Richard Dawson Photo: Sally Pilkington
Nick Bollinger lends an ear to the medieval musings of Newcastle musician Richard Dawson
One of the most amazing live performances I’ve witnessed in recent memory was when the singer and guitarist Richard Dawson toured here in 2015.
Peasant Photo: supplied
In Wellington the Newcastle musician silenced a rowdy Meow bar by beginning his first song unaccompanied, singing into a microphone at maximum volume. Having stunned everyone to attention in those first few bars, he then turned completely away from the mic and sang the rest of the song with no amplification at all.
It was an object lesson in dynamics and crowd control. And with his near-impenetrable Geordie accent and the raw, unbeautified melody, I felt I could have been hearing some British peasant singer from medieval times. Which, happens to be the setting of his latest album.
Peasant is a themed collection of songs that takes as its setting the Medieval kingdom of Bernicia, in what is now north east England and south east Scotland. The song titles suggest a cross section of a community: ‘Soldier’, ‘Weaver’, ‘Ogre’, ‘Beggar’, ‘Prostitute’.
‘Folk music’ is a touchstone for Dawson, and these songs tell the tales of actual folk, though the term is one he backs away from, perhaps because he has seen it colonised by a breed of acoustic musician he has little in common with. Dawson is no mellow strummer; his guitar parts are angular and spiky. And though his instrument of choice is a hollow-bodied acoustic guitar, in his hands it becomes a particular kind of tool, from which he extracts all kinds of expressive noises, sometimes tuning his strings low so they snap and slap in wild and percussive ways. He exaggerates and relishes in all the incidental scrapes and rattles that guitarists so often try to mask.
If Dawson comes closer than most to the spirit of true, pre-recording era folk music, he is also right in tune with the experimental music of the 20th century. Audible influences range from the avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey to jigs, reels and rock’n’roll.
Yet as far as he stretches things sonically, the sense of an ancient folk music – even if it’s a folk music of the imagination – pervades this whole of this muddy, messy monument of an album. And as Dawson lends his voice to his various conjured characters, with all their fears and hopes, I start to see them. Only the more I listen, the less they seem like ancient Britons and more like people you might encounter today. Maybe folks just haven’t really changed that much.
Peasant is available on Weird World
