Fame can be a costly vice. That said, I don’t imagine anyone could have predicted it taking a toll from a Newcastle upon Tyne avant-folk singer. But it has, you can hear it in Richard Dawson’s voice. When I first experienced him live it was one of the single most powerful human performances I had ever seen. Saturday, 05 September wasn’t quite that.
However, and this is key, Richard Dawson at even 75% will still blow your mind. He is a unique performer, at once awkward onstage yet compelled onwards to share his world with whoever is gathered in the room.
He is clearly having some throat troubles - a result of an increasing demand for him to perform following the release of, for me at least, the best record of 2014, Nothing Important - but it takes nothing away from the show on the closing night of Beat Root, a festival of alternative roots music presented by Moving on Music.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was alone in even registering the slight alterations he’s been forced to make to some of his vocal performances - I’m not exaggerating the impact of the first time I saw him, I can relive it vividly from memory (I now know almost every word of every a cappella song he performers) and I have studied his recorded output on a weekly basis since - so my expectations perhaps exceeded most others.
Despite this, Richard Dawson, in Belfast’s Crescent Arts Centre was unique, engaging and utterly compelling. From opening the show from the floor, sans microphone, singing The Brisk Lad, to shamelessly headbanging while flawlessly manhandling his small bodied acoustic guitar, and to closing the show with a devastating performance of the song Nothing Important. Richard led the room on a merry ecstatic dance for well over an hour, with a set that even featured a joke about masturbation.
For me the entire night was a lead-in to Nothing Important. I was impatient to hear either of the two vocal songs from the aforementioned album and I was handsomely rewarded. Live, the vocals, and by extension the words, are much clearer than they are on the record. And the journey that you’re taken on over the course of some 16 minutes is one that is so intimately personal to Richard that it feels almost voyeuristic, but this is tempered by the knowledge that we’ve been invited on this trip. We’re free to follow Richard down these tunnels, but there is no guarantee that there’ll be sunshine at the end of each one. We can share a laugh at the “moon-faced vagabonds”, providing we’re also willing to share the burden of knowing that “he survived for seven days, before he slipped away”.
And share it we do. This isn’t just a folk gig, this is a communion. The setting is irrelevant, wishing that more of the guitar had been put through the PA doesn’t matter, even the person behind me having a chat (there is always fucking one!) can’t spoil this. For tonight we share a vision of a “knapsack made of wood”, we cringe at the thought of the men’s vain efforts against the “poor old horse” and we marvel at the reckless abandon of Richard’s guitar playing. It is a night unique and one that won’t/can’t be forgotten quickly.
I have told almost anyone that will listen - Nothing Important is a staggering piece of work, deserving of your complete attention and I am thrilled that such a dense and complex record has done so well, and that an artist like Richard Dawson is ostensibly making a career from his art. I also hope he is able to find a way to maintain both his work and his means of producing that work, his voice.
Because I am already impatiently waiting for his next record and the next opportunity to see him live. Richard Dawson at 100% will change your life. Richard Dawson at 75% will change your life. Richard Dawson at 50% will change your life. I think you get the point.
Richard Dawson played the Crescent Arts Centre on Saturday, 05 September for Beat Root - A Weekend of Alternative Roots Music in Belfast. Moving On Music next present Tempered - Contemporary Music Weekend on 05-08 November. See movingonmusic.com for more information.
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