Hawker, Mike (29th November 1936-4th May 2014)

Songwriter born Michael Edwin Hawker in Bath, Somerset, to a military family who were stationed at the RAF base there. He lived for some of his childhood in Singapore and returned to relatives in Barnsley, Yorkshire.

He attended university and then joined the RAF where he was stationed in Europe. He started writing concert reviews of American jazz musicians for the magazines Jazz Journal and New Muscal Express among others and then joined EMI’s publicity department in the late 1950s before moving into promotional work with Larry Parnes.

Working as a songwriter he collaborated with Ivor Raymonde as the co-writer of Dusty Springfield’s first solo hit, “I Only Want to Be with You”. His most common co-writer was John Schroeder, and together they penned a number of songs for Helen Shapiro, including the Ivor Novello Award-winning “Walking Back to Happiness”, and “You Don’t Know”, both of which topped the charts in the U.K. They also had the expensive habit of giving Shapiro a gold bracelet whenever she took one of their songs into the charts.

He gave his heart to Jean Ryder of The Breakaways, for whom he wrote the lyrics of “He Doesn’t Love Me”. (The Breakaways had sung backup on “I Only Want to Be with You”.)

In the late ‘60s, Udo Jurgens and Matt Monro each recorded a version of “The Music Played”. The music continued to play in 1973 when Mocedades covered “Eres Tu (Touch the Wind)”, co-penned by Mike and Juan Carlos Calderon.

In the new millennium, “I Only Want to Be with You” was included in the off-Broadway sensation, Shout! The Mod Musical.

After suffering health problems for a few years he passed away in 2014 when he was 77 years old.

Dusty Springfield recordings
I Only Want to Be with You (Mike Hawker/Ivor Raymonde)

Sources:

Hawker, Mike (29th November 1936-4th May 2014)

Navigation