The British tradition of observational songwriting goes through the looking glass with Richard Dawson. From his base in Newcastle, where he has been releasing records since the late 2000s, he sings about ordinary people in a rising and falling voice influenced by traditional folk. Songs unfold like shaggy dog stories, while timeframes flip between present and the distant past.
His last album, 2022’s The Ruby Cord, pushed his approach to the limits, including an opening track lasting more than 40 minutes. End of the Middle is less extravagantly appointed. Its songs are populated by an everyday assortment of characters: an allotment gardener, the parent of a child in trouble for fighting at school, a dissatisfied shopper at Boxing Day sales.
The set-ups are diaristic. “I’m in the hall on the phone,” are the opening words to the album’s first song, “Bolt”. But then a lightning strike fills the family home with a bright flash of light, scorching the landline telephone. “It was only a wrong number,” Dawson, dazed, sings about the call. A humdrum act of chance has become fused with a cosmic bolt from the blue.
His lyrics repay attention. He sings them with idiosyncratic phrasing, from a droning plod to high tones touched by wonderment. The music is led by the sturdy strums and meandering melodies of his guitar, with drums shuffling alongside. There are occasional interjections from a scribbling clarinet, like illegible messages from an avant-garde gatecrasher. Intensity picks up at key moments, as when the woman in “Gondola” — who feels her life has slipped away — tells herself: “I don’t want any more regrets.” She resolves to take her adult daughter to Venice, that most fantastical of cities.
The album’s focus on family life and feelings of discontent takes place in a very British setting of budget supermarkets and high streets. But an inspiration is the Japanese director, Yasujirō Ozu. “Isn’t life disappointing?” a character says in Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story. Dawson is too warm-hearted to agree, as the streak of sentimentality in his writing shows, but the question haunts his album.
★★★★☆
‘End of the Middle’ is released by Domino
