Exhausted fulfilment centre workers. Self-loathing civil servants. Medieval peasant soldiers. Attendees of a future museum of extinct human life. Drunken teens on a secondary-school trip. Joggers combating anxiety. In the decade since his breakthrough with his 2014 album Nothing Important, the songs of the iconoclastic Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson have observed life in England from now dozens of vantage points. Do not let it be said that he lacks perspective.
On his new album, End of the Middle, the first-person character studies that have become his trademark are refined to their most domestic focus yet. Its songs tell the stories of three or four generations of the same family: “It zooms in quite close up to try [to] explore a typical middle-class English family home,” Dawson explains of an album whose title he has hinted as alluding to the end of that same middle class. “I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally.”
Richard Dawson’s own upbringing was somewhere around the middle. Born in 1981, he was raised in the leafy Newcastle suburb of Gosforth to a mother who worked in child protection and a packaging-worker father. “All I wanted to do was make songs,” he told The Adam Buxton Podcast in 2022, “and that’s when school went downhill, when I was about 13 or 14.” After failing his A-levels and flunking on a college music course, Dawson was saved by a job in a Newcastle record shop. This provided not only stable employment, but an eclectic syllabus in the wilder fringes of the shop’s stock: musique concrète, austere English traditionals, the atonal and futuristic jazz of Sun Ra.
Dawson’s talent cohered and focused in his early thirties, aided by the fact that disability living allowance payments for a degenerative eye condition allowed him to work part-time and devote more hours to his craft. He cites the 2011 song “Wooden Bag” as his first creative lightbulb moment. A deceptively simple list song, the narrator catalogues the items in a rucksack: an expired toffee bar, contraceptive pills, “half a dozen of those tiny Ladbrokes pens”. Not much on paper, but its mosaic of details – withholding just as much as it reveals – becomes a heartbreaking meditation on ordinary human loss. Some of its power comes from Dawson’s voice: conversational and Geordie accented, prone to unexpected surrenders to reedy falsetto, grave baritone or a wallpaper-stripping shriek. The release of 2014 album Nothing Important saw him come to national attention as a kind of folk singer – though, instructively, he prefers the term “ritual community music”. His live performances, still the best way to consume his songs, provide a rough definition of this term: a rare blend of confrontational emotional heft and avuncular, digressive patter.
In the late 2010s, there was a vibe shift in British music. After two or more decades of boom-time political amnesia, the jump shocks of Brexit and austerity forced a reckoning that could be observed from the underground to the Brit Awards: grime’s alliance with Jeremy Corbyn; Stormzy’s 2019 Union Jack police stab-proof vest; the whole concept of Sleaford Mods. Richard Dawson was part of this, but obliquely. His 2017 album Peasant was about England, but exclusively in the sixth century. With splenetic acoustic guitar and incantatory songs about weavers, soldiers and the idiot sons of potters, Dawson conjured a muddy, marshy and foul-smelling English past that had resonances for the present. Dawson spoke in interviews about the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder on the record, telling the Quietus in 2017 how the Renaissance painter would “cover the different strata of a community from people out in the sticks who had nothing, to people more in a city or town with more possessions and more power. Rather than approach it as individual songs first, it was to see how the whole painting would fit together.”
Its follow up, 2020, released in 2019, is his most accessible. To find a British lyric writer with such fluency for the street-level quotidian, you have to go back to Jarvis Cocker in the 1990s. Of course, our times are not the 1990s. Songs by Blur or Ray Davies once used the figure of the repressed civil servant, usually leading to some eccentric breakdown. Dawson conjured pure apocalypse out of a more plausible conclusion: breaking from their malicious and numbed-out bureaucracy by going on long-term sick leave. Its key lyric comes after a pen portrait of a Kurdish family having a brick thrown through their window: “It’s lonely up here in Middle England.”
Today, the Dawson who releases End of the Middle is not exactly mainstream, but a protected species on its fringes. On the same label as Arctic Monkeys and Wet Leg, he has just supported the US alt-pop star Mitski. This is his back-to-basics record after two albums which evidence his refusenik singularity: Henki (2021) a concept album with a Finnish metal band about the history of plants and The Ruby Cord (2022), which opened with a song that was 41 minutes long.
End of the Middle’s opening track, “Bolt”, sets the stage for this album’s births, deaths and marriages drama, its slowcore guitars ominously paced as it details a house struck by lightning, or “an empty page of heaven”. Just as the record is tightly focused on its familial concept, its arrangements are similarly intimate and closely maintained, pared back only to Dawson’s spidery and taut guitar, featherlight drum arrangements and fidgety interventions of discordant clarinet.
“Gondola”, the album’s first proper character song, gives voice to an elderly woman who watches telly as the day starts (“Good Morning Britain, a soft-boiled egg/Piers is on Lorraine, shooting pains down my leg”) and drinks heavily alone as it closes. The way that alcohol abuse drips down through families becomes one of End of the Middle’s obsessions.
There’s the grandmother blotting out her distant hopes with Blossom Hill, the parent distracted by a Zoom call with his client Majestic Wine, the dad who meets sudden redundancy by taking to the lagers. Most harrowingly, the song “Knot” observes a long, set-piece wedding – the Lake District, the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream”, a drooling golden retriever in a dickie bow carrying the rings. This is gradually revealed as merely the backdrop for someone’s alcoholic spiral. Patiently, Dawson follows the narrator from the shame of that day’s first waking moments to its bleak, jagged final hour, pumped full of Jägerbombs and staggering out of a taxi on the road after a nasty fight. What’s striking about these characters is not really their alcohol use, but their intense loneliness.
This, really, should all be a little bleak. Music to listen to once or twice – and never on a bad day. Why isn’t it? Not only does Dawson have a gift for the tragicomic, but he is an underrated writer of needling, often remarkably poppy, melodies that lodge in the head like splints. “Polytunnel” is one moment where this is allowed full flight, its chorus a lovely fanfare to the pleasures of allotment living: pulling up the turnips, mucking out the chickens. Are these quiet joys – searching for meaning, or the flight from endlessly doing so – how Dawson’s characters might be able to escape their cycles? “Everything’s so f**king f**ked,” Dawson told Q magazine in 2019. “But when people who get really affected try to turn it positive, it’s an incredible thing.”
Dawson has been tagged a social realist, parallels have been made by the Guardian and Pitchfork to the British film director Ken Loach. I’m not at all convinced. If Dawson is a social realist, then he is closer to Mike Leigh – interested in ordinary people’s secrets and lies. Never polemical, as in Loach’s cinematic protest songs, but to serve an ongoing enquiry into the human spirit.
Take End of the Middle’s final track, “More Than Real”, a duet with Dawson’s partner and frequent collaborator Sally Pilkington in which the instrumentation shifts suddenly to glowing, shopping-channel synthesizers. It comes on like a revelation. A new dad – or a dad we have heard from a few times across this album now – gazes upon his baby in an incubator, promising to mend his feckless ways: “Such a golden promise I’d break over and over again.” Then the daughter, the setting once again a hospital, but this time watching over the dad at the end of his life – “I don’t know if he can hear us but I think he can.” Here, the album reveals its central question: “How do I begin to heal wounds forever concealed?”
Dawson doesn’t offer answers, merely sending the listener back through the rest of the album for clues, on a record where the past, present and future all jostle for space inside the same family home. In an increasingly lonely and atomised society, how does an artist interested in “ritual community music” find a way forward? In End of the Middle, one of England’s finest working songwriters delivers another humane and excellent response.
“End of the Middle” by Richard Dawson is out now on Domino
See also: Bridget Jones after Mr Darcy]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation