More and more I’ve come to think of it as really some kind of conscious, alive creature.” “Over the last few years the music becomes more like a plant. Part of the reason he’s reluctant to get into the political ramifications of his songs is that the process of their creation is increasingly mysterious to him.

It’s working very well from a certain point of view.” The way the Tories have dismantled the welfare system, he says, “is very considered. “The song’s pretty troubling, I think, in a way the others aren’t, in that the rest of the people are quite hopeful and not disaffected.” He sighs. So, he wrote about a civil servant who can’t take the coldness of the system anymore. I thought, next best thing, what’s the most compassionate thing you could do?” He initially tried to write a song about his experience of the system, he says, documenting the ins and outs of the application process. It’s getting slightly worse over recent years but nothing drastic.” How is his eye condition at the moment? “It’s a very steady decline and then it will probably hit a sharp decline at some point. The Royal National Institute for the Blind helped us. I had a kind of shit time appealing it and then took it to tribunal and won eventually. “Not only did I not qualify but I got zero points across the board. Under the Tories’ “reforms” the rules were changed and he lost the payment. Dawson had been in receipt of the disability living allowance because he has an eye condition called juvenile retinoschisis. It’s informed by Dawson’s own experience of Britain’s social security bureaucracy. It’s about a civil servant who can’t face hearing “the strangled voices of all the people that I’ve failed”. I do think contradiction is like a governing forceĪnother song on the record, Civil Servant, was also inspired by a real event in Dawson’s life. “Maybe I didn’t have a Doctor Pepper with my Chinese buffet. “That was real,” says Dawson, unexpectedly. One part in 2020 that is, in fact, directly autobiographical is the opening verse of Black Triangle, in which the narrator and his friend “Neil” are returning from an “Oriental buffet” when they see a UFO. If I listen carefully, he tells me, he’s doesn’t gender the protagonists in most of his songs. I ask him again about his relationship to the “guy in Jogging”. Whether it’s politics or morals or emotions, it seems like a vital thing to be able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and see things from multiple perspectives.” Autobiographical I don’t think it’s a bad thing if someone is singing about themselves. I don’t know if that’s because of the way songs have been used to sell us things or what. Why does he think people struggle with fiction in songs? “I think I’d say that people’s expectations have been lowered about what a song can do. And loads of people were trying to sponsor us as well.” (At the end of Jogging, the character asks if the listener will sponsor him in a charity run.) “I got some emails off people after I said that I actually hate jogging, ‘that song means so much to me and I was so disappointed’. That's the one place in the record I think the writing is not so good.'Ī number of listeners took the story of his song Jogging – about a redundant school-councillor turned freelance graphic designer who deals with his anxiety by jogging – to be autobiographical. There is one line in The Queen's Head which is about the 'fatheaded butcher' when I was thinking about those f**king fatheaded pigs Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. I didn't want to be about my feelings on things. I admire a lot of people who make protest art but sometimes it can be polemical and didactic. 'I don't want to tell people what to think. 'I only wanted to try and maybe make a kind of how it really feels, what the world is like,' he says. In some ways, 2020 feels like a post-Brexit state of the nation address, but when I meet Dawson in the Bodega, a pub in Newcastle, the city where he lives, he says that that wasn’t his intention. He gets a lot of small details into his songs about the frayed but extraordinary edges of ordinary lives. On his latest record 2020, Dawson plays strangely jarring but beautiful guitar and synth motifs, over which he moves from a powerful folk baritone to a sweet, soulful falsetto, in order to tell beautifully observed stories about anxiety-prone jogging enthusiasts, flooded publicans, austerity-jaded civil servants, exhausted, ennui-filled warehouse workers and a homeless person sharing an alleyway with a dead dog. Richard Dawson is one of the most interesting and emotionally resonant musicians in the UK.

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