Richard Dawson (raucous experimental UK folk racket w/ intense picaresque realness vox)

I...I...I'm...

'Nothing Important', both the song and the album.

This is some of the best music I've heard in ages, I think. Four songs and with them - with TWO of them - he's become one of my favourite British artists. A certain chap agrees:

Marcello Carlin @marcellocarlin · Oct 16
By the way, “Nothing Important” by @richarddawson12 is the most striking and stunning piece of music I've heard this year. Album out Nov 3.

https://soundcloud.com/weirdworldrecordco/richard-dawson-nothing-important/s-OiEAn

^the title-track - there's another one called The Vile Stuff that's pretty much just as good - there's an 11-minute video version on Youtube and the full 16-minute version elsewhere.

Apparently an incredible live perfomer as well:

No, but seriously: my friend played me 'Poor Old Horse' when I went home for christmas last year, but he did the thing he always does and made the preamble so amazing that nothing can ever live up to it. So I spent the year thinking Dawson was good but not as amazing as he was made out to be... until I saw him live. When I was super pissed off with my tent probably having been blown away by horrible winds and worried about everything... and Dawson really *was* as good as the preamble. Pulling up this intense voice, hitting himself to make it come out, screaming and yelping... he is genuinely so so good.

― emil.y, Monday, November 17, 2014 1:03 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fully expect ILM to get behind this guy

ah you started this while I was in rolling time travel, also everyone likes a guy who posts his posts to multiple threads

Richard Dawson is p much one of my favourite working musical entities in the world and has been for the last 18-24 months maybe. he is also a v nice person ime. really glad he is getting more and more opportunities to do his thing in front of more people.

if you happen to see a review of his new album as published by a weekly UK music paper of note, please don't bother reading it as it's been edited to make its writer sound lukewarm on the album, and intimidated by its scary weirdness. FUCK EDITORS

― proper maoist (DJ Mencap), Monday, November 17, 2014 8:36 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really hope this takes off completely. Not sure how. If tedious worthy dreck like Young Fathers is winning the Mercury, what chance does Dawson have, eh?

Anyway, this isn't about him taking off, this is about how his music is fucking astonishing & his personality one of the most performatively engaging I've heard on record

Not seen him live, but the record is extraordinary. In all sorts of ways: people who like it will really, really, really like it; those who don't will simply be unable to make any sense of it, and I'm not yet sure which camp I fall into. It sounds like a stream of consciousness, both musically and lyrically. In many ways its a truer and more difficult form of alternative/outsider music than any noise or deliberately anti-melody record, because there are tunes and melodies here, they just seem all wrong - the notes, the chords, the progressions all seem wrong. Like a folk Beefheart.

I've definitely mentioned him on here a few times as well. Seen him probably about half a dozen times in the last 3 or 4 years, I think the first time was just as The Magic Bridge came out and he's never been less than brilliant. From the visceral impact of Poor Old Horse the first time I saw him, to the pouring out of his heart in Wooden Bag, to co-opting folk standards like The Brisk Lad, to the sinister tragedy espoused in Ghost Of A Tree - which could also live on the creepy british tv thread in tone - I've always been rapt.

I wrote about Nothing Important on FB but can't find my post. I'll repeat what I said there though - The Vile Stuff is the distillation of his career to date and if he never does anything again that song will be enough.

let's post it here, in fact

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQVlNt6DAxY

2:40 into "Nothing Important" and this is very easily going into the "I don't get it" file

"The Vile Stuff" is completely obsessing me right now. Probably my favourite track of the year. (Evidently based in truth, as his teacher left a comment on his FB:

"Ha ha. I remember that trip to featherstone castle one of the highlights of my teaching career"

Also heard very good things about him as a live performer, from a trusted source. Hell, even his collages are good: http://www.richarddawson.net/collages.html

I'm interested

i've liked some of this guy;s stuff but i'm getting an icky jam-band feeling from that last youtube

how many minutes did you listen for

after 2 or 3 minutes the vocals come in and it's completely gripping, imo

i listened to the whole thing!

I think this would probably appeal to folks who dig the Incredible String Band. I'm more on the Holy Modal Rounders' team, myself.

I can see tracks like Judas Iscariot and all the instrumental pieces on The Glass Trunk appealing to Derek Bailey fans. John Fahey fans might get a lot out of this too.

Judas Iscariot is like a more deliberate Bill Orcutt

Yeah, I can see that.

Dammmm, just listened to Nothing Important on Spotify: "Judas Iscariot" an instrumental,justifies the Fahey and Derek Bailey comparisons right away, unselfconsciously; title track's vocals vulnerable, idealistic, tenacious, suggesting Robert Wyatt and Roy Harper; "The Vile Stuff" is a mighty tag-magnet for all of the above and RIYL ISB, the groove of solo Wino, Dredd Foole, and maybe Jandek (though I'm not a J-man fan). This track is or surely should be the one to get him on campus etc. radio. "Doubting Thomas" instrumental perfectly folds into its four minutes plus. The words haven't all registered yet, but I like the ones that have. Thanks ILM!

Seems that this all comes from his own youngblood experiences (incl. listening to his records and himself), more than wearing influences on his sleeve. Though still working on his own unmistakable sound, own voice, as writers say.

It sounds like a stream of consciousness, both musically and lyrically. In many ways its a truer and more difficult form of alternative/outsider music than any noise or deliberately anti-melody record, because there are tunes and melodies here, they just seem all wrong - the notes, the chords, the progressions all seem wrong. Like a folk Beefheart.

Description sounds like Kevin Coyne, in KC's more out there moments. But he doesn't sound like Kevin Coyne, more like Roy Harper gone weird.

Yeah, Coyne and Beefheart are in the same associative family tree, but actual sound closer to young Harper.

Seriously one of the year's best records

i liked the first track on glass trunk with the letter so much but have cooled on him since then

Oh yeah this is pretty cool. Like the guitar playing a lot.

listening judas iscariot right now

good, but as a couple others pointed out VERY bill orcutt almost to the point of distraction for me sometimes

I'm liking "Nothing Important" quite a bit.

huh ok now the next song is L@@K RARE OOP PRIVATE PRESS UK PROGRESSIVE WITCH FOLK VG++ ONLY 200 COPIES WERE PRESSED

this song is awesome

also the first song was good, i shouldn't be backhanded, it was more "put together" than orcutt usually is and it's not like recalling bill orcutt is an easy task either way

Richard Dawson 'The Vile Stuff' (Karen Gwyer Remix)

Listen to Karen Gwyer's hypnotic version of the song https://soundcloud.com/weirdworldrecordco/richard-dawson-the-vile-stuff-karen-gwyer-remix

"Nothing Important is driven by an ongoing conflict between entropic impulsiveness and an almost classical sense of beauty and order...Dawson's most ambitious and affecting composition to date." 7.8 - Pitchfork

"The 33-year-old Newcastle avant-troubadour has made one of the most unique singer-songwriter records in recent memory with the abrasive, vivid Nothing Important.” - Rolling Stone

The sinister lament that is ‘The Vile Stuff’ shows Dawson as a master of the minutiae of British storytelling as he charts the downfall of a group of students on a school trip, “downing Asda’s own-brand stubbies in the lad’s bogs” before succumbing to all sorts of transgression and calamity – fracturing skulls and cheekbones, stabbing screwdrivers through their hands and hopping into bed with their teachers. It’s a song as surreal as it is strangely relatable in its pitch-black humour and effortless conjuring of grizzly adolescent fantasy.

In her remix, Gwyer takes the song's ominous instrumental loop and tones it up into a muscular, sinister alien-club track reminiscent of her releases for No Pain In Pop.

Read a recent interview with Richard Dawson via BOMB Magazine (conversation w Cian Nugent):http://bombmagazine.org/article/2000044/richard-dawson/

That's from dominorecordco.com, so's this

http://i2.cmail1.com/ei/d/36/889/699/csimport/RichardDawson-CROPPEDFORPR.151153.jpeg

oh my fucking god this remix

just found myself listening to this dude earlier today cuz he is supporting the ex next week. definitely pro him

listened to him for the first time yesterday, siked to have a new person to listen to whose work I think is amazing

to me, this has some similarities to akron/family back in the day when they were really on top of what I believed to be an extremely compelling sound

listening to the back half of nothing important and oh man this guy

maybe I need to go to both days of the the ex thing

aah, i used to kind of know this guy from when he worked at alt vinyl in newcastle years ago, pleased to see him making a name for himself (or is it just on ilm . i saw him play loads of times about 5 or 6 years ago and he was always great but never got round to hearing any of his albums somehow (will rectify this). i remember being being quite taken aback when i first heard him singing, him being such a mild mannered, softly spoken chap.

i`ll admit my memories of that time in the north east are getting pretty hazy, but i remember wondering at the time htf maximo park and the futureheads blew up when field music and richard dawson were sooo much better

gosh how did a band whose calling card was a novelty 80s cover make a deeper impression on the public than this guy with his sixteen minute song about school kids getting drunk on 4x and stabbing themselves with screwdrivers

ha! well it was back when i actually gave a fuck about such things.

five or six years ago RD's music was much more quote-unquote accessible straight-bat folk-rock kinda stuff; afaik no-one took much notice until he started to get ~weird~

So what a couple of bits I've heard reminds me of (so far) is some Harsh 70s..-era Dead C 'heavy' strumming. After five mins I can't be arsed.

I dreamt about Richard Dawson last night.

In the dream the mainstream had decided to try and co-opt him and so he had been invited on TV wanker-fest Sunday Brunch with Tim Lovejoy and The Other One. It was a special summer edition which was outside and the invited "too old for Hoxton but we're going to pretend anyway" middle class twunt target market were having a picnic. To try and make him more palatable they had given him a completely inappropriate backing band and they started a version of The Brisk Lad that sounded a bit like Take That. Richard tried to destabilise things by picking up a saxophone (which he clearly couldn't play) and tunelessly honking over them after the first verse. The producers responded by turning up the backing to try and restore order. Richard then walked off the stage in amongst the picnickers and started ad-lining verses, but when he said he would split the stolen sheep "from maw to cunt" it got a bit much for the producers and it went to a black screen.

:D

someone not on phone pls repost to striking imagery thread asap

That should have been "ad-libbing" near the end, but autocorrect obvs.

AAAAAAHHHH

Just interviewed him. Lovely man.

Spoke to him after the gig and can corroborate this

this is great! how did i not hear it till now?

This should be right up my alley but I've never managed to get past the first couple tracks.

there are only 4 tracks

Phenomenal news! Even if the two are joining more as "Bulbils" than as "Dawson & Pilkington, songwriters of Hen Ogledd," that's still one hell of an addition. Obviously. Bulbils rule the world.

I failed to take that Roundtable very far (though thanx for playing along, imago), but closing on two years since release, The Ruby Cord remains one of my top ten albums ever.

The three new songs he's played live remind me of 2020, which I didn't love, so I'm keeping my expectations low. For me, his work work veers between "holy shit what the hell" (The Glass Trunk, Nothing Important, Henki, Free Humans, The Ruby Cord, and everything Bulbils... okay, that's a clear majority when I actually list it) and "cool in theory but I don't actually enjoy listening" (Peasant, Mogic, 2020).

Still one of the most interesting artists I'm aware of.

2020 ended up growing on me quite a bit! But its lesser tracks really came to life live I thought

For the record, if that'd have been a more general-purpose RD server it might have gone a bit further...ah well! Maybe there's one out there...

new rich(?) dawson day. end of the middle out in feb.

New single easily the lamest thing he's ever put out, but honestly, where do you go after The Ruby Cord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mraMN1lILXY

yeah this isn't compelling at all sadly. press release has nothing to make me optimistic either, alas

cute video tho

Woah. Bulbils have a lot... any recommendations where to start?

Dive right in with the first record, Squatch. (But I say that being only seven or eight in myself. They're too wonderful to rush through.)

Or if you want an overview, you could try their self-curated four-hour set: here

New single easily the lamest thing he's ever put out, but honestly, where do you go after The Ruby Cord

Triple-album continuous-narrative space opera, of course!

Clearly I'm more excited than I was expecting. And having given it a first listen, remain intrigued and hopeful. This Polytunnel sounds way more melancholy than the live versions. Has more space too. Feels like it's got some of the loneliness of the hills from the Hermit video in it.

sure not so ambitious, but i love this. deepening delivery of 'polytunnel' especially.

After a few more listens, I love Polytunnel. Great prog folk. And touching as hell.

Not feeling Boxing Day Sales but willing to keep trying when the album's out.

Great talk with Richard here: https://pod.link/1081000090/episode/c40df76cffba228a3b726a9148db7b69

Third single Gondola is pretty good. Great video. And the reviews and new interview that have popped up over the last couple of days are sounding renticing. And Polytunnel has cemented itself as a huge fave. So, I finally made up my mind and pre-ordered, two days before the release date. Would love to join the Bandcamp Listening Party but that's 3AM in China.

*enticing

Woke up for the 3 AM listening party regardless. It's like a zombie version of 2020. An eviscerated 2020, its innards laid out on the table beside it. Which I mean as a compliment.

It's a lot less tame than the singles and album blurb had led me to expect. Got chills quite a few times. All three of the singles are more powerful in sequence.

Lyrically it's very 2020 too, but you keep getting moments where a black hole opens up, or things suddenly get mystical -- disorienting and disturbing moments that reminded me of the "while the faces of my loved ones disappear" turn in Nothing Important, or the dream about the minotaur in Fresher's Ball.

Three seven-minute songs, so it's not all miniatures either. The opener is short but massive -- just the way to answer The Hermit.

Looking forward to this.

A nap and few hours later, I'm really anxious for this to get published on Bandcamp. Can't wait to hear it again.

"knot" is fantastic

"more than real" is a pretty significant departure for him and is really special

the rest of the album is just alright by his standards but those two tracks are incredible, and i like it overall more than 2020 at least

Knot towers over all the tracks before it, that's for certain

On this album I mean, which is proving a bit of a disappointment

There are a lot of lyrical clunkers on this. He's always walked a fine line between affecting and corny, staying on the right side, but not here

the dream about the minotaur in Fresher's Ball

It wasn't until I read this upthread that I connected it with the singer in "Ogre" dreaming of skyscrapers before the child vanishes!

Haven't dug all the way into the new one yet, but I do appreciate his apparent desire in the early songs to distill his thing into an incredibly simple, clear, efficient and approachable version of itself. Which "Polytunnel" really seemed to manage. (It's replaced "Wooden Bag" as the Dawson song my younger kid wants to hear all the time.) For me there have definitely been times in the past where his willingness to aim at really earnestly human topics seems worrisomely clunky right up until I've gotten into the song and am forced to think no, this is just a plain and affecting statement about real life, and its being poised on that edge is a good part of why it's going to make me increasingly borderline-weepy every time I hear it

It wasn't until I read this upthread that I connected it with the singer in "Ogre" dreaming of skyscrapers before the child vanishes!

Oh, damn. The Fresher's Ball dream of course happening after a child vanishes.

Can't account for it yet, but End of the Middle has me rapt. Noticing a theme of natural forces trying to make their way indoors -- the lightning strike in Bolt, the blizzard in Boxing Day Sales.

his lyrical approach on this is mostly so mundane that it's hard to have any interest there, and his material loses a lot without the rich arrangements - the arrangements here are mostly so stripped back and rudimentary that they feel like demos by comparison

the lyrics to "more than real" are definitely corny but that feels very deliberate given the arrangement, i don't really mind that

two great tracks is more than i was expecting given the singles and the rest is still fine, the only thing i really dislike is "polytunnel" which leans into all his most irritating qualities, but it's got nothing on his best work

that's funny, the reason why i love polytunnel is that it leans away from the cohered narrative or character study that's his default mode and appears simply as these snatches and fragments which aren't necessarily related to one another. find there is so much more affect in these isolated moments and pleasure in the phrases as they sound without having to join them together around a fictional person.

Been playing Henki, The Ruby Cord, and End of the Middle over and over again this week. Reading and re-reading what the music publications had to say about them all. I love this insight from Konstantinos Pappis:

[The Tip of an Arrow] is about a father refusing to let his daughter conform with the times, so of course it’s a chugging metal riff they adopt as the language of resistance.

Pretty melodies and great Sally vocals aside, I can't feel my way into More than Real, but the rest of the new album is meaning more & more to me. 3:31 to 5:56 of The Question has become one of my favorite bits in the whole Dawson catalogue.

Okay fuck, More than Real finally got to me, I get it now -- the bleeping gloom and how it connects & undercuts / reinterprets "how my own dad was with me," right, god, there's the tears. Richard, I surrender!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002c0v8

"Grab a brew and take a pew for a very special edition of Late Junction, as we head to Northumberland to pay a visit to the home of Geordie troubadour Richard Dawson."

That was fantastic. And now, there ya have it: I have knowingly heard Kraftwerk. What an introduction.

By the way, I still listen often to End of the Middle, and still think it's genius. (Ye olde chorus of one.)

It's my family's last week before we move house, one province to the south. We've been in the same city for eight years and the same apartment for three, so it feels like a big deal. I get very happy every time we start stuffing things into boxes because Removals Van inevitably starts playing in my head.

Also -- this past term at the uni I was assigned to teach a "cross-cultural communication" class, into which I of course incorporated a unit on music videos. Today a student let me know that as we watched Horse + Rider ("cinema" style -- I'd drawn the curtains, turned out the lights, hit "play") she was moved to tears. And a few days later she realized that the scene in which Richard dances with abandon as the sun goes down had cured her of depression. That was a few months ago. She's still doing fine.

I didn't need any more reasons to love Richard Dawson, but here we are

Generally speaking, Free Humans doesn't sound particularly great to me. I'll take Nothing Important and Henki and The Ruby Cord and End of the Middle over Free Humans anytime.

But then there are days like today, when it sounds like one of the best albums ever made.

It's been a while, but here it comes! FREE HUMANS SEASON!

Ah! In "Gondola", I've always heard the narrator lamenting "And I went to work for Dad / In the jewellery shop I wish I had. // Go into higher education / But Tom was always the clever one". But the punctuation in the subtitles of the (yes great!) video indicates that their actual lament is: "And I went to work for Dad / In the jewellery shop. // I wish I had gone into higher education / But Tom was always the clever one". Not a gigantic discrepancy, but perhaps a bit less tragic.

I like that video a lot, too. Especially the long scene near the end, during the instrumental outro, with the close-up of the actor's eyes above the melancholy smile.

When this record first came out, I could listen to it several times a day, just enjoying the music and the singing and starting to unravel the stories. Now I can only listen to it on certain days, in certain moods, because these songs are too awesome to be background music, but every time I do listen carefully, I end up crying through half the thing. Only recently realized how painful and profound Boxing Day Sales is -- and Boxing Day Sales had been the album's last lyrical hold-out, which means that now *every* song cuts deep.

I've bawled my eyes out to More than Real on a crowded public street, on the bus, on campus...

The way her expression conveys noticing the "dead fly on the windowsill" is masterful.

Totally the same about certain days and moods! On some levels I'd be happy to listen to his stuff all the time, but some of it is so emotionally affecting that it has to come out sparingly. That's pretty rare for me, and often song-specific, but with Dawson there are all sorts of parts where I know I'll end up focused on them and getting really emotional. (I wrote a thing about "Jogging" a while back in part because it snuck up on me on this front: somehow the possibility that the narrator is explaining the whole thing to a stranger while seeking marathon sponsors just gets into me.)

I remember that Jogging writeup very fondly, yes :)

I saw this guy when he played at an Adam Buxton podcast recording. He was OK.

BTW, my Richard rankings:

1. The Ruby Cord
2. Nothing Important
3. End of the Middle
4. Henki
5. The Glass Trunk

I would call Nothing Important more of a start-to-finish perfect record than The Ruby Cord, but The Ruby Cord has The Hermit, which is my favorite 40 minutes of Richard, perhaps never to be topped. And, unlike Nothing Important or End of the Middle, The Ruby Cord isn't so heavy emotionally that I hesitate to play it. Most weeks, I listen to The Ruby Cord two or three times.

And then Bulbils is this jar of swirling colors over on the side-shelf.

I think I like The Magic Bridge the best and I have a lot of time for Peasant.

*wasp* not fly obv

peasant and the ruby cord are masterpieces and nothing else quite compares to those

I've tried & tried with Peasant but still can't connect. In my own personal narrative of his life in music, Nothing Important was so perfect that he had to reset, and Peasant and Mogik and 2020 were his way of ambitiously but only sometimes gracefully finding a new voice, and a new kind of story to tell.

From what I can tell of Richard's *own* narrative of his life in music, the big breakdown apparently happened after The Ruby Cord, making End of the Middle the first post-reset album. Recent interviews suggest he's more into film connoisseurship than musicmaking at the moment.

Soooo...

Attempting to penetrate a coconut husk with a Philips-head screwdriver
I pierce a hole straight through my hand into the laminate worktop.

That's crucifixion imagery. I never noticed that before.

And then -- perhaps a stretch, but considering what just came before, conceivably not; in the next two lines:

It's a major operation to repair a damaged tendon
I come around with the tube still down my throat

an echo of the Resurrection?

When I was a kid one of my Sunday School teachers showed up heavily bandaged and explained that he'd had a power drill go through the center of his hand, and it was a real elephant-in-the-room thing, sitting in a church basement with absolutely nobody acknowledging the resonance