The Newcastle singer-songwriter’s avant-folk stories of a troubled medieval age have striking relevance to our own fraying society
Who would have thought that one of the year’s most absorbing albums would have concerned the goings-on in the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bryneich, performed by a geordie with a nylon-stringed guitar, a busted amp and a penchant for impenetrable avant-folk? Richard Dawson’s latest long-player doesn’t exactly scream “Best of 2017”, but there was something in Peasant’s detailed vignettes of dark ages beggars, weavers and prostitutes that felt unexpectedly resonant in 2017, a timely work from another time.
Dawson has previous on excavating the distant past to explain the present. The Newcastle singer-songwriter’s 2013 album The Glass Trunk was inspired by a search for clippings on the subject of death at the Tyne and Wear museum archive. He dug up some remarkable finds – none more than the poem that inspired live favourite Poor Old Horse, a blackly comic account of three tanners yard workers’ fruitless and exceedingly brutal attempts to put a nag out of its misery. At the same time though there was something slightly callous about the exercise, a feeling that its author was a little too in love with the notion of the past as a period of brutality and squalor.
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