Richard Dawson (or “just Rich,” as he suggests on the cover of his new album) is a wildly inventive musician. His work with Hen Ogledd made pop songs stranger and more exciting than almost anyone had done before. His record with Finnish metal band, Circle, was awesomely unclassifiable. Bulbils, his duo with Sally Pilkington, born in lockdown confinement, released endless mini-albums of pure expression. His solo work has created a new form of folk music, filled with inimitable storytelling and triumphant tunes. His new album, End of the Middle, is his most stripped back to date, featuring mostly Dawson’s voice, guitar and percussion, so that when a saxophone appears it drops like a bomb. It is also his most direct and haunting work, and a confident, sophisticated achievement that is surely his best work so far.
Dawson is a master at creating and becoming characters. As the narrator, each song finds him immersed in complex, yet instantly familiar stories, which he unwinds layer by layer. The opening track, ‘Bolt’, drops us in at the deep end. “I’m in the hall on the floor / Jen’s in her room watching Neighbours”. A family setting, ordinary in every way, suddenly becomes the scene of an extra-terrestrial event: “an empty page of heaven landed on our roof / leaped from room to room”. Something incredibly strange occurs, described with a precision that makes it both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Then its meaning becomes ambiguous, and we are left to interpret events for ourselves. Dawson explains that, while he “thinks he knows what happens in each song,” we may have different ideas. The sophistication of this track, a haunting, melodic piece, takes the breath away.
Ambiguity is at the heart of the album. Everyday events are both what they seem and something else, depending on the listener. Our individual experiences give each of us a different reaction to what we are told, but drawn from common experience. The album is peppered with references to Blossom Hill, Good Morning Britain, allotments, exchanging house contracts, B&Q – but also with alien visitations, severed heads and the afterlife. Dawson is incapable of writing easy or expected songs, and his work is easier to understand in relation to writers in other forms than to musicians. Specifically, End of the Middle has much in common with the work of playwright Annie Baker, perhaps the greatest stage writer working today. Baker creates situations, characters and dialogue which are ordinary in every way, to the extent that they feel unfamiliar on stage – and she reveals the deep strangeness inherent in normality. Supernatural events occur in suburban living rooms, B&Bs and spas. Dawson has a similar deep insight into the things we actually spend our time doing, and the weight they carry.
End of the Middle is a rich album, each of its nine tracks a self-contained world that is both familiar and strange. ‘Polytunnel’, for example, is apparently an account of working an allotment – “my happy place” – the preparation, the plants, the people. No-one writes songs about this stuff, and it takes a songwriter of exceptional insight to see the importance of everything we usually ignore. It also features a charmingly jaunty tune, yet seems to be about death. The song drifts into an account of looking after someone who is ill, and suddenly lines like “Out the gate and down the lane” take on an entirely different, possibly metaphysical meaning. It is a quietly devastating track.
Dawson also has an enviable ability to write the most gorgeous tunes. Every track on the album drops something delightful on us, often accompanying accounts of inexplicable events and unexamined lives. ‘The Question’, with its insistently upbeat guitar riff, is a full-on ghost story. ‘Gondola’, propulsive and yearning, tells the story of a woman’s lifelong regret at having never been to Venice with, perhaps, suggestions of the next life. ‘Bullies’ is about a boy suspended for punching a fellow student, told through different voices, including parent and victim, across different time periods. It has several movements, all built around a four note motif which is both sad and lovely. It is the kind of pocket opera that few musicians could conceive, never mind pull off – but it is just a small part of an album that serves up the unexpected every time.
Dawson’s singing voice is highly distinctive. His Geordie accent is instantly recognisable, never mind the falsetto he employs to impressive effect to drive the emotion on each song, even on tracks that are apparently uneventful. ‘Boxing Day Sales’ is about exactly what its title suggests, but the lyrics about the annoyances of Christmas music and marketing slogans are sung with an emotional commitment that gives them genuine heft. No-one sings about noise-cancelling headphones like Dawson. In fact, no-one sings about them at all, or about most of the things on which he focuses his uncanny spotlight.
The album wraps up with ‘More Than Real’, a lush soundscape with the aforementioned saxophone, which sweeps the song away. Sally Pilkington also sings on this, the final track, her soprano taking the album to a new emotional peak. Her account of tending to a father in his final hours in hospital is emotionally honest and quite devastating. Few songs have actually made me cry, but this one did. It tells it like it really is, the experience of being human in its beauty and inseparable shittiness.
In the Age of Anxiety we all find ourselves inhabiting, it is increasingly apparent that human connection, in its myriad forms, is the only thing that matters, and also the hardest. Dawson’s music propels us into its deep meanings, and shows us that the places we fail to examine are where we will find meaning, and the closest we will ever get to an explanation of existence. There is no surface in this album – only insight and compassion of the kind we need moment by moment to navigate our lives. With End of the Middle, Rich has given us the album we didn’t know we needed.
