Larry Schwartz
Richard Thompson is a musician’s musician … and kind of likes it that way. Story by Larry Schwartz.
HE HAS BEEN HAILED as one of rock’s great guitar players. Critics rate some of his albums as classics. His songs have become standards, covered respectfully by his peers. But fans say he has not achieved the mainstream appeal that is his due. Richard Thompson is a musician’s musician,
famous for not being as famous as he might.
In his notes to a three-CD compilation of Thompson’s work, rock writer Greil Marcus cites Van Morrison and Neil Young as “perhaps Thompson’s only true pop likenesses”.
But how many otherwise in the know are still unfamiliar with Thompson’s work? “I’m slightly off the musical mainstream,” he says. “I don’t really play immediately accessible music for people. It’s slightly different. It’s got a Celtic edge to it. Some of the music is dark; some of the lyrics are
a little cynical. It’s not immediately radio-worthy. People have to make a slight effort to find it. So I don’t think it ever is or will be something for mass popularity. But I’m kind of glad about that as well.”
He worries a little about the way he is portrayed. “Sometimes I get reviewed as serious and deadpan and really the opposite is happening,” Thompson says. “There’s a lot of jokes in the songs. There’s a lot of irony. Americans don’t really understand irony and tend to miss it and take stuff at face value.”
There’s a mordant spin in his lyrical preoccupations. Though he says he’s loathe to play it too often, his darkest lyric, a 1970s lullaby in which the infant is told “there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow … nothing to grow up for anymore”, is among the most requested by audiences.
Like Randy Newman, he creates an assortment of sometimes dubious narrators. But where’s the line between the singer and the song? “I’m not sure that I know the difference … am I really expressing myself or is this just some strange persona? I think sometimes obviously it’s a persona.
Where you’re talking about some slightly deranged psychopath … it’s surprising how many people do think that’s me.”
A policeman’s son who grew up in London, Thompson is a founding member of the influential British group, Fairport Convention, that also featured the late singer-songwriter Sandy Denny.
Critics heaped praise on his later work with ex-wife, Linda, culminating in their last album, Shoot Out
its high standards.
Thompson is returning to Australia for a second visit, once again with an old friend, singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. They toured here in the mid-1980s and Thompson has produced two albums for him.
He will be accompanied by Danny Thompson, the ex-Pentangle bass player, with whom he collaborates intermittently. “The duo thing is something we’ve been doing on and off for seven or eight years,” Thompson says. “It’s an enjoyable option … It’s a good semi-economic, pleasurable time
for us and hopefully something a little different for the audience.”
He and the bassist have completed an album due out later this year in which they explore “the end of industrial Britain and how the landscape’s changed and the jobs have changed and people’s lives have been affected”.
The Australian concerts will feature songs from his latest album You? Me? Us? as well as a “selection retrospectively back to, gosh, even the late 1960s”.
Like Morrison and Young, he has been the subject of a tribute album featuring the likes of R.E.M, Los Lobos, Dinosaur Jr, Graham Parker, June Tabor, Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy and Beauloseil.
“I was honored that contemporaries would be interested in performing my songs,” he says.
He is less impressed with the Rykodisc compilation, Watching The Dark, in which he had no input in the selection. “One of the criticisms that was levelled at it was that it was neither a fan’s collection of out-takes and rarities nor was it some a retrospective of greatest hits,” he says. “It fell
somewhere between the two. So for me there was nothing really definitive about it.”
Fly Away Dreams, a compilation of ex-wife Linda’s work last year, with much of it featuring Richard’s guitar backing, reminded fans of their strength as a duo. Thompson commutes between Los Angeles and London, where Linda is based.
The extraordinary Shoot Out The Lights was interpreted at the time as comment on the breakdown of their marriage. “I don’t think it was,” Thompson says. “Those songs were written probably a year before the album was recorded and the album was recorded probably a year before it came
out. As far as I was concerned I was just writing stories … perhaps there was something strange going on subconsciously … but it’s probably too pat and too glib to say it is about the break-up of a marriage. I don’t think it is.”
He has since worked with other female vocalists, notably Shawn Colvin. “I’m a baritone and it’s nice in terms of popular music arranging … to have higher harmony voices just because there’s room in the aural spectrum for them to come through.”
Thompson still sees his former Fairport Conventions bandmates – they play reunion concerts each August. “I think Fairport was a very important band,” he says. “It had a wide influence all over the world for taking indigenous, traditional music and contemporising it, putting it with the
lingua franca of the day, which was rock ‘n’ roll. To make people’s own music, something that spoke for them. Something that was contemporary. I’m proud to be a part of that.”
Songwriting aside, Thompson’s flair on guitar is legend. He attributes a fairly idiosyncratic style of playing – plectrum between thumb and forefinger while picking with the remaining fingers – to laziness. It’s a technique he says is shared by players as diverse as Glen Campbell and Albert Lee.
His latest album featured two CDs: one devoted to acoustic playing, the other electric. He has a different approach to each. “With electric playing in a band, much of the harmonic and rhythmic chores are taken off me. So I am much freer to play single string lines or melodic lines. If I’m
playing acoustic guitar I have to do everything. I have to be rhythmic and harmonic and play the melodic stuff as well.”
On the Australian tour, we’ll be seeing one side of Richard Thompson, the acoustic, with a generous dabbling with open chords. But he says the guitar will be plugged in and “I have a few tricks up my sleeve as well in case”. What might they be? “I won’t tell you,” he laughs.
The Sunday Age, 23rd of February 1997
Larry Schwartz Writer 