Richard Dawson

Richard Dawson press photo Domino Records

Richard Dawson playlist

Contributor: Ben Mackenzie

Newcastle’s favourite folkie has taken a long road to where he is today. From performing at small gigs around Europe ten years ago to supporting Mitski and Lankum at London’s Apollo this year, Richard Dawson has gathered a formidable following behind his mix of American primitivist guitar and trad folk vocals. And it’s by no means unwarranted – from The Magic Bridge in 2011 to 2022’s wonderful The Ruby Cord (as well as another album currently in the works), he’s had one of the most incredible runs of albums from an artist I can remember of late.

I started listening to Richard shortly before the world plunged into lockdown four years ago, and his music provided me great comfort through that difficult time. Digging into his catalogue revealed various different directions of exploration – there were the minimalist guitar and vocals on The Magic Bridge and Nothing Important, the extended a cappella excursions on The Glass Trunk, the knotty neo-neo-medieval folk on Peasant and the more accessible indie rock on 2020, all provided plenty to dig through during the months spent indoors. Hopefully my list manages to represent a broad swathe of his different styles and encourages you to explore each of them in further detail!

Kicking things off we’ve got the first proper song off Peasant (after an intro track), the album that really broke Richard into being an indie mainstay. Like the rest of the album, Ogre is a real neo-medieval folk stomper, while avoiding all the rubbish cliches of the genre. No wandering minstrels in the gallery here (no offence intended to Jethro Tull), Richard is giving us a glimpse into what real life might have been like for the majority of people in early medieval England. In Ogre, we’ve got a narrative of the residents of a village in Bryneich – the anglo-saxon kingdom that contained what is now Newcastle – who are paranoid of some unseen outsider threat coming for their village, snatching children in the night. It’s never confirmed whether this threat actually exists or whether such things are happening due to someone within the village. Of course, this song is hard to discuss without considering when it’s from – Peasant came out in 2017, in a post-Brexit Britain, and so it’s hard to hear this song without considering the narrative of these villagers being afraid of a possibly non-existent outsider threat coming into their homeland within the context of the political atmosphere at the time.

From medieval England we move to Richard’s album 2020 – the middle part of a conceptual trilogy he released that also consists of Peasant (early medieval period) and The Ruby Cord (25th century) that explored England as it looks at different moments in time. 2020, as the name suggests, is set in the then-present day (although, since it came out in 2019, it obviously doesn’t predict the major event that happened in that year). Unlike Ogre, with its heavy, potentially politically-charged imagery, Two Halves is a far more simple narrative, but one of Richard’s best. A mainstay of his solo performances, being performed in session on BBC Radio 6 Music as well as when I saw him at the Roundhouse in 2022, the song simply follows its child narrator as he experiences the emotional highs and lows of playing and losing a football match. Football is another key to Richard’s discography as, while not a major theme other than here, it’s a recurring motif in a few of his songs (Nothing Important, The Vile Stuff and Museum being another two).

After the modern day, where do we go but the future? The Ruby Cord, Richard’s 2022 album, is set in the 25th century, in a world that, from some of the lyrics, seems to have broken so badly that for the average person life is closer to what’s depicted on Peasant than on 2020. The Fool, which could’ve easily fit on Peasant lyrically, depicts a bittersweet love story between a man forced to play the role of a village idiot and a woman who comes to the village over the course of Spring. Musically, like much of the album, it’s a strange mix of electronic and electric instruments with a few of Peasant’s medievalisms sprinkled in for good measure. I saw Richard perform all but one of the songs from this album on his tour in 2023 and it was one of the most incredible live shows I’ve ever seen.

Richard’s first proper album, The Magic Bridge (his debut, Sings Songs And Plays Guitar, is currently unavailable), is also one of his most stripped back. No other arrangement flourishes here, just Richard on guitar and vocals. It’s no surprise that it’s one of my favourites of his. Man Has Been Struck Down By Hands Unseen is fairly obscure, lyrically speaking, but I believe it links somewhat to a lesser known part of Richard’s story – he has an eye condition called juvenile retinoschisis which means he is visually impaired (when asked about this he stated “I can see a great deal but details and the edges of things fade away”). Disability benefits he received due to this meant that he only had to work part-time to support himself, leaving him more time to write songs and practice guitar.

The Bamburgh Beast is another track off The Magic Bridge and one that illustrates the album’s other half well. While much of the record features Richard’s vocals and lyrics alongside his guitar playing, on four of the tracks (making up 25 or so of the album’s 63 minutes) he lets his instrument do the talking. I think these are the best examples of Richard’s skill as a folk guitarist, as he plays a mix of intricate fingerpicked lines and what sounds to me like blues inspired soloing. Melodically speaking, his guitar instrumentals share more with his vocal songs than may first be apparent. His guitar in this period (unfortunately around the tour for Peasant his nylon-stringed semi-acoustic guitar was broken, leading to a change in sound and writing style) sounds a lot like his voice – raw and unpolished but emotional, melodic and very real.

And now, to go in the opposite direction, a track from The Glass Trunk – an album Richard created as part of a project with the Tyne and Wear archives in 2013. The album features no songs where Richard plays guitar and sings simultaneously, instead consisting of noisy guitar instrumental tracks interspersed between longer solo vocal pieces. Poor Old Horse, based on a folk song he found in the archives, depicts three men terribly botching the euthanasia of a horse, with Richard’s voice, somehow both strong and cracked, conveying the horror of the situation. Unlike the original song, however, this version adds an additional verse to the end, depicting the men returning home to their normal lives, seemingly unaffected by the terrible violence they’ve just committed to the poor old horse.

We now enter another one of Richard’s specialities – lengthy songs. I still remember first hearing Nothing Important and being absolutely blown away. I’d heard 2020 a few days earlier and enjoyed it but it wasn’t completely mindblowing to me at the time. This however … I struggle to find the words to say. The intensity, the emotion, the imagery. It all combines to be like nothing I’ve heard before or since. He rarely, if ever, performs the vocal tracks from this album anymore – understandable as they both run 16 minutes or so and would probably absolutely wreck your voice to sing live. However, there are brief clips of a performance of this song – as well as numerous full recordings of him performing The Vile Stuff – on YouTube if you want to see some of my favourite live performances ever.

Another 2020 song, Fulfilment Centre is a 10 minute heartbreaking lament about the conditions of an unnamed online shopping warehouse. This one uses one of my favourite techniques Richard employs as a songwriter, and one that can be seen on quite a few tracks throughout his discography. He has a tendency to have some of his lyrics consist of lists of items, and somehow make that emotionally resonant – here it’s lists of completely inessential items purchased by the customers of the online store, while on Nothing Important it’s (in my interpretation) a list of items left over in a house after the occupants have passed away, or William And His Mother Visit The Museum’s lists of museum exhibits seen by a blind child and his mother on a day out, or Wooden Bag telling a story through the seemingly mundane contents of a forgotten bag. I’m not sure why this technique gets me in the heart every time, but it does.

Masseuse is the best song on Peasant, an absolute folk-horror odyssey which finds a disillusioned masseuse hearing of an ancient relic granting its holder eternal beauty, and who decides they must possess it no matter the consequences. I can’t really say much about this lyrically, as it’s Richard’s storytelling at its best and to give away any of the plot would be doing the first-time listener a disservice. Musically speaking it’s absolutely brilliant – about as heavy as I think folk music can possibly get before it turns into something else. Parts of this still fill me with dread in the pit of my stomach even after what’s probably the 30th or 40th play.

And finally, Richard’s magnum opus. I remember being perplexed, excited and concerned at the same time when The Ruby Cord was announced back in 2022 when I saw that the album was 80 minutes long (his longest by about 15 minutes), with the opening track stretching out to 40 minutes on its own. The Hermit is basically an album in itself (and was released as a limited CD single alongside the album). A very slow burn, with Richard’s vocals not even entering for the first 11 minutes (we’re treated to some lovely soft guitar/percussion interplay), I’m still not entirely sure what this one’s about as such, but it’s got some absolutely amazing lyrics. One of the great feats of live music I’ve witnessed was the tour for The Ruby Cord, where he performed this and nearly every track off the album in full. I had front row tickets for the show he did at the Barbican in London and it was an amazing time. Richard produced a film that goes along with this, which I haven’t seen yet but I am assured is fantastic.

CD single

2020

Richard Dawson official website

Richard Dawson Bandcamp

Richard Dawson on Domino Records

Richard Dawson Youtube Channel

Richard Dawson on Prog Archives (incl. Discography)

Hen Ogledd official website
Hen Ogledd is Rhodri Davies, Dawn Bothwell, Sally Pilkington, Richard Dawson

Bulbils on Bandcamp
Bulbils is Sally Pilkington and Richard Dawson. The group was started as a way to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, at first aiming to record and release a ramshackle ambient album every few days but gradually slowing down to a trickle …

Eye Balls Bandcamp
Eye Balls was the computer music project of Richard Dawson 2008/9

Richard Dawson biography (AllMusic)

Ben Mackenzie lives in St Albans and has a bedroom full of books and records. He firmly believes Cardiacs are the greatest band of all time, and can be found espousing this and other opinions regarding semi-obscure nerd music on Bluesky.

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