From Geordie Mick to Geordie Richard, courtesy of Tim de Reuse…
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Tim de Reuse: It’s deliberately hard to parse, the way Dawson crams together unrelated signifiers of lower-class Britain into these rhyme schemes; the day-to-day can only be grasped as a bunch of unconnected, unordered images, pasted together awkwardly like an automatically-generated slideshow. The only times the song finds some momentum and smoothness are when it’s wailing about failures of the past (the sinister, drunk-fainting cry of “Let the darkness roll inside” buoyed by enthusiastic guitar strumming) or when it’s shooting for glimpses of relief in a possible future (the sudden burst of life that starts with “I can’t believe I’m a grandma” and lasts through the whole fantasy of Venice). In a scant two hundred-odd words, barely any of them repeated, we get not only a description of a wasted life but a feel for the texture of it – the impossibility of the narrator’s present moment and the ease with which she slips into any other point in time, aided by cheap wine and bad TV. I do not know much about daily life in northern England — I’ve only ever been to London, and then just for a few days — but I know that senior citizens not being able to pay their energy bills is an increasingly urgent topic, and that things in general are getting worse all across the UK, with public services unravelling and quality of life diminishing as a result; so, this song feels particularly prescient, perhaps because despite having demographically nothing in common with this alcoholic pensioner I can see the same tendencies in my own life, and the lives of many in my own neck of the woods.
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Scott Mildenhall: Richard Dawson’s Talking Heads strip away the artfulness in a way Alan Bennett never could. “Gondola” is pushed by the power of plain speaking along an unrefined route. Thora Hird would read it and ask where the clever bits are, but Dawson dares to have his characters just say things, finding the music within and laying it bare. Crucially, he doesn’t sound like a bad ventriloquist — affinity and affection abound, with their potential unextinguished.
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Alfred Soto: The way Richard Dawson pitches his melodies, “Gondola” plays like a four-minute chorus, perpetual climax; it forces me to listen to every well-turned use of the demotic. I’m not hearing the Method acting, though.
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Ian Mathers: Honestly, his album with Circle brought a little “I don’t know what” to Dawson’s work that, for me, pushed it into true greatness. The sparser backing here doesn’t seize me quite as much, but he’s still a wonderfully idiosyncratic voice (literally and figuratively) and I’m always glad to hear from him.
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Nortey Dowuona: A fond feeling is that you love your grandmother. Not at all. Love is caring for a elderly woman who can barely walk and breathe, cooking her favorite foods, listening intently to her stories, even taking her on holidays and watching the last few embers of her youth smolder in her eyes as she rushes down the hill or is carried over the grass, once remembering how easy it once was to sprint through the mud without budging much, now instead the frustrated complaints and rustling wheezing of a body having survived the unending torturous prolonging of a life long lived and long forgotten by even their beloved grandchildren, who rarely think to call or write or even visit until it is too late. There are the few of us who do not try, or attempt, who are reading this blog off their phone as they are lazing around the 2 story home assembled and bought long after the knee cartilage has begun to wear and grind against the kneecaps, close enough to hear the labored breathing, there to see the rheumy eyes flutter open and their lips cast off the last stories they still have yet to tell you. The body betrays you once you leave fighting age, leaving a crumbling ruin to harbor a once great mind grown weak and thin with disuse. Even the simplest dreams and delusions have long since deserted them. And there is nothing left to do but take a breath in the gondola, then finally float away.
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