances. ![]() Wilkinson highlighted some of the differences between Berkshire and Tiny. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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