(4 / 5)
The River Ouse has a particular atmosphere around Lewes in East Sussex. It winds slowly through the landscape towards the sea, past reeds, fields and ancient streets, seemingly oblivious to everything along its banks.
Yet there is something about its quiet beauty that invites another interpretation: that beneath the peaceful surface lie generations of stories, tragedies and secrets. You could imagine the river as the town’s silent witness, carrying what it has seen, steadily towards the Channel. It is this tension between innocence and darkness that Mark Chadwick explores on “Ouse Dragon”.
Best known as the frontman of the band Levellers, Mark Chadwick takes a strikingly different route here. His first solo album since 2014’s “Moment”, “Ouse Dragon” is a six-track atmospheric journey through his adopted home, combining electronics, acoustic instrumentation and storytelling. It feels like an imagined journey through Lewes and the surrounding countryside, where the familiar gradually becomes strange.
The album grew from a live multimedia project presented as an immersive exploration of the darker side of Lewes, involving music, dance, photography, film, visual art and poetry, with collaborators including choreographer Nick Pile, artist James DiBiase, photographer Nigel French, filmmaker Warren Dudley and poet Charlotte Gann. That wider creative approach seems to have seeped into the record: the music is unusually visual, conjuring places and images as much as telling stories.
There is also something fitting about the album’s title. Sussex has its own tradition of water dragons, or “Knuckers”, mythical creatures said to inhabit deep pools. The best-known tale comes from Lyminster, where a “Knucker Dragon” supposedly terrorised the local population before being defeated by a young hero.
The stories on the album are darker still. Mark has said that the events and experiences behind the songs are true, touching on murder, suicide, spirits and the unexplained. The nine-minute title track, “Ouse Dragon”, establishes the mood with its slowly unfolding electronic and acoustic textures, while “Chrysanthemums & Diadems”, inspired by a real local murder, is suddenly interrupted by police audio, bringing an uncomfortable jolt of reality into the music.
“Dance Of The Crows” turns towards the landscape, creating a hazy, dreamlike impression of the Sussex countryside, while “Leap” is perhaps the most melodic track, its gentler feel contrasting with its subject of local suicide.
“Bearing Witness” brings a more recognisable folk pulse, with the rhythm feeling like a steady progression through the landscape. The closing “Paxos Room”, named after a much-loved Lewes character, takes the album somewhere stranger, moving from local memory into stories of abduction, possession and other dimensions.
For me, the record’s sense of place is its greatest strength. Living nearby, I can relate to this feeling of the timeless, almost innocent beauty of the landscape, set against the weight of its underlying history, the haunting stories, tragedies and secrets that seem to belong to the place itself, all carried quietly along by the River Ouse as it slowly meanders towards the sea. There is something particularly dark about that contradiction: the beauty is always there, but so is the shadow beneath it.
Anyone expecting the communal charge of Levellers will find themselves somewhere very different. But that departure is precisely what makes “Ouse Dragon” so special. Mark Chadwick creates a haunting atmosphere, allowing the river, the landscape and the people who inhabit it to take centre stage.
Ultimately, “Ouse Dragon” is about what places remember – memories, tragedies, folklore and unanswered questions. The Ouse becomes a witness, a keeper of stories, quietly carrying everything it has seen towards the sea. Beauty and darkness occupy the same landscape. Lewes has always had its ghosts. The “Ouse Dragon” has seen them all.
- Mark Chadwick solo dates September 2026:
2nd September – Colchester Arts Centre
11th September – Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis
12th September – Bedford Esquires
20th September – Foxlowe Arts Centre, Staffordshire
27th September – Georgian Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees
By Manja Williams / Photos by Steve Gullick (Band) & Ami Barwell (Mark)
(1 / 5) ‘Dull Zone’
(2 / 5) ‘OK Zone’
(3 / 5) ‘Decent Zone’
(4 / 5) ‘Super Zone’
(5 / 5) ‘Awesome Zone’
Recent Comments