Richard Dawson
End Of The Middle
★★★★
WEIRD WORLD
Over twinkly cruise ship syn-strings, the protagonist in More Than Real – the final track on Richard Dawson’s new LP – remembers a great false dawn. “In the moment I first gazed upon my bonny lass through a tangle of wires, tubing, sticking tape and fibreglass I swore on her little life I'd change my woeful ways," the Tyneside eccentric sings. It doesn’t quite turn out that way as – not for the first time on this exceptional exercise in musical storytelling – one of Dawson’s characters finds faulty personal wiring short-circuiting their best intentions.
After two more portentous pieces - 2021’s Henki and 2022’s The Ruby Cord - Dawson envisaged End Of The Middle as “small-scale and very domestic”. Musically, it is a return to the palette of 2019’s Peasant; the Tindersticks reconstructed from balsa wood and baler twine, this time shot through with Faye MacCalman’s lurid clarinet squiggles. Lyrically, it is off into a stratosphere of its own, the point where Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci or Captain Beefheart merge into Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett.
It starts with lightning (“a stupendous burst of all-seeing light") striking a family home on Bolt, a terrifying near miss before Dawson’s focus shifts to more commonplace natural disasters. The grandmother looking back on a shrunken life on Gondola; the man suffering a mental health crisis at a wedding on Knot; the allotment holder seeking refuge from grief and illness on the Flanagan and Allen prog of Polytunnel.
At its core, it is a meditation on the tendency of damaged emotional DNA to pass from generation to generation. Metastasized rage taints the health food shop jazz of Bullies, as a man whose teens were blighted by an ugly incident during a PE lesson gets a phone call from his old school to find his son has “been scrapping again, broke a lad's jaw”. On folk-joke-opus The Question a brilliant young girl is stalked by the headless ghost of a station master asking the relentless question: “Where are you going?” Tortoise on tippy toes, Removals Van finds a soon-to-be father stung by the memory of his own dysfunctional dad.
Breaking bad cycles is a lifelong challenge, but Dawson suggests that redemption is always possible. Back on More Than Real, Dawson’s partner Sally Pilkington takes over the lead vocal as the scene switches from the delivery suite to a father’s hospital death bed. “I don't know if he can hear us but I think he can,” she sings. “I whisper 'I love you' – yes, I'm sure he squeezed my hand.”
Royle Family haters may gag at such ethanol-strength poignancy, but if End Of The Middle can veer toward Willy Russell-style musical theatre, Dawson’s command of the nuances of northern English speech and empathy for small, vulnerable things of all ages shines through with all-seeing light. Man tends to hand on misery to man, but here is a sense – vain or otherwise – that with care and a little light soldering, not much cannot be mended.
End Of the Middle Is out now on Weird World.
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