David Byrne, leader of the Talking Heads and much else besides, once remarked of his fellow musician, Richard Thompson: “It’s somewhat satisfying he’s not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good”.
The response of perhaps most people reading this would likely be, “Who?”—thus affirming the first part of Byrne’s statement. As for what makes him so good, Thompson is simply one of the finest guitarists and songwriters alive. As an instrumentalist, he is equally—indeed, dazzlingly—facile in both acoustic and electric mode. As a songwriter, turning out lyric after lyric that attains poetic resonance without pretentiousness or artifice, he has few equals and even fewer betters.
And despite his seeming obscurity, Thompson has appeared, Zelig-like, throughout popular music for over half a century. He has played on albums by Nick Drake, John Cale, J.J. Cale (no relation), and Bonnie Raitt, among many others. Elsewhere, he scored Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man—most appropriately too, given how many of his own songs share its mordant insights into fate and nature.
Thompson’s primary career is unequally divided between his earliest years as a founding member of the seminal (for once, the word applies) British folk rock band Fairport Convention; his middle period, recording as a duo with his then-wife, Linda Thompson; and finally, his remarkably fertile solo career, now spread across more than four decades.
If forced to choose among these three eras, many fans and critics would very likely assign pride of place to the second, during which the Thompsons, husband and wife, released a series of albums of significant beauty and power, which sounded like little else in the history of popular music. The blood-streaked cover of their debut as a couple, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, might have indicated to the casual listener what was in store, had he encountered it in the “Folk” section of a record store. During a time in which “folk” typically signified “mellow”, the songs within were anything but, partly thanks to Thompson’s guitar playing.
The blood-streaked cover of their debut as a couple, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, might have indicated to the casual listener what was in store, had he encountered it in the “Folk” section.
There is (refreshingly) very little blues in Thompson’s modal technique, which draws freely on English and Celtic folk idioms, and resembles the playing on Marquee Moon or perhaps Jerry Garcia’s wilder excursions, more than conventional guitar heroics. Thompson is capable of great speed and dexterity, but what most comes through in his solos on tracks like “Night Comes In” or “The Calvary Cross” is a kind of focused intensity that makes heavy metal sound tame.
Then there are the songs, in which the blended voices of this married couple address themes of love and desire and death and religion; most of their peers sound callow or merely polite by comparison. One could not by any stretch of the imagination call these songs easy listening , but the clear sweetness of Linda’s voice did moderate her husband’s stentorian tendencies. And he in turn opened up his songwriting to accommodate her voice, which could go places his could not (it is a testament to Thompson’s musical intelligence and sensitivity that he could write for two great female singers in British popular music—his wife and Fairport’s Sandy Denny).
In keeping with their manner of refusing to do anything obvious, the two (mostly on Richard’s initiative) converted to Sufi Islam midway through the 1970s. Initially forbidden by their Shaykh from playing or recording music, they reached a compromise by which their music would be informed by religious devotion.
In keeping with their manner of refusing to do anything obvious, the two (mostly led by Richard) converted to Sufi Islam midway through the 1970s.
Thompson responded by penning towering songs like “A Heart Needs a Home” and “Dimming of the Day”, in imitation of a style of ancient Sufi poetry in which the speaker addresses the divine as he would a lover. At their best, the Thompsons’ albums of this period managed a remarkable feat of sustained artistic balance—a combination that A&R types would call “bittersweet”, but this term doesn’t at all capture the complex interplay of darkness and light throughout their best music. Alas, it couldn’t last.
Their final album—one of the great records of the 1980s—remains their most legendary. Shoot Out the Lights, which basically plays as if Sara Dylan had joined her husband on Blood on the Tracks, has lost none of its grim authority over the years. In fact, the Thompsons have sworn up and down that the songs on the record were written prior to the dissolution of their marriage, and it was only in touring on the album that things really went to hell—that probably had something to do with Richard’s revealing at the start of the tour that he’d been carrying on an affair with the woman who would become his second wife.
And to be fair, one couldn’t exactly call the Thompsons’ prior work lighthearted. In any case, this may simply be an instance of art being truer than life—or at least anticipating it. How else to interpret songs with titles like “Don’t Renege on our Love”, or “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”. Even the title track—a vicious take on the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which blows up Link Wray’s “Rumble” to geopolitical proportions—somehow feels like a cruel commentary on the couple’s crumbling relationship.
It was also around this time that Linda’s voice was overtaken by spasmodic dysphonia—a vocal disorder of uncertain cause—largely silencing her thereafter. Meanwhile Richard has continued to record and tour as a solo artist, and very productively too. And though his baritone is a more limited instrument than Linda’s mezzo-soprano, he continues to write and play songs of surpassing loveliness when the mood strikes him—”Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, “Beeswing”, among many others.
It would be too much to say the man has become mellow in his august years, but perhaps he has softened somewhat. The distance of time has allowed him to speak of Linda in interviews with actual fondness, and when he plays the songs of their divorce years in his live shows now, while his guitar solos are as coruscating as ever, perhaps some of the bitterness is gone from his delivery.
When I last saw Richard Thompson in concert, he was touring with his now-grown son, Teddy, from his marriage with Linda. The two accompanied one another on the encore, their voices blending in a kind of sympathetic harmony that perhaps only those joined by blood or love can achieve. For just that moment, it was like hearing Linda and Richard together again. And then it was over.
