(with support from ACCÜ)
Tickets are £10/£8.
Doors will open at 7pm.
RICHARD DAWSON
Rising up from the bed of the River Tyne, a voice that crumbles and soars, that is steeped in age-old balladry and finely-chiselled observations of the mundane, Richard Dawson is a skewed troubadour at once charming and abrasive. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing stumbles from music-hall tune-smithery to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and teetering on the edge of feedback. His songs are both chucklesome and tragic, rooted in a febrile imagination that references worlds held dear and worlds unknown.
Both live and on record Dawson is a barrage of musical expression and personality. A shambling exterior, amidst tales of pineapples and underpants, ghosts of family members and cats, his stage presence is at once inviting and awe-inspiring. The visceral power of his voice against the lurching modality of his guitar lines conjure false memories of Tim Buckley and Richard Youngs duetting with Sir Richard Bishop and Zoot Horn Rollo. There is a rawness to the music that embodies timeworn singing traditions – the fire and pestilence gait of the Sacred Harp singings, the fractured call and response of the Gaelic Psalms, the unbridled power of Mongolian throat singers – its power tempered by intimacy, flecked with human emotion anchored by a sense of place.
“Dawson emerges as a talented chronicler of the tiniest, realest details” – NME
“At times deeply, painfully intimate, but also witty, bawdy, surreal, disquieting, nostalgic, brash and fearlessly individual” – The Quietus
“An odyssey of intelligent observation, morose humour and north-eastern magic” 5* – Record Collector
“Weirdly engrossing” 9/10 – Vice
“madcap, abrasive and, at times, laugh out loud funny” – Q
“Nothing Important is a rhapsody of the material, the messy, and the intensely human” 9/10 – Loud & Quiet