Dean Wilson: Voices from the other side - new albums reviewed
‘THE VERY BEST OF US’: Poet Dean Wilson. Picture by Dave Lee
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Review of two new albums by poet Dean Wilson - Sometimes I’m So Happy I’m Not Safe On The Stage and Beachfinds
Dean Wilson, the self-styled Fourth Best Poet in Hull and Second Best in Withernsea, has not one, but two new albums out. One of them, Sometimes I’m So Happy I’m Not Safe On The Stage is a live performance recorded last year over two electric nights at Wrecking Ball Cafe.
For those of you unfortunate enough to have never seen Dean live, it’s a fine souvenir of an artist at the height of his powers. Poems old and new reduce a large and loudly affectionate audience to fits of hysterical mirth. Dean inspires a lot of love from the people who come to his shows, and the warmth between them radiates off this recording. The strange and lovely thing about Dean’s poems is that for all their brevity and simplicity, I still hear new insights to laugh along with every time I watch him perform. It’s like a bottle of medicine that never runs out. Leaves you with a rosy glow. The gaps between Dean’s gigs are always too long, so invest in this live album to keep you smiling through the coming winter months.
The other release is a collaboration between Dean and New York City/Berlin-based singer/ composers Erik Leuthäuser and Arta Jēkabsone, entitled Beachfinds. This finds a selection of Dean’s poems arranged into gorgeously sparse new shapes by the tasteful application of jazz and folk-infused melodies.
Erik had found a copy of one of Dean’s books in London and read it to his friend Arta while they were recording in New York. East Coast of Yorkshire meets Berlin and Latvia via the East Coast Of America. It’s an intriguing, seemingly incongruous meeting of worlds, which works like a particularly breathtaking dream. My battered lugs are more accustomed to hearing Dean’s tragicomic tales of love and lighthouses delivered in his trademark flat, beseeching Hull vowels. There’s a beguiling oddness to hearing the words “I put the blue bin out in my best blue pyjamas” sung by a voice as clear and as pure as cold water drawn from a well in a fairytale village. This air of ethereal otherness hangs throughout the rest of the collection, like Scandinavian mist.
The arrangements are largely acapella; Erik and Arta’s inter-twining voices supported only by occasional percussive stomps and handclaps, and multi-layered clouds of goldplated vocal harmonies that sound like The Carpenters have descended from heaven and taken up residence. The only other instrumentation featured is on the aforementioned Blue, which sounds like the closing credits of a Disney Christmas special, all plaintive piano and shimmering strings.
The rest of the album is painted in the primary colours of voice. Dean’s words overlap, the breathless nervy rhythms of performance are slowed down and gently tugged to one side. The effect is simple ad stunning. Imagine 10cc’s I’m Not In Love re-written by a lovesick former postman who wanders the beaches of Withernsea accompanied by a host of heavenly angels from the 5th Dimension. The 60s group, I mean. It’s that strange and that good.
Dean himself is utterly elated with the results. He says he loves it because “it doesn’t sound like I had owt to do with it”, which is typically self-effacing of the great man. He did, of course have everything to do with it, but we get what he means. Handing your words over to someone else to speak - or in this case, sing - often results in several new shades of meaning emerging.
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Dean cites a poem like Monday, which he previously dismissed as “just a list of something I did one Monday when I was bored” as an example of Erik and Arta’s interpretation elevating “an average poem into something beautiful”. Dean is only half right here - Monday is not an average poem, it’s a poem about the average and the everyday. Beachfinds makes it a triumphant and gently defiant fingersnapping celebration of the mundane. Similarly, Take Me Up the Lighthouse is prised from its saucy seaside postcard setting and elevated into something verging on celestial. As Dean observes, “sometimes I see God in the eyes of my favourite bingo caller”. Erik and Arta know what this feels like too. You can hear it in their voices.
Beachfinds is a very special and affecting collaboration. And aptly named, too. It’s like a beautifully polished piece of sea glass held up to the sun. A bit like Dean Wilson himself. Hats off to Erik and Arta for taking Dean’s words and dressing them up in new and different clothes. As for the rest of us, let us continue to cherish Dean Wilson and his work - he is the very best of us.
Sometimes I’m So Happy I’m Not Safe On The Stage and Beachfinds are available from Irregular Patterns