MUSIC REVIEW - Richard Dawson - 2020

How would I describe Richard Dawson's music? For a start, it appears to be beyond accurate categorisation, it has in a way carved out its own category. But what you'd call that I couldn't say. You only have to listen to the sixteen minute long The Vile Stuff from 2014's Nothing Important about a teenage school trip gone wrong, and its accompanying hallucinogenic video, to realise this man works off the usual beaten track.

The current album has clearly arisen out of his earlier folkish origins, but it now occupies newer territory where folk can only be used in its original sense of 'of the people'. By 2020 he's evolved a style of guitar playing that builds in clumsy execution, embraces dissonance and veers wildly from grungy riffs to an anarchic atonality. Lyrically his subject matter is frequently the day to day inconsequential details of ordinary people and their lives. His words often sounding as though they're verbatim transcripts of actual conversations.

Open your eyes, time to wake up
Shit, shower, brush your teeth, drain your cup
Wolf down a bowl of Ready-Brek
Fasten a tie around your neck

All over the city we arise, arise
For a job we despise, despise, despise

I don't want to go into work this morning
I don't think I can deal with the wrath of the general public
And I don't have the heart to explain to another poor soul
Why it is their Disability Living Allowance will be stopping shortly

Bus fulls of meat slumped in our seats
Staring at phone screens and our own feet
Shuffling off at the business park
Let's linger awhile in the smoking bubble

From every direction we arrive, arrive
With a swipe of the fob, the fob, the fob, the fob

I don't want to go back to that seething viper's nest
I can't listen anymore to the bleating of the terminally depressed
Or the stream of opinions from the creep in the office next to mine
I dream of bashing his skull into a brainy pulp with a Sellotape dispenser

(from Civil Servant )

His subject matter is, local football matches ( Man On ), the agonising resistance to doing a job you hate ( Civil Servant ) and the anxiety depression and paranoia you can develop when you either lose or no longer can do your job ( Jogging ). This could seem on paper to be all quite resolutely grim and gritty, but he is attempting a more truthful representation of the lived reality of a lot of people's lives. Much of this one assumes draws on Dawson's own experience. There is always a good deal of humour, sometimes gallows, sometimes self-deprecating, but frequently touched with an affecting poignancy, as in 'Heart Emoji'.

Dawson would readily admit he's not in possession of a great voice, but a characterful one, which, like all the best singers of this type, he uses with an honest passion, bellowing away as though singing uninhibitedly in the shower. He's not trying to be anything other than himself. Take him flaws and all. Because of this I guess Richard Dawson will never be hugely popular, he's one of those artists existing on the periphery of popular music, garnering critical praise and slowly growing a band of followers.

2020 is his most accessible album to date, moving on from the contemporary medieval inflected tales of 2017's Peasant. Whatever he does I find its usually worth bearing with, because here is a person with a rather unique perspective on music making and life, even if his appearance does resemble an out of work extra from Lord of the Rings.

My entry point into appreciating Richard Dawson began with the video for 'Jogging' so I'll leave you with that to savour.