Richard Dawson’s Hyperrealism
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The English singer-songwriter, prone to medieval flights of fancy and celestial metaphors, spends his new album, End of the Middle, embedded in life’s minutiae.
Richard Dawson’s bent folk music has never been entirely of this earth. The Newcastle singer-songwriter has always had a flair for the fantastical, painting even the most modern of problems with coats of medieval mysticism. His characters are rich and lived in, but they rarely exist in the here and now.
“As I rode to your house I was beaten and robbed / By a band of moon-faced vagabonds,” he begins on “Black Dog in the Sky,” a song from his 2012 LP, The Magic Bridge. “They were rifling through my pockets and untying my shoes / When the air began to boil.”
On End of the Middle, his attackers are rendered more concretely, given names and faces so detailed they leave us wondering whether they’re autobiographical or fictionalized. “After what happened in PE / I didn’t wanna go back,” he sings at the start of “Bullies.” “But it turned out so much worse than I would… have thought it could.” He goes on to describe being “blanked by his best mates” and “punched in the face on the bus.” The lead bully, Anthony Pape, leans over and spits on him as he lies on the ground. “I don’t want to remember anymore,” he sings before a skronky clarinet enters, fracturing the sorry scene.
Back at school, Anthony gets expelled “for something else entirely,” and the term rumbles on. The narrator does badly on his exams, but a kindly teacher named Mrs. Kovacic helps him manage an “A and a B in English,” at least, and he puts his head down, working in the library during lunch on his submission to a short story competition.
The clarinet returns, then fades away into a backdrop of moody acoustic guitar, and we’re shoved forward in time. Grown up now, our protagonist gets a call at work from his son Joshua’s school, telling him to come right away. (When the call comes, he’s “in a Zoom with one of our most important clients, Majestic Wine.”) Joshua, it turns out, has “been scrapping again, broke a lad’s jaw,” and is now suspended. “What’m I gonna do with this kid?” Dawson wonders. He goes to the school — the same institution where he was once bullied, it turns out — and asks after Mrs. Kovacic, who he’s told is “taking some well-deserved leave.” After a week of strained silence between him and Joshua, they go to a soccer game, and he tells his son he knows his heart is good.
A past Dawson might have told this story obliquely, taking his time to develop all the forces at play — his last album, The Ruby Cord, begins with a 41-minute track called “The Hermit.” But “Bullies” is less than five minutes long, even including the arguably unnecessary details (the English grades, the Zoom call) that test the limits of effective realism. The mirroring of the bullied narrator and his bullying son isn’t subtle, but it feels completely natural. Dawson is inherently clever, but on End of the Middle, it never feels like he’s trying to be.
“Bullies” is the most straightforward tale in Dawson’s new collection, but its eight other tracks are also based in quotidian granularities, even when their subject matter extends into the unusual. In “Bolt,” he creatively describes the moments before and after a house is struck by lightning, but the song’s parameters are strict — deal only in detailed observations; show, don’t tell.
In “The question,” the narrator’s sleepwalking daughter Elsie sees a recurring apparition in the hallway. Later, the family discovers matter-of-factly that the ghost is the house’s former owner, a station master who was “a relatively young man and a brand new father when he took his final step in front of a train.” Still, Elsie moves past these night terrors and becomes something of a prodigy, attending Cambridge on a scholarship. She now works as a research analyst at the London School of Economics, “trying with a wayward husband to keep a happy home and bring up her boy.” Then, one night, she sees the ghost again.
These family scenes — sometimes banal, sometimes otherworldly, jumping from one hyperreality to the next — are the beating heart of End of the Middle. We’re constantly time traveling between generations, learning what’s changed and what hasn’t through simple juxtaposition. On “Removals Van,” we hear about the narrator and his brother’s shared childhood climbing trees and building “great cities of LEGO” in a house that “backed right onto the old tramway.” Then, suddenly, the house is all boxed up, and he and his partner are “having a curry on crossed legs, surrounded by boxes,” WhatsApping drunken selfies to relatives.
American listeners, myself included, might struggle to untangle the web of British reality TV show references presented on “Gondola,” but we can still appreciate the way he weaves them line by line into the domestic dramas that play out in front of the screen. Between “Piers on Lorraine” and Cash in the Attic, the narrator drinks cheap liquor and goes to work for her dad at the jewelry shop, regretting that she never went to university. Near the end of the song, she worries again about her mounting regrets, her dreams deferred, the ever-depleating supply of summers he has left. She pledges to take her granddaughter on holiday, to make more memories “before it’s all too late.”
Musically, End of the Middle is the most spartan album Dawson has made since his 2007 debut, Richard Dawson Sings Songs and Plays Guitar. Gone are the dissonant guitar battles of his breakout record, Nothing Important; the discomfiting choral drones of his art-song suite The Glass Trunk; the detuned strings and clapped Qawwali percussion of his 2017 masterpiece, Peasant; the proggy arrangements of Henki, his recent collaboration with Circle. Even 2019’s 2020, though much more accessible than his previous work, is baroque in comparison to this one.
The simplicity of the new album’s instrumentals — unadorned acoustic guitar accompanied by Andrew Cheetham’s barely present drums, for the most part — is a disarming tactic, making deviations from the norm scratch like sandpaper on raw skin. On “The question,” for instance, sections of unnerving guitar playing punctuate the track’s singsong verse-chorus structure, as does Faye MacCalman’s clarinet on “Bullies” and elsewhere. The chorus of “Polytunnel” is appropriately light as a green-thumbed hobbyist walks us through such beloved activities as “pulling up the turnips,” “tying on the sweetpeas,” and “mucking out the chickens,” but there’s a hint of something less buoyant in the oddly angled verses.
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