Rumour and Sigh: Richard Thompson Turns 75
Celebrating the life and career of the English guitar guru
It was March, 1991 and I was packed into a small out-of-way pub, the Blackthorne Tavern, south of Boston.
A venue much smaller in size than Richard Thompson could play, has played and would play — a real treat for those able to get in. This was his second show of the night.
Over the course of this set, Thompson has taken us down many a dark road this evening — a lot of heartbreak (“When the Spell Is Broken”), some subway violence (“Killerman Gold Posse”), a bit of do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night rage (“Wall of Death”), a little mayhem (“Psycho Street”) and considerable melancholia (“Waltzing’s for Dreamers”). His next-to-last song contained this cheery thought, one I do not disagree with, sung as a lullaby: “Life seems so rosy when you’re in the cradle/I’ll be a friend and tell you what’s in store/There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow.”
Heavy stuff. So, what does Thompson select to close the hour-and-45 minute show? Why none other than “Ca Plane Pour Moi,” French singer Plastic Bertrand’s deliriously goofy, Ramones-like novelty semi-hit from the early new wave era. There was Thompson — esteemed English folkie and fingerpicker deluxe — wailing away on an acoustic guitar, singing silly in French.
VIDEO: Plastic Bertrand “Ca Plane Pour Moi”
Terms such as “dark” and “dour” often seem appropriate when you think of Thompson, who turns 75 on April 3rd. But Thompson — who came to fame in Fairport Convention and has expanded his musical vocabulary as a solo artist and collaborator — is not all that. He did a Buddy Holly medley “Rave On”/”Not Fade Away” and he seamlessly segued from “Wall of Death” into The Searchers’ “Needles and Pins.”
And during his chat between songs, and occasionally in song, Thompson proved himself one of the sharpest, most self-deprecating wits on the circuit. “Some people say `Why do you keep writing the same song?’ ” he said, from the tiny stage in front of the fireplace. “I call it `Style, man.’ ” As we were seeing the second of two shows that night, he addressed those who’d bought tickets to both as “you crazy, wacky rich people.”
The tickets, you see, were $22 (not cheap in ’91) and many stood long in the rain, awaiting entrance — but since the club’s capacity was but 120, this really was like seeing a star, A-level musician in your living room. (Note: fireplace.) A star? Well, yes, but Thompson preferred to refer to himself as a shameless aging rocker and apologized that since he’d played all the “hits” and good stuff during the first set, he would treat the second set’s full house to “dreck and dross.”
What we got: Several new songs, a couple of Fairport gems, a bit of the more avant-garde music he’d done with Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser, a couple of obscurities and an an entrée from artist genuinely willing to take requests — that’s where the Holly medley came from. (During the first set, he played a request for The Beatles’ “Revolution.”)
As always with Thompson, you got a probing mind, a deeply resonant voice and extraordinary finger-picking: He’s a triple-threat, at home acoustically or fronting a full-tilt band.
“This is the tour that doesn’t exist,” said Thompson, after the set, of this low-profile jaunt. Thompson and his then-wife-manager Nancy Covey were traveling to out-of-the-way “vacation” spots around the country to see old friends and play out-of-the-way venues. They returned to the Blackthorne, he said, because of “friendly people, good food and my mortgage.”
In 2024, as I write, Thompson’s on that kind of circuit again, although the clubs around New England, New York and the Eastern Seaboard are not quite as tiny. (He’s at The Cut in Gloucester, MA. April 4.) The rationale for the small club non-metropolis tour?
“I can’t exist happily without performing fairly regularly,” explained Thompson via email. “When I have a record released, we do bigger tours that hit the major markets – but that’s only every few years. In between these, my kindly agent will find me things to do in secondary and tertiary markets. The nice thing about these shows is the smaller venue size, and the more intimate relationship with the audience.”
His latest album, Ship to Shore, comes out May 31, his first studio disc since 2018. Next month: Rock & Roll Globe will feature a new interview with him about that record.
Thompson is now at a point where some of his peers have stopped creating new music and releasing albums. Some of that may because of songwriting burnout, but it also surely has to do with the decreasing numbers of CD sales due to downloads and, especially, streaming, which pays minimally.
Thompson concedes that this new-ish paradigm is a consideration, one reason, he says, why ticket prices are so high and so many older artists are on tour. That’s where the money is made. But as to writing and releasing music, Thompson says, “I like making albums. I’ll keep making albums and if I have to make them in my home studio for no money, I’ll still do them. But it’s all about ‘live’ now and it has been for some time.”
Three more flashbacks:
From 1992, Berklee Performance Center, Boston: Once again, Thompson proves himself the John Cleese of rock ‘n’ roll, or folk, or whatever genre you want to put him in. At least some of the time. Thompson’s quick wit — from playing a riff from “Wipe Out” and “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” to introducing the “psychopath part of the show” — is marvelous, and he uses it to contrast with some songs that can get pretty heavy duty: Considerations of suicide in “Shoot Out the Lights,” pride, rage and lust in “I Feel So Good,” betrayal in “She Twists the Knife,” melancholy in “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” and an alcoholic’s bittersweet despair in “God Loves a Drunk.” Yes, the Thompson crazy-quilt has quite a few colors in it but certainly one of them is black.
From 2017: He played a solo show at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. – notable for, among other things, pulling the pathos out of Britney Spears’ “Oops! I Did It Again” – he welcomed my wife and I into the inner sanctum of backstage post-show decadence. There no bowls of cocaine and scantily clad hookers. It seems a local friend of his had gifted him with most delicious cookies and he was very willing to share. My wife and I agree they were the best cookies we’d ever had.
VIDEO: Richard Thompson “Oops! I Did It Again”
And from 1994: Grunge was still going strong so I thought I’d ask – as Thompson was the master of so many guitar styles – if he might perhaps even be the Godfather of Grunge? (I mean, aside from everything else.)
“Well, I think so,” he said. “I was doing the `holes in the plaid shirts’ back in ’67.”
So, I wondered if Thompson was a musician on the move, a pioneer on the proper path?
“Um, yes, sometimes,” Thompson said, with a slight laugh. “I’m not sure where the path is, or if I find the path I’m not sure where it’s going.” Cheerfully mixing metaphors, he added, “Generally speaking, I think I have a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.”
All right, would it be fair to say Thompson is the master of the dark and mordant? I was thinking particularly of the tack taken on his then current LP, Miror Blue.
“Dark and mordant?” said Thompson. “Aargh. Um, I can’t remember what’s on it, it’s been so long. Hmmm. Dark and mordant? No, I see it as a varied mixture of moods, reflections on the human condition.”
Actually, a mixture of moods has long been what Thompson’s music has been about. He came to prominence at a young age, as a co-leader of the exemplary folk-rock band Fairport Convention; he later blossomed in a duo format with his then-wife Linda; he also recorded a body of solo work, both acoustic and electric, that ranks among contemporary rock’s finest. He’s also played as a session guitarist on numerous avant-garde and pop side projects. He’s one of rock’s most well-respected musicians. When Thompson plays the house, he can rock it with his touring band or bring it to a hush on his own.
For Thompson, music has always been his lifeblood. “I think one of the reasons I started to play music and to write music,” he said, “was because I found it hard to communicate. Of course, I could communicate some things, but there were other things I couldn’t. I think the reason anybody who dances or paints or does any of that stuff does it because you’re trying to express the inexpressible.”
Thompson, like many songwriters, resists defining his songs, arguing that by defining them you shut them down in the minds of listeners. “Just as music is open-ended,” he said, “if you’re going to talk about music then it’s nice to talk about it in an open-ended way, a nice sort of misleading way.
“You’re dealing with an ambiguous thing, something you don’t really understand yourself. That’s the nature of creating something: you don’t really have a hold of it. You can’t pin it down. The fact that it is that you have to chase this bright, elusive butterfly of a . . . whatever it is.”
One of the popular misconceptions about Thompson — the same thing that’s hovered around folks like Lou Reed and Trent Reznor, to name just two — was that he lives the life of the tortured artist. Thompson did, certainly, write a particularly dark body of work for Shoot Out the Lights around the time of his breakup with Linda Thompson. I didn’t see that supporting tour but word is the tension on stage was palpable.
AUDIO: Richard and Linda Thompson “Shoot Out The Lights”
But, even if Shoot Out the Lights had some songs that just had to be personal, Thompson said, he’s no musical diarist.
“I’m trying to write fiction,” he said. “I’m trying to write stories. I’m trying to use my imagination, which shouldn’t seem all that unusual.”
However, as songwriters sometimes aren’t given the same artistic license as filmmakers and novelists — hence the violence-in-rap controversy during the ‘90s — Thompson realizes that art and reality might get mixed up in listeners’ minds.
“If you write a novel,” he said, “then you, as the author, stand at the back and pull strings. But in many ways, if you like, the ‘myth of reality’ is reinforced by the fact that a) I’m the songwriter and b) I’m the performer. As a songwriter, I have to make the story convincing and as a performer I have to reinforce that with a convincing performance. Otherwise, there’s no point in doing any of it.”
Thompson laughed. “So, in a sense, that is what I want people to believe, but I hope that people are intelligent enough to realize that it is a kind of theatrical thing. The emotion might be true, but the facts are changed. That’s what fiction is and in some cases it can make reality more interesting or more entertaining.”
If Thompson is a cult artist these days, he seems to be one with an ever- expanding cult. “If you’re out there playing music, you want it to get bigger,” Thompson said. “You want it to go somewhere in terms of more people appreciating what you do. I suppose if the trend reversed, it shouldn’t be a disaster. Really, you should live and die by your own yardstick.”
Though critics and other musicians have always rated his guitar prowess exceptional, Thompson generally demurs. “Well, there’s areas of life in which you excel and there’s areas of life in which you kind of muddle through,” he said. “I suppose as a musician I’m a more capable version of a human being than I am as a tax consultant.” He joked that in the studio he has “a built-in failure mechanism,” and admitted he rarely enjoys listening to his older recordings.
You always think they could have been better?
“Always. C’est la vie.”
VIDEO: Richard Thompson “I Feel So Good”
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