Richard Dawson’s End of the Middle is a masterpiece of folk storytelling.
Written in his Tyneside allotment, with ‘wasps and wandering horses for company’ its simplicity is deceptive. There are subtle echoes of his past albums, but this time, there’s no medieval folklore, no daily grind, no shimmering digital dreamscape. Instead, his focus is more intimate – a stark, poetic meditation on the home, family, memory, and the weight of time itself.
It begins with ‘Bolt’, a mundane afternoon snapped into sharp relief by an act of God. The house is filled with familiar sounds—Dad’s whistling in the bath, Mam’s reading yesterday’s news, the phone is ringing. Then, a lightning flash. The world is peeled back to its frame, light darting exposing everything, before vanishing again. A wrong number, the receiver replaced moments before. The phone now a blackened beige flower on the wall. “That was so close. You were so close. I almost recognised the voice”
This is the record’s trick—turning the domestic into something mythic, something trembling on the edge of revelation. ‘Gondola’ finds its protagonist adrift in time, floating between Piers Morgan on daytime TV, unreturned calls and the last dregs of Blossom Hill. “I never got to go to Venice,” she sighs, standing under the sterile lights of a Lidl booze aisle, like its an existential crossroads where cheap wine and lost dreams gather in the same basket. Yet, Dawson’s compassion for his subjects shines in the closing lines, even if it is just wishful thinking: “There we are beneath the Rialto Bridge, huddled in a gondola.”
‘Bullies’ digs deeper, tracing the echoes of violence that reverberate across generations. A child cowers in a puddle, spit landing on his cheek. Years later, his son breaks a classmate’s jaw. The cycle turns, the roles shift, and Dawson leaves the listener stuck in the gap between cause and consequence. “I know you’ve got a good heart,” he says, but can knowing that ever be enough?
End of the Middle doesn’t dwell solely in the past. ‘Boxing Day Sales’, which he wryly dubs ‘the pop song,’ unfolds in the fluorescent glow of post-Christmas consumerism. A chance encounter—pleasantries exchanged over scones, polite enquiries that skim the surface. “And are things any better between you and Tom?” The question lands with a thud, swallowed up by a world of stainless-steel espresso machines and crane-patterned kimonos, where half-price distractions offer momentary relief from wounds that never truly heal.
Dawson explores the mental toll of these wounds in ‘Knot’, a wedding song warped into something deeply absurd. A golden retriever waddles down the aisle, vol-au-vents collapse under the weight of expectation, and the narrator spirals, lost in the numbing fog of self-loathing. “My soul is sick—a herring-gull in an oil slick.” This is celebration seen as horror, a grotesque theatre of forced smiles and barely held-together emotions. But then, a shift: the morning after, the lake is still, the curlews call. “There must be a road nearby.” A quiet suggestion that change, however hesitant, is possible.
The album softens with ‘Polytunnel’, where Dawson retreats into the rhythms of nature, into the quiet sanctuary of an allotment. The song hums with the steady, grounding repetition of small tasks—tying sweet peas, thinning leeks, waging war on bindweed. But there’s an unease beneath it, a searching quality, as if these simple acts of care are standing in for something larger. “Would you like another cuppa?’” he sings, a phrase that carries more than hospitality—it’s a call for reassurance, a reminder that tending to the living, no matter how uncertain, is still an act of hope.
‘Removals Van’ captures the wrench of moving home, where memories cling stubbornly to the walls as the boxes pile up. Dawson paints the scene with flickering images—LEGO on the floor, Erasure’s Blue Savannah on the car stereo, a father’s redundancy unraveling the fabric of home. Moving house becomes a metaphor for transition, not just in space but in identity. The past intrudes on the present; childhood recollections blur with the uncertainty of adulthood. ‘Where am I?’ he asks in the dark, not just about a new address. The song wrestles with the quiet struggle to build something new without being dragged under by what came before.
And then, finally, ‘More Than Real’. After an album of relative restraint, Dawson lets go completely with a solid emotional suckerpunch. The song unfolds like the slow dimming of a bedside light, a breath that struggles to find its way into the next moment. A dying man reckons with the weight of his choices, his regrets condensed into a single refrain: “It ends right here.’” But resolution is never that simple.
Then, the handover. Pilkington’s voice steps in—not as an interruption, but as an inevitable shift, the presence of someone arriving too late yet still determined to offer something. “I don’t know if he can hear us, but I think he can.” The song doesn’t build to a climax; instead, it settles, softens, offering only the quiet gravity of presence. Love here isn’t a declaration—it’s the touch of a hand, the hush of a room waiting for something that may never come. A final note, left hovering in the air.
Dawson remains one of our most vital songwriters, mapping out the overlooked beauty and bruises of everyday life. His voice is divisive, whimsically naive one moment, bellowing like an Old Salt the next. But his lyrics truly shape worlds, all delivered with the familial warmth of a sincere, but serious chat with a concerned relative down the pub. He’s called this album “the end of a phase” – a taking stock, a moment of pause before stepping into something unknown. If End of the Middle marks an ending, it’s one without a full stop. And somewhere, in the distance, a phone is ringing.
‘End of the Middle’ is released on 14th February, via Weird World / Domino.ary, via Weird World / Domino.
