6 minute read
RICHARD DAWSON
Image by Kuba Ryniewicz
AS THE GREATEST LIVING GEORDIE© PREPARES TO RELEASE PERHAPS HIS MOST AMBITIOUS RECORD YET, LEE FISHER ASKED HIM ABOUT LANGUAGE, TECHNOLOGY AND CLAVIGERS
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Interviews with Richard Dawson end up as wonderful, free-flowing conversations that are, to be frank, a fucker to squeeze into a NARC. interview wordcount. We were ostensibly discussing The Ruby Cord, his seventh album and the final part of a putative trilogy that also includes Peasant and 2020, with the new album taking us into a version of the future, but one that’s seen through the prism of video games and fantasy. As with Peasant, one of the striking things about the album – and about the mammoth 40-minute opening track The Hermit – is the inventive use of archaic or obscure language: clavigers and mantuas and cobles.
“Peasant afforded a good opportunity to use all kinds of old language”, he explains. “But with this one I was thinking about a place where people would have access to information at the blink of an eyelid. It allowed me to open up this possibility of using a more technical language. I always have this thing of like, ‘what would the person in the song use? What would they think?’ I mean, we could talk about this all day, it’s one of my favourite topics. And I love the combination of a word with melody and how that can also change the meaning of both the word and the melody. So there was this chance to really push the language, it’s descriptive of the kind of information overload and this overlapping of different styles of language as well.”
Richard mentions some authors he’s read before and after recording the album (like Ursula LeGuin and Brian Catling) and I wondered if he could ever see himself writing a novel, but he’s not sure.
“I would love to, I think more and more how much I would love to do that. But I always simultaneously think I might not be able to do it very well… I just think there’s such good writers out there, while I feel like I’m some distance along the road with making songs. I put a lot of work into that and if I’ve still got further to go, then I should do that. I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon in the last year or two, and Iris Murdoch, and you just read these things and go ‘This is so, so good.’ And I think I would just be pouring mucky water around the edge of the well. To me, when you come across a great book, it just seems so unfathomable and it’s like the most incredible thing that a human could make, even more than a film, which I know is technically a bigger endeavour, but I sort of could grasp the different parts of how you’d make a film.”
Speaking of films, The Hermit is being released with a ’40-minute pop video’ which doesn’t seem like an obvious move. “I think it was just a kind of perverse thing really,” he admits. “I just thought ‘well, that should be the single’. Everything seems to be moving faster and faster these days, with TikTok or YouTube. People digest music on Spotify with advert breaks actually in the middle of songs now. So I like the idea of this contradiction of making a pop video for a very long song.”
The Hermit might be his most beautiful song yet; a closing section layering a small group of friends (Nev Clay, Cath and Phil Tyler, Yakka Doon and his Hen Ogledd bandmates among others) in a gentle choral section that ruins me. Nev Clay had mentioned that the session felt emotionally charged and Richard felt it too. “I think when I was making it, it felt good. I think I’ve had that sensation a few times before, doing some things on Peasant. And when I did the vocal for Jogging, I had the same feeling of ‘this feels a like a lot!’ It’s so nice to have friends come into the studio. Because it’s quite a gentle part of the song as well, it was like doing a group meditation or something.”
I wondered if Richard ever considered the possibility – or otherwise – of performing something live as he was writing it. “It’s not so much, ‘how are we going to do it?’ It’s more like ‘how will that be received?’ Towards the end of the 2020 gigs when we were doing the trio, they felt almost like rock concerts and it was kind of exciting, but I don’t really don’t wanna go down that road. So this is sort of the opposite of that… I mean, I hope people will enjoy it but I could imagine people might come to a concert and be disappointed because they might want to hear the uptempo 2020 stuff.”
One of the other standout songs (let’s face it, everything on The Ruby Cord is a standout song) is Horse & Rider, which to me feels rousing like a school hymn. “That tune’s been kicking about for a while and I’ve tried recording it in various guises, but it was never the right thing. I even tried to get it on Glass Trunk. I just haven’t been able to shake off the melody of it. But then it just came together really easily for this one. I like that it has the appearance of being this uplifting, rousing, carefree, happy song. But after the album that’s come before, we already know that things aren’t necessarily how they seem.”
There was more of course, about Rhodri Davies’ astonishing harp and how words work and about his deep love for Circle. Richard Dawson’s mind is a wonderful thing, and The Ruby Cord is one of its most remarkable manifestations so far.
Richard Dawson releases The Ruby Cord via Weird World/ Domino on 18th November. The Hermit film tours selected cinemas throughout November, including a screening and Q&A at Newcastle’s Star & Shadow on Thursday 17th November. www.richarddawson.net
