These days, writing a song for Richard Hawley doesn’t mean sitting in a rehearsal room with a guitar, scribbling down notes.

Instead, he will pull on his walking boots and take his collie dog out on the Peaks.

“I’ve got more confident about writing songs in my head without an instrument,” says the former Pulp and Longpigs guitarist as he prepares to tour his seventh Mercury Music Prize-nominated solo album Standing At The Sky’s Edge.

“I can imagine the whole thing in my mind – there’s something about the repetitions of putting one foot in front of the other over ten miles, you fall into another state of mind and the songs come out of that.”

Anyone who had boxed Hawley off as a bruised romantic in thrall to precise orchestration and classic vintage guitars will receive a surprise when they put on Standing At The Sky’s Edge, particularly with its long, psychedelic opening track She Brings The Sunlight.

“I felt with Truelove’s Gutter [from 2009] I had gone as far as I wanted with anything orchestral for the moment,” he says. “I have been playing the guitar since I was six years old, I’m very connected to it. Live, we had become a little bit more raucous and I wanted to capture that. There’s something elemental about it and I wanted to channel that with the songs I was writing.”

Radio gaga

He has deliberately tried to shy away from the commercial and the “fascism of modern-day radio”, penning songs that can stretch to seven or eight minutes in length.

“If I’m going to be creative, I want to create a piece of music for its own sake,” he says. “I’m not interested in catering for people with the attention span of a gnat. Some pieces of music take longer to form, and need more time to breathe. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and I take that approach to my whole life.

“This music is not something you could wash pots or windows to.

“There’s no point in making something that will only last for a week. Nobody would dare to write a piece like Hey Jude, Strawberry Fields, Riders On The Storm or Bohemian Rhapsody today – it wouldn’t get played on the radio. The radio restricts creativity. If you heavily control something, you don’t develop culturally as a nation – it restricts our development artistically.

“People get nostalgic about the 1960s because they didn’t have any rules. How did we end up in the situation where we have these Nazi-like rules?”

He is very much a believer in the album as an artefact in itself, railing against the digital shuffle approach to music which has become more prevalent with the internet and iPod revolutions.

“When you sit down to read a book you don’t just want to read a chapter,” he says. “It’s a very weird way of approaching something but it seems to be the modern approach to music. I guess our attention spans are becoming less and less. I don’t want to create something to add to the nebulous globule of music on the internet – I want to make albums with a beginning and an end.”

The album was recorded live with the band in the studio.

“There is a lot of love in the band, we are very close,” he says. “There’s a lot of humour that keeps us going. Sometimes a version of a song would go somewhere else and we would go with it. It all felt very natural.

“That process of musicians in a room has been used throughout the ages, whether it was disco music or whatever. The 1980s has a lot to answer for, when they used to record things totally separately, even to the point where they would break up the drum kit. It makes it so clinical.”

The album was the hardest to sequence so far, not least with a couple of softer, more romantic works in the middle – including latest single Seek It.

“We have a secret weapon which is our bassist Colin [Elliot],” says Hawley. “He’s the master of setlists and sequencing. We knew She Brings The Sunlight was the Banksy in goal, the one you want opening the show. After that we went to the pub and left him to it.”

The differing style from his previous music has been working well onstage.

“We’ve just done a load of shows and I can’t believe how well it works – it seems to flow,” he says. “People say this album is a departure, but give it time over three or four albums – it’s a whole river, you can’t tell where it is going to veer off.

“It could be like an oxbow lake. I can’t tell yet because the story isn’t over. This is just a stopping point.”

Support from Lisa Hannigan.

  • Brighton Dome Concert Hall , Church Street, Wednesday, September 19. Starts 8pm, tickets from £18. For more information, call 01273 709709.