As Rich(ard) Dawson sat in his allotment shed writing lyrics for his latest record, he looked out over still green slopes of the Tyne valley with his only company being the wasps which would occasionally land in his brandy-glass cup of tea or the horses who would pop by to stare into his window, to stare into his soul. It’s an intimate scene that is almost reminiscent of the kind he sketches out across End of the Middle. “I wanted this album to be small-scale and very domestic,” he explains. “To be stripped back, reconnect with the basics and let everything speak for itself – to be really stark and naked by just putting the words and melodies out there.”
While Dawson is no stranger to big musical ideas, be it opening his 2022 album The Ruby Cord with a world-building 41-minute track or writing epic songs from the perspective of a seed in collaboration with the Finnish experimental rock band Circle, here Dawson dials everything down. An instruction to drummer Andrew Cheetham was to play everything so softly that he was barely touching the drums. “It’s the same with the guitar and singing,” Dawson says. “Everything is held back and soft. I wanted it to sound feeble, sickly, or maybe like a newborn foal struggling to get to its feet”.
By stripping things down to a bare bones essence (“a very tightly controlled palette”) what is revealed is some remarkably poised, elegant and beautiful music. This is unquestionably some of Dawson’s finest work to date, which is especially impressive given his impeccable track record for songcraft and having already been declared “Britain’s best songwriter” by The Guardian.
The sparsity of the compositions has an almost post-rock sensibility at times, as guitar lines quietly twist on top of whisperingly tapped drums, but then delivered through Dawson’s inimitable folk-tinged style. There are also moments that are undeniably straight up pop. With no huge arrangements and productions to hide behind, and with every tiny detail emphasised, not only do you have Dawson at his most exposed but you have a platform for his tunes to really shine. “I wanted to show all of the nuts and bolts,” he says. “So, you can really see the songwriting.”
The album deals with small-scale domesticity by focusing around a family unit. “It zooms in quite close-up to try and explore a typical middle class English family home,” Dawson says. “We’re listening to the stories of people from three or four generations of perhaps the same family. But really, it’s about how we break certain cycles. I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally. Generational memes! Things are instilled into us at such a young age and it’s, like: how do we progress and not repeat the same mistakes? How can we reject the algorithms that course through our blood?”
End of the Middle is a title with multiple meanings and interpretations. It encompasses everything from age to class to even reflecting a period in Dawson’s own career. “It’s a kind of a wonky exclamation point,” he says. “With hitting middle age I’m kind of taking stock and looking back at how I’ve got here. And, what’s next, what now? So, without planning to, this album has lots of elements of all my previous albums coming together. I hope it’s not nostalgic though – I HATE nostalgia!”. And to further hit home the significance of this circular-cum-middle end point, the DomMart vinyl version of the album will be a reverse cut, playing from the middle outwards, the opposite direction to a standard LP.
The idea to zoom in his focus for this record was partly inspired by his love of the films of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu (Late Spring, Tokyo Story). “His films are very domestic and all of the so-called big occasions happen off screen,” he says. “What we see is the moments between those events, in the quiet interactions in the family home – where the real drama happens – and how the emotions play out between the characters in these small moments. That was the real kernel for the album.”
Despite leaning into similar depictions of day-to-day domesticity in which the emotional weight and drama is often taking place elsewhere, Dawson has also crafted something narratively ambitious that belies the premise of making something simple. He has written an album that explores intergenerational relationships stretching across multiple decades, with timelines, and perhaps even different families, all jumping back and forth.
While soothing guitars, sparse drums and Dawson singing about everyday banalities of the family home brings the album to life on ‘Bolt’ so too does a bang of sorts, as lightning strikes. “The lightning bolt is a flashlight shining into every room,” he says. “As the lightning leaps from room to room, it becomes a torch shining into the deepest recesses of a seemingly cosy English middle-class house.” Dawson’s own house was similarly struck by lightning as a child, although his pulling details from his own life to be used in songs, as ever, can be a red herring more than a clue. “The albums are not autobiographical,” he explains. “But you draw on things that have happened to you, or people you know, because you want it to be real.”
The album is richly detailed, evocative, tactile and almost has the transportive ability to put you in the places and scenarios it describes. But one of Dawson’s real skills here, perhaps nodding to Ozu, is his ability to extract a great deal of poignancy and emotional punch within such confined stories. ‘Knot’ is a beautiful yet heart wrenching depiction of putting a brave face on things at a wedding while wrestling with poor mental health, trying to find an escape through a miasma of corned-beef pie, Jagerbombs and karaoke. Meanwhile, ‘Polytunnel’ warmly depicts a gardener engaged in the noble, calming, mysterious business of raising vegetables whilst dealing with illness.
Despite the pretty, almost breezy and easy skip of the folk-pop-esque ‘Polytunnel’, it’s also one that appears to hide a deeper darkness. “I think I know what’s happening in the song, but hopefully that’ll be different for each person listening,” Dawson says. “I like that the line ‘out the gate and down the lane’ – it could mean going down the allotment, or it could mean going somewhere else. Tunnel is obviously a very loaded word. There’s possibly a lot of drama happening outside of the lines of the song…. Or not. It might just be a song about an allotment.”
Similarly, ‘Boxing Day Sales’ – a beautifully wonky pop number that merges Dawson’s deft yet infectious melodies with a pleasing bolt of jagged clarinet from Faye MacCalman (who plays the role of ‘lightning’ throughout the album) – is a song that contains depth despite its seemingly shallow waters. “I wanted to make a pure pop song,” says Dawson. “Almost like a total throwaway song – like a Christmas gift: A pair of novelty socks, some Lynx Africa, or a daft plastic game you get on Christmas morning and then chuck in a drawer for the next 10 years. I wanted it to be the most throwaway and lightweight triviality of a thing.” But Dawson also found himself moved by the noble spirit of the character in his song, lifting it to a place that went beyond disposable gifts, pop hooks, and a critique of capitalism. “Even when there isn’t much room for a character to speak you still must go all the way with them”.
‘Removals Van’ is a song that Dawson is particularly proud of and in many ways embodies the entirety of the album. A deceptively-simple, pretty, delightfully melodic piece of music about moving house that also explores the lingering impacts and the repetitive cycles of parent-child relationships, continuing the album’s pattern of jumping back and forth in time but this time between chorus and verse, verse and chorus, the structural shifts carefully mapped to emphasise the contours of a wide emotional minefield our main character is attempting to cross. “It’s like the lens is switching out faster and faster at this point in the album, and we’re desperately trying to find the right level of focus,” Dawson explains. “Also, it’s about how one moment is not just about that moment, that each moment can become infused by previous moments… and that makes it a challenge to be in the now! Do you catch my drift? I don’t usually like to boast, but it’s like a big novel for me, this one, very satisfying.”
Shifting us into a completely different sonic sphere, the final song ‘More Than Real’ is a beautiful, bold, brilliant, and utterly devastating close to a record that once again holds multitudes of emotional weight. “The whole album is really controlled up to that point,” Dawson explains. “And then it becomes almost too sentimental. It’s so over the top in a way but I just wanted it to feel like a rainbow bursting through the stereo, whereas it’s all been quite monochrome up until that point. I was thinking a bit about the end of the Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev, when the screen bursts into full colour after three hours of stark black-and-white, the effect of which is to make me feel something I can’t put into words”. The second half of the song becomes even more startling as Dawson’s voice is replaced by partner Sally Pilkington (who co-wrote this number). As her and Dawson’s vocals finally overlap tenderly, it coalesces into a remarkably moving and astonishing finale. “There’s no holding it back,” admits Dawson. “It’s quite glorious, hopeful – and terribly sad.”
It feels like such a potently pronounced and perfectly executed ending to an album that it almost suggests something larger is coming to a close. The end of the middle perhaps? “It’s the end of a phase for me,” says Dawson. “I don’t understand it but I feel it. I have to change my shoes shortly, see where they take me next. But I had to do this first… just to be a simple song-maker…. As direct as possible… and gather up a bunch of these little songs for kindling. There’s a good soundbite to finish with”.
As Rich(ard) Dawson sat in his allotment shed writing lyrics for his latest record, he looked out over still green slopes of the Tyne valley with his only company being the wasps which would occasionally land in his brandy-glass cup of tea or the horses who would pop by to stare into his window, to stare into his soul. It’s an intimate scene that is almost reminiscent of the kind he sketches out across End of the Middle. “I wanted this album to be small-scale and very domestic,” he explains. “To be stripped back, reconnect with the basics and let everything speak for itself – to be really stark and naked by just putting the words and melodies out there.”
While Dawson is no stranger to big musical ideas, be it opening his 2022 album The Ruby Cord with a world-building 41-minute track or writing epic songs from the perspective of a seed in collaboration with the Finnish experimental rock band Circle, here Dawson dials everything down. An instruction to drummer Andrew Cheetham was to play everything so softly that he was barely touching the drums. “It’s the same with the guitar and singing,” Dawson says. “Everything is held back and soft. I wanted it to sound feeble, sickly, or maybe like a newborn foal struggling to get to its feet”.
By stripping things down to a bare bones essence (“a very tightly controlled palette”) what is revealed is some remarkably poised, elegant and beautiful music. This is unquestionably some of Dawson’s finest work to date, which is especially impressive given his impeccable track record for songcraft and having already been declared “Britain’s best songwriter” by The Guardian.
The sparsity of the compositions has an almost post-rock sensibility at times, as guitar lines quietly twist on top of whisperingly tapped drums, but then delivered through Dawson’s inimitable folk-tinged style. There are also moments that are undeniably straight up pop. With no huge arrangements and productions to hide behind, and with every tiny detail emphasised, not only do you have Dawson at his most exposed but you have a platform for his tunes to really shine. “I wanted to show all of the nuts and bolts,” he says. “So, you can really see the songwriting.”
The album deals with small-scale domesticity by focusing around a family unit. “It zooms in quite close-up to try and explore a typical middle class English family home,” Dawson says. “We’re listening to the stories of people from three or four generations of perhaps the same family. But really, it’s about how we break certain cycles. I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally. Generational memes! Things are instilled into us at such a young age and it’s, like: how do we progress and not repeat the same mistakes? How can we reject the algorithms that course through our blood?”
End of the Middle is a title with multiple meanings and interpretations. It encompasses everything from age to class to even reflecting a period in Dawson’s own career. “It’s a kind of a wonky exclamation point,” he says. “With hitting middle age I’m kind of taking stock and looking back at how I’ve got here. And, what’s next, what now? So, without planning to, this album has lots of elements of all my previous albums coming together. I hope it’s not nostalgic though – I HATE nostalgia!”. And to further hit home the significance of this circular-cum-middle end point, the DomMart vinyl version of the album will be a reverse cut, playing from the middle outwards, the opposite direction to a standard LP.
The idea to zoom in his focus for this record was partly inspired by his love of the films of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu (Late Spring, Tokyo Story). “His films are very domestic and all of the so-called big occasions happen off screen,” he says. “What we see is the moments between those events, in the quiet interactions in the family home – where the real drama happens – and how the emotions play out between the characters in these small moments. That was the real kernel for the album.”
Despite leaning into similar depictions of day-to-day domesticity in which the emotional weight and drama is often taking place elsewhere, Dawson has also crafted something narratively ambitious that belies the premise of making something simple. He has written an album that explores intergenerational relationships stretching across multiple decades, with timelines, and perhaps even different families, all jumping back and forth.
While soothing guitars, sparse drums and Dawson singing about everyday banalities of the family home brings the album to life on ‘Bolt’ so too does a bang of sorts, as lightning strikes. “The lightning bolt is a flashlight shining into every room,” he says. “As the lightning leaps from room to room, it becomes a torch shining into the deepest recesses of a seemingly cosy English middle-class house.” Dawson’s own house was similarly struck by lightning as a child, although his pulling details from his own life to be used in songs, as ever, can be a red herring more than a clue. “The albums are not autobiographical,” he explains. “But you draw on things that have happened to you, or people you know, because you want it to be real.”
The album is richly detailed, evocative, tactile and almost has the transportive ability to put you in the places and scenarios it describes. But one of Dawson’s real skills here, perhaps nodding to Ozu, is his ability to extract a great deal of poignancy and emotional punch within such confined stories. ‘Knot’ is a beautiful yet heart wrenching depiction of putting a brave face on things at a wedding while wrestling with poor mental health, trying to find an escape through a miasma of corned-beef pie, Jagerbombs and karaoke. Meanwhile, ‘Polytunnel’ warmly depicts a gardener engaged in the noble, calming, mysterious business of raising vegetables whilst dealing with illness.
Despite the pretty, almost breezy and easy skip of the folk-pop-esque ‘Polytunnel’, it’s also one that appears to hide a deeper darkness. “I think I know what’s happening in the song, but hopefully that’ll be different for each person listening,” Dawson says. “I like that the line ‘out the gate and down the lane’ – it could mean going down the allotment, or it could mean going somewhere else. Tunnel is obviously a very loaded word. There’s possibly a lot of drama happening outside of the lines of the song…. Or not. It might just be a song about an allotment.”
Similarly, ‘Boxing Day Sales’ – a beautifully wonky pop number that merges Dawson’s deft yet infectious melodies with a pleasing bolt of jagged clarinet from Faye MacCalman (who plays the role of ‘lightning’ throughout the album) – is a song that contains depth despite its seemingly shallow waters. “I wanted to make a pure pop song,” says Dawson. “Almost like a total throwaway song – like a Christmas gift: A pair of novelty socks, some Lynx Africa, or a daft plastic game you get on Christmas morning and then chuck in a drawer for the next 10 years. I wanted it to be the most throwaway and lightweight triviality of a thing.” But Dawson also found himself moved by the noble spirit of the character in his song, lifting it to a place that went beyond disposable gifts, pop hooks, and a critique of capitalism. “Even when there isn’t much room for a character to speak you still must go all the way with them”.
‘Removals Van’ is a song that Dawson is particularly proud of and in many ways embodies the entirety of the album. A deceptively-simple, pretty, delightfully melodic piece of music about moving house that also explores the lingering impacts and the repetitive cycles of parent-child relationships, continuing the album’s pattern of jumping back and forth in time but this time between chorus and verse, verse and chorus, the structural shifts carefully mapped to emphasise the contours of a wide emotional minefield our main character is attempting to cross. “It’s like the lens is switching out faster and faster at this point in the album, and we’re desperately trying to find the right level of focus,” Dawson explains. “Also, it’s about how one moment is not just about that moment, that each moment can become infused by previous moments… and that makes it a challenge to be in the now! Do you catch my drift? I don’t usually like to boast, but it’s like a big novel for me, this one, very satisfying.”
Shifting us into a completely different sonic sphere, the final song ‘More Than Real’ is a beautiful, bold, brilliant, and utterly devastating close to a record that once again holds multitudes of emotional weight. “The whole album is really controlled up to that point,” Dawson explains. “And then it becomes almost too sentimental. It’s so over the top in a way but I just wanted it to feel like a rainbow bursting through the stereo, whereas it’s all been quite monochrome up until that point. I was thinking a bit about the end of the Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev, when the screen bursts into full colour after three hours of stark black-and-white, the effect of which is to make me feel something I can’t put into words”. The second half of the song becomes even more startling as Dawson’s voice is replaced by partner Sally Pilkington (who co-wrote this number). As her and Dawson’s vocals finally overlap tenderly, it coalesces into a remarkably moving and astonishing finale. “There’s no holding it back,” admits Dawson. “It’s quite glorious, hopeful – and terribly sad.”
It feels like such a potently pronounced and perfectly executed ending to an album that it almost suggests something larger is coming to a close. The end of the middle perhaps? “It’s the end of a phase for me,” says Dawson. “I don’t understand it but I feel it. I have to change my shoes shortly, see where they take me next. But I had to do this first… just to be a simple song-maker…. As direct as possible… and gather up a bunch of these little songs for kindling. There’s a good soundbite to finish with”.
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