Rich(ard) Dawson returns with news of his latest record End of the Middle. 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. “Everything is held back and soft.” By stripping things to a bare bones essence, what is revealed is a remarkably poised, oddly elegant and beautiful collection of songs – unquestionably some of Dawson’s finest work to date.
The title of the new album End of the Middle is a suitably slippery contradiction, one that invites multiple interpretations: Middle-aging? Middle-class? The middle-point of Dawson’s career? The centre of a record? Centrism in general? Polarisation? The possibility of having a balanced discussion about anything? Stuck in the middle with you? Middle England? Decide for yourself on February 14th 2025.
Also shared today is new single, “Polytunnel”, it warmly depicts a gardener engaged in the noble, calming, mysterious business of raising vegetables whilst dealing with illness. Despite its pretty, almost breezy folk-pop-esque sound, it 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.”
The video – directed by James Hankins – was filmed at several allotments and its all-ages, all-faces quiet joy is a beautiful tribute to these communal, alternative spaces.
As Rich sat in his own allotment shed writing lyrics for the 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. 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.”
End of the Middle is richly intricate, evocative, tactile and almost has the transportive ability to put you in the places and scenarios it describes. Partly inspired by his love of the films of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, the album focuses 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.”
To further hit home the significance of the title and 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.
Faye MacCalman
Faye MacCalman is a performer, composer-songwriter and improviser on saxophone, clarinet, voice and electronics. She fuses experimental songwriting with free-weaving melodies and enveloping rhythms drawing on jazz, folk and rock music inspired by under the surface emotional worlds; playfully merging magical realism with raw realities.
“Providing food for thought on what jazz is and can become” ~ Kevin Le Gendre, BBC.
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