RICHARD DAWSON
The gritty Tynesider’s latest is his most direct album to date. By Louis Pattison
LAST time we came face to face with Richard Dawson, he was adrift in ancient Britain. The Newcastle singersongwriter’s fifth album, Peasant, was set in Bryneich, a Middle Ages kingdom that stretched between Scotland and the River Tyne somewhere around the 6th century AD. These were faraway times, barely documented in the written word, so on the surface his new album 2020 – which is very much a record of the here and now – should feel like a world apart. Yet there’s something about the way that Dawson writes – in a vivid first-person style, full of grit and vigour – that gives his music a consistent thread, and roots it in something very human.
2020 is, without a doubt, Dawson’s most direct album to date. Entirely self-played but ambitious in its palette and bold in its arrangements, it finds him adding a new lucidity and sense of melody to his knotty and raucous take on folk music. Next to Peasant – an album that, in Dawson’s words, “sounds like it’s covered in dry mud and twig scratches” – 2020 is positively hi-fi, its spry fingerpicking and tremulous choruses presented in gleaming clarity, guitars mostly electrified and paired up with synths and chunky drums, both real and electronic. Its 10 songs are set against backdrops of mundane modernity – town centres, provincial football pitches, flooded pubs, Amazon warehouses – and focus their gaze on a cast of characters who are down on their luck or feel alienated by the world that surrounds them. On the opening “Civil Servant”, we follow the perspective of a staff member in a job centre, dealing daily with the hopeless and the desperate, and gradually feeling his humanity slipping away. “In my bed I can hear the strangled voices/
Of all the people I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed,” he chants, as guitar and drums lock into a grim, arabesque churn. Not for the first time on 2020, you’re reminded of an observation by the philosopher Jean-paul Sartre: that hell is other people.
The mess of human relationships is grist to Dawson’s mill, and his writing here has seldom been better. On “Heart Emoji”, a man learns of his lover’s presumed infidelity through the glimpse of a 3am text message. “Two Halves” is the tale of a child footballer and his competitive dad that captures the pair’s relationship in tragicomic style (“Stop fannying around!/ Keep it nice and simple/you’re not Lionel Messi/just pass the bloody ball”). At times, 2020 feels almost unbearably