Once upon a time, all music was live music. But, as David Byrne recounts in How Music Works, the act of recording changed the art itself.
With technology and humanity altering one another, we move like slow gods away from primary experience and towards secondary perception, trading our interventionism for omniscience. Richard Dawson’s 2022 album The Ruby Cord sees the defiantly original Geordie genius turning his peerless brain and voice to these concerns, roaring out experimental folk epics set in a world upended by virtual reality.
Let’s fast-forward to 4th May, 2023. The gig-goers nestled within St George’s Bristol are united in anticipation of Dawson and his band, due to perform tracks from The Ruby Cord. Either ironically or appropriately, director James Hankins has returned this concert to the recorded realm. Like the computer-swaddled cast of the album, we can glory in the excitement of live music without ever setting foot in the venue.
Shuffling onto stage and settling onto a stool, Dawson coaxes a web of notes from his guitar as he begins ‘The Hermit’, over half an hour in length. The musicians behind join him, sonic textures weaving in and out like minnows in a stream of meditative softness.
Finally, Dawson begins to sing, his gale-force bray uncompromising and unmistakeable. ‘The Hermit’ appears to depict a medieval figure living in bucolic seclusion until the twist reveals itself. Our protagonist accepts an upgrade to his ‘visual and ontoceptual cortexes’, his perfect life a technological hallucination.
But Dawson suggests that the Information Age, despite tragically making complacent hermits of us all, brings means for wonder too. He pauses, presses a finger to the bridge of his glasses, and the music surges like a ship on the sea. Full-body shivers kick in as the title character, ‘utterly awed’, discerns every spatial-temporal detail of the surrounding bees and fungi with new, superhuman eyes.
As the song reaches its coda, the band’s voices mingle in a melody that glows like the gold-accented altarpiece they sing beneath. Staying seated throughout, straggling hair framing his owlish features, Dawson’s self-presentation subtly evokes his musical hero, Qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. As a member of experimental pop group Hen Ogledd (two bandmates are backing him here) this isn’t the first time Dawson has bridged the binary of science and spirituality.
‘Any sufficiently advanced technology’, Arthur C. Clarke famously said, ‘is indistinguishable from magic.’ When most people perceive both software and human consciousness as immaterial mysteries, isn’t there something religious about our computer worship?
Between songs, Dawson remains as funny and self-deprecating as ever, acknowledging apologetically that his work can be an acquired taste. ‘Usually a very dull song,’ he says dryly of the next number, ‘but in this context it can sound like a pop banger.’
Admittedly he is right in thinking that ‘Thicker Than Water’ is an effective palate-cleanser, light-footed and spry. The lyrics are poignant and absurdly comic: ‘Within weeks, I managed to find the building where Mam and Dad’s earthen vessels are lain. And the dog’s. And my own.’
Even strapped into his VR goggles, our grieving hero cannot save his family. ‘I am in bits,’ Dawson deadpans jauntily, sounding more like the competitive dad of his 2019 football song ‘Two Halves’ than a man wracked with mourning. ‘I’ll just have to find another way to reach them.’
Next we move into discordant stomper ‘The Fool’. The chorus’s barbed falsetto rubs up against the clanging verses with Dawson in full wounded-town-crier mode. Heavy metal is a major passion of his, and the crashing, knotty heft the band generate here demonstrates exactly why, even as the atmosphere is full of familial tenderness and comfort.
‘Our tour last spring was a special time,’ Dawson recalls. ‘I was glad to be on the road with loved ones. The music was challenging but I mainly felt calm.’ This cooperative contentment never sands off Dawson’s visceral edge, but The Ruby Cord sees him working in an uncharacteristically sentimental mode. Take ‘Museum’, sung ‘from the point of view of something like a robot or a computer or an alien.’
Set 1200 years after the extinction of humanity, the song begins with Dawson’s guitar and Rhodri Davies’ harp weaving a graceful, lilting folk tune. The lyrics tell of a museum filled with endless footage of human activity, repeating in ‘loops of light forevermore.’
Sally Pilkington’s synth joins Dawson’s wordless vocalisations as the music begins to swell, conjuring heart-rending visions of our future chroniclers reaching back past time and space with longing fingers. Andrew Cheetham pounds his drums behind Dawson as he strums his guitar wildly and wails into the mic. The churning hope and sadness they summon sails far, far above the concept’s potential archness in a torrent of warmth and feeling.
Although recorded in May, an almost festive air flavours the communal former-church setting and many of the songs. ‘Horse and Rider’ is a case in point, with a touch of the dance theme from The Snowman suggested in Angharad Davies’ loping violin. It’s hard to listen to without swaying along, and you may well end up wiping a tear from your eye.
We have a grand finale yet to come. The room darkens, Dawson stands, and the band strike up ‘Ogre’, from his 2017 album Peasant. Mirroring how The Ruby Cord illuminates the present by imagining the future, ‘Ogre’ draws a line between Middle Ages monster-hunting and the contemporary scapegoating practised by politicians and media outlets. In less capable hands this subject matter could nudge at the door of flippancy, but Dawson’s writing is so imaginatively rich that we need not fear.
‘The heartbroken potter’s idiot boy was snatched from the speltfield,’ he shrieks, like some hysterical Anglo-Saxon TV reporter. He finally breaks into a throat-shredding yowl as he stomps and thrashes, indulging his inner metal-head and leading into a glorious, soaring, ritualistic climax.
As the song grows more and more dissonant, Dawson drops to his knees, rocking back and forth, scraping his guitar to veritable pieces. When he rises again and the band return to the opening refrain, it seems to belong to a different world.
If any sufficiently advanced singer-songwriter is, in their own way, as good as a magician too, Dawson may as well be a grandmaster of wizardry. With humanity heading further into a world where data-guzzling neural networks threaten to siphon off creative endeavour, here is a poet and musician who stands as testament to the power of community, albeit with a resolutely individual imagination which the cleverest computer could never replace. There are millions of interchangeable machines. There’s only one Richard Dawson.
The Ruby Cord Live is out on Friday 8th December – pre-order via Domino Music
Richard Dawson is on tour throughout December 2023, with tickets available here:
6th Dec – Norwich, Norwich Arts Centre *
7th Dec – Brighton, St Georges Church **
8th Dec – Nottingham, The Boat Club **
9th Dec – Chester, St Mary’s **
10th Dec – Swansea, Bunkhouse **
12th Dec – Falmouth, The Cornish Bank **
13th Dec – Bristol, Bristol Beacon (Lantern Hall) **
16th Dec – Newcastle, Victoria Tunnel *
17th Dec – Newcastle, Victoria Tunnel *
* = solo show
** = with Andrew Cheetham (drums)
Find out more about Richard Dawson on his official website
Review by Poppy Bristow
Still from The Ruby Cord Live, directed by James Hankins
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