Richard Dawson
Sun 9 Nov 8:00pm
Sun 9 Nov 8:00pm
Heralded experimental folk troubadour in a special intimate performance. Plus support from Gwenifer Raymond
Northumberland’s modern folk poet is hitting middle-age: a stage he examines in his latest album, End of the Middle. Inspired by small-scale domesticity, Dawson’s sonic explorations, ranging from alt-rock to psychedelia, provide a laser-focused analysis of his everyday struggle to understand life in an increasingly unpredictable world.
About Richard Dawson
Richard Dawson is an English progressive folk singer-songwriter from Newcastle upon Tyne who writes narrative-based folk songs with experimental structures, and has received acclaim for his storytelling capabilities, emotional depth and sense of humour. Alongside his solo career, Dawson is also a member of the experimental pop band Hen Ogledd, and he has released electronic music under the name Eye Balls.
To date, Dawson has released eight solo studio albums, releasing his eighth studio album, End of the Middle, on February 14, 2025, with the album’s lyrical content focusing on “several generations of one family, and how patterns of behaviour repeat across them.”
Welsh instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond, is set to announce her third studio album, to be released September 5th on Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies. As celestial drones and mutant folk meet a frenetic blues that bends and twists like space-time, on her new album Raymond finds herself evoking the work of pioneering rocket scientists, the words of fictional hobo prophets and the concepts of mathematical infinity.
Raymond, via the circuitous trans-Atlantic journey of her demo – signed to San Francisco’s Tompkins Square Records in 2017, with who she released her first two albums. Her first proper gig was at the Thousand Incarnations of the Rose Festival in Maryland, where she hung with heroes such as Glenn Jones, Marisa Anderson, Daniel Bachman and Peter Walker and was presented by Henry Kaiser with a 1880s Joseph Bohmann guitar which she feels may be possessed by some fingerpicking demon.
The Guardian has described her as a “profound talent” whilst The Observer praised her “awe-inspiring technique and intense musicality”, and Uncut Magazine has championed her “fast-developing talents as a composer of eerie menace.” She has since toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Handsome Family, Lankum, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker, and Squid.


Britain’s best, most humane, songwriter
The Guardian