The songs of Lee Hazelwood are the dream project for the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley. Both Sheffield-born artists have more ties to the late everyman of music than first thought. Hawley and his love for Duane Eddy is satiated by the ties Hazelwood had there and Cocker has, like the pop singer, worked with Nancy Sinatra. Cocker and Hawley come together and not for the first time to provide some inspired cover work of an impressive song. A Cheat is in safe hands and the pair find themselves redefining the Hazelwood-penned song from 1956. Hawley and Cocker are defined by their guitar efforts and wispy voice respectively, and A Cheat wastes no time getting to the core of both men.
But throw a drum machine in there and a drifting, shadowy extra guitar which sounds like the equivalent of a trip down a dark alley in a mid-range 1980s thriller, and what you get is a performative explosion of modern times adapting the early days of Hazelwood. The instrumental sections are stripped back to their fundamentals. Hawley clangs through with a static, well-timed guitar piece which rarely, if ever, changes. Whispered efforts from Cocker who has a slight echo to his vocals here work nicely, in stride with the clanging, The Fall-like menace presented by the instrumentals Hawley is toying with. This is his dream guitar riff, a simple but strikingly effective piece which calls attention away from everything going on for the track. Straight through to the crushing joy of sinister instrumental work.
We are deprived of these tortured tones too often and it is great to hear Hawley and Cocker get to grips with the Hazelwood-written track with such ease. Or at least it sounds like it. Those drum machine additions feel like a chance to break up the slots of consistent guitar work while Cocker singing of lonely days and sleepless, starved nights, finds itself in line with the usual run of work he had in his solo career. Thematically similar to what this pair of artists were often working on but with the benefit of being already established, both in presence and with lyrics from another great wordsmith. Ultimately a fitting tribute to an artist forgotten to the scratches and footnotes of history. A Cheat remains an intense song benefitting not from wild and flourishing arrangements but noise and cruel sound which makes for a cigarette smoke-laden style.
You can feel the ash and smoke rippling off this track. Tension is the fundamental part of A Cheat and while it is not as elusive here, it does help to have Hawley and Cocker in place with the quality they so often provide. Slick work from Hawley who would lean into this macabre stylishness in his more recent works as the guitar-heavy shift occurred while Cocker became an abstract conduit for these very ideas. A Cheat is the guilt and grief with a partner on the sly, and it is not as though the pair are strangers to this in their writing. Both have planted strong images with their solo works, and together with Pulp. A Cheat is a chance to hear it boom once more, and what a welcome treat it is.
