Richard y Linda Thompson

Linda Peters fue una de las mejores amigas de Sandy y colaboraron en varias ocasiones cantando o en los coros de otros músicos que les invitaron. Ella sintió mucho la muerte de Sandy y esta le dejó desolada. Estaba casada con Richard Thompson del que tomó su apellido a la vez que participó en varios de sus discos.
Richard y Sandy fueron dos de los componentes mas importantes de los que han formado parte de Fairport Convention. Richard a la guitarra y Sandy cantando aparecen en los mejores álbumes de Fairport. El, también participó en varios de los discos de Sandy en solitario. La discografía de Richard, solo o con Linda es realmente excepcional. Otros comentarios estarían fuera del propósito y contenido de esta página. (Ver enlaces para mas información) 
En esta página se incluyen cuatro artículos publicados en direrentes años, alguno de ellos tiene referencias a Sandy.

Richard Thompson The Minstrel's Tale 
Mat Snow, Q, December 1988 
He is, by all accounts, a brilliant songwriter, a breathtaking guitarist, profoundly unphotogenic, a Moslem, an awkward old sod. Richard Thompson has spent 20 eventful years lapping up critical acclaim while neatly sidestepping commercial success. "I have a sense of mission," he tells Mat Snow.
"WE REGARD ourselves as a latterday Peter, Paul & Mary, only with more hair," beams Richard Thompson. Stage-right, his vocal foil Christine Collister enjoys the jest both at his own expense that of the homely figure of guitarist-cum- keyboard-player Clive Gregson. For whereas Christine's crowning glory remains undiminished by Mother Nature's mischief, Richard and Clive boast immaculately polished pates gleaming cheerily in the house lights.
"Only slightly more," continues Richard to further audience mirth, "but it's the little things that count in show business..."
Richard Thompson is one of the more self-effacing figures "in showbusiness". Nothing but his modest disdain for self-promotion can explain how this man, whom many connoisseurs regard as Britain's greatest living rock guitar virtuoso (and one of our best singer-songwriters to boot), is wowing a packed audience at Vancouver's Town Pump, which yet numbers no more than perhaps 400 people.
Even with the kind of promotional support he claims he was denied on the three major labels of his career, the sad truth is that Richard Thompson may never play the stadiums - for better or worse. In his 20-year recording career he's never made a bad record, and his latest album, titled Amnesia, matches his very highest standards. Not since he abandoned his magnificently sustained epic live renditions of the songs 'Calvary Cross' and 'Night Comes In' has he been in such dramatically judgmental mood. And though he has the head of a suffering mediaeval saint surmounting the body of a wading bird, an awesome authority steels the willowy Thompson limbs when he steps from the microphone to wring several shades of brilliance from his scuffed Fender Stratocaster. If Neil Young has a rival, it is he.
Our story starts not on some maypoled village green in Old Albion, but rather in the leafy but distinctly North London purlieus of Highgate and Muswell Hill. Indeed, so quintessentially suburban are these Victorian avenues that local-boys-made-good the Kinks ironically titled a 1971 album Muswell Hillbillies. Eight years before, the young Richard Thompson had seen the same group - when they were called The Ravens - play the local youth club.
"They were dead good," recalls this quietly chummy conversationalist, "but I couldn't honestly say that Muswell Hill was the Kansas City of the '60s. It wasn't a seething hotbed of jamming and incredible instrumental prowess. In North London you had the Kinks, The Who and The Downliner Sect. This was the sort of live music one had access to, for better or worse."
Nor was Richard Thompson's family outstandingly musical. His father was a Scotland Yard detective ("It was such a terrible job. He never talked about it and I never saw him; he did 16 hours a day") who played guitar for a police band. It was that instrument lying around the house and his dad's collection of Django Reinhardt and Les Paul records that weened young Richard, aged 11 in 1960, in his lifelong devotion to six strings. As he got to know his way around the fretboard, his sister's boyfriend taught him the Buddy Holly repertoire, and then he took a year of classical lessons. "Very handy," he deadpans, "got the old fingers going a bit."
Soon Richard found himself playing Duane Eddy and Shadows covers in an acoustic guitar duo with a schoolfriend, which expanded to an instrumental five-piece: "We played our first performance at a school dance," he laughs. "It was so traumatic that we immediately disbanded."
Groups in the R&B vein followed with other schoolmates, including future Strangler Hugh Cornwell, who played bass at the time. "Good fun," the veteran punk-rocker told Q last year. "We were called Emil and the Detectives for about three weeks, but the name kept changing. We supported Helen Shapiro once, at Crouch End Town Hall."
"We used to play whatever was the common currency of the time - Who numbers," Richard continues. "On drums we had Nick Jones, son of Max Jones, a very fine jazz writer on the Melody Maker. Because of that we found some obscure material, some great B-sides, and so developed a very interesting repertoire for a school band. When I was about 161 started playing with Ashley Hutchings and Simon Nicol, who I knew through a mutual school friend. These were complex North London inter-school relationships, I was living in Highgate at the time, but what became Fairport was based in Muswell Hill. We started putting together different kinds of bands. We had a Lovin' Spoonful, playing jugband blues, eclectic American music."
Ah yes, Fairport Convention, which like so many groups of the period started out by playing American music in the London suburbs. And with their ears tuned across the Atlantic, they initially scorned contemporary upholders of the homegrown tradition. "There was only Pentangle, which we didn't consider to be much of a band. We thought they were just a bunch of folkies trying to be bit more electric. I never liked them at the time."
Leaving school at 18 to be apprenticed as stained-glass window designer, Richard was soon sidetracked into a full-time musical career. But first there was the ticklish problem of a name. "There were so many," Richard remembers with his habitual air of vague bemusement. "The reason the very first band I was in broke up was that we couldn't think of a good name. We spent a couple of hours rehearsing every Sunday, and then another three sitting around trying to think of a good name.
"Fairport's early name was Tim Turner's Narration; Tim Turner used to be the narrator on this 20-minute documentary slot they showed before the main film at the cinema, a thing called Look At Life. It would look at hairdressing or Eskimos, anything. It just seemed to be the time for obscure names. Hapsash & the Coloured Coat were rearing their ugly heads, so it seemed necessary to get a name with at least eight syllables.
"The climate in Britain at that time was bad music a la Geno Washington, and blues bands - and a sheen of psychedelia was creeping in over the top. There weren't many interesting bands from our point of view, apart from maybe family. By the time we turned professional we had what might be called a 'psychedelic' audience. You'd have a light show and everything, an attempt to recreate the kind of environment that was being so successful in America with the Fillmores and the Avalon Ballroom. The audiences were basically fashion-conscious.
"It was exciting because we were young," Richard considers, "but I don't think it was as exciting as the stuff that had just passed: the early Beatles, seeing The Who live at the Marquee in '65 was very, very exciting, and seeing Paul Butterfield in '66 and Hendrix in '67, that was rating. I'm not sure that what we were doing was musically that worthy. It was exciting to be playing in front of an audience."
Richard is an inordinately harsh judge of the arty Fairport Convention, whose distinctive vocal harmonies and British accent on the American folk-rock styles of Dylan, The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield caught the ear of expatriate American Joe Boyd. One of the '60s' most important backstage movers and shakers; Boyd signed the band to his Witchseason Productions company and secured them a deal with Island Records.
"He was the first one in the business who we ought had any musical integrity, and seemed genuinely convinced that we had some potential. We had approaches from just about everybody, as I think did every band at the time. Everybody was signed at some point, because nobody knew what was going on so they had to sign everybody just to cover all bases. We were very lucky to fall in with Joe because he had a very good musical pedigree; he grew up listening to jazz records and an outstanding collection of boogie-woogie 78s and had been the stage manager at Newport when Dylan went electric and had recorded Paul Butterfield, so he seemed the right man for the job. Plus he put in a lot of very sound input and turned us on to a lot of very good music that we later covered. He actually knew Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs, and that connection was important to us.
"We saw ourselves as a song-playing band," Richard recalls. "We took pride in finding obscure imports of Jim & Jean, Phil Ochs; or obscure Dylan material - we had stuff from his publisher no one else had at the time, which was eventually The Basement Tapes. We had Joni Mitchell material before she made any records, and Tim Hardin stuff."
Of the many artists whose work they covered, the Fairports paid courtesy calls on Tim Hardin and Leonard Cohen. "We were very much the young band in awe, a bit nerd-like," Richard chuckles. "We'd creep up to these people and say how wonderful we thought they were."
By their 1968 third album, Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention had arrived at both their classic line-up - singer Sandy Denny, Martin Lamble (drums), Ashley Hutchings (bass), Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol (guitars) plus a pool of intermittent members including singer Ian Matthews and violinist Dave Swarbrick - and classic approach. The album includes two originals each by Thompson and Denny, three Dylan covers (including the hit single 'Si Tu Dois Partir', a French rendering of 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now'), but best of all is their haunting arrangement of 'A Sailor's Life', whose updating of a British folk standard signposted the following album, Liege And Lief.
"Probably since about '65 we'd been playing the odd British traditional tune, and when Sandy joined she brought with her a fairly good traditional repertoire that she'd been singing around the folk clubs, and we started to incorporate that into what we were doing," Richard explains. "Liege And Lief was seen as a project album in which we'd do just traditional material as a one-off. Having done that, we thought it was an interesting direction and so decided to keep going.
"There was a certain amount of scholarship in it. We thought because we were British we should be playing the indigenous music. This was something at which we could excel, whereas we may never excel at being second-rate B.B. Kings or third-rate Waylon Jenningses. We also saw that there was a need for the traditional music in this country to be revived. It was unpopular with British people, so we wanted to bring it up to date. We were white liberal intellectuals, I suppose.
"We had friends, like Arthur Brown and Blossom Toes and Family, that we played with all time," Richard continues. "On the road there was a camaraderie but not a musical fraternity - there were no all-night jam sessions or anything. Fairport rather snobbishly thought they were a bit different from other bands, playing traditional music in that way. This was pioneering stuff and we really couldn't see anybody else doing it, so we slightly pooh-poohed the music of the time."
Though the band played big festivals - Isle Of Wight '69, Bath '70, and in Rotterdam to 100,000 people - and toured successfully in the UK, they never cracked America. Money was a factor in the gradual disintegration of the band's classic line-up.
"When I left Fairport the wage was £40 a week, and we never recouped any money from records or gigs. It's expensive to foster a band. Just in terms of recording costs, which were then pretty cheap - I doubt we made a record costing more than £10,000 - we never recovered any money at the time. And if we needed a new van or something, someone would have to put up the money which would get knocked off our future earnings. So we just never, never earned more than just the weekly wage.
"By the time I left Fairport we were all living in a disused pub in the country, which was quite fun, but only the sort of thing you can do for a while when you're fairly young and naive and can actually suffer that kind of discomfort. Some of us thought that it would be a good musical environment if we all lived together, so we could rehearse or just jump in the van and play a concert. "
And so in 1971 Richard quit.
"Musical differences - isn't that the classic phrase? Which means the musicians all hate each other," he laughs. "But bands do just disintegrate, it's the general rule, because people want to do different things. You need freedom to make mistakes and flex your muscles."
Muscles flexing prodigiously, Richard Thompson popped up in nearly every major British folk-rock enterprise of 1972. A one-off project with Sandy Denny and her husband Trevor Lucas called The Bunch folked up rock tunes (rather than the other way round) such as Buddy Holly's 'Love's Made A Fool Of You' on the album Rock On. And with Ashley Hutchings' project Morris On, the English morris-dancing tradition was dragged, bells-a-tinkling, into the post-reformation era. Two of this outfit's musicians have played on and off with Thompson ever since, including his current band: the ever-youthful drummer Dave Mattacks and, by contrast, button-accordionist John Kirkpatrick, who bears such a terrifying resemblance to the Human Riff that everyone calls him Keith. (As for Richard's bassist, fans of '70s folkists Fotheringay will spot Pat Donaldson.)
That same year Richard Thompson donned a pair of scarlet bug eyes to adorn the sleeve of his first solo album, Henry The Human Fly.
"I was writing all this stuff, and I couldn't see how Fairport would do it, it was so self-indulgent. I had all these songs, and when I left Fairport I was still under contract to Island. So I went into the studio and recorded them and told the record company later when I sent them the bill. So Henry The Human Fly got made and they very graciously put it out. According to Warner Brothers who released it in America, it was their smallest selling record ever!"
Has he ever seen a royalty?
"This is a very sore point. Island have been rather slow in catching up with back royalties. Last year, 20 years later, they finally settled Fairport Convention's back royalties; it wasn't even the right amount. Scandalous, really."
This period also marked Thompson's recognition as a bona fide guitar hero. "I never liked the British ones very much; Peter Green was probably the best of the lot," he judges. He preferred such blues originals as Otis Rush and jazzmen Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt and Johnny Smith. Of the rockers, his '50s favourites are James Burton (Rick Nelson, Elvis) and the Crickets' Tommy Allsup, and of his near contemporaries he liked Mike Bloomfield, Moby Grape's Jerry Miller and The Band's Robbie Robertson.
The most significant figure, however, in both Richard's life and career for the next decade would be the daughter of a music-hall artiste billed as Vera Love, Speciality Dancer. Brought up outside Glasgow with no formal musical background, Linda Peters became first Richard's girlfriend, then vocal other half, then wife. Their partnership inspired perhaps the finest music of Thompson's career so far, and their first album together, 1973's I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, is arguably his absolute peak. "We made that record in three days and it cost £2,500," recalls Richard. "And Island hated it - it didn't come out for a year. It was only acclaimed in retrospect. When you make records you don't think, Gosh, we're making history here, a classic. If you've got any sense anyway."
Their third album as a duo, Pour Down Like Silver (1975), made history in a small way; its sleeve revealed Richard and Linda wearing Arab headgear - not a joke but symbolic of the fact that they had joined the Sufi sect of the Islamic faith. "In '74 I became a Muslim. I'd been interested in it for quite a long time, but I never knew what it was. Sufism is like a pure version of Islam, the inner core of its teaching, the spiritual hub. It's derived purely from the Koran and the prophet Mohammed, in a direct line.
"I'd always been interested in Zen and the Essenes and American Indians' spiritual traditions; I was just a young person trying to connect with reality somehow," he continues. "I just realised that Sufism was where it was at. Intellectually I decided it was the thing to do, and when I met Muslims I recognised a quality in them that I wanted in my self."
Though many of his songs have a spiritual dimension, an Islamic jihad cannot be detected in the Thompson repertoire. He has ceased drinking, will eat only halal meat, and believes the Iranian revolution to have been "a fine thing at the time". By contrast, he considers Ayatollah Khomeini "insane", that the Jews are as entitled to a homeland as the displaced Palestinians, and that chopping off thieves' hands in countries where amputation is not part of the traditional penal repertoire is not a good idea. But reconciling his newly burning faith with his previous lifestyle was not always so easy.
In the mid-'70s the Thompsons moved to a heavily Muslim part of Norwich, then returned to London and opened an antique shop, the idea being to abandon the profession of music.
"I wanted to see if I could do anything else. I also wanted to understand music, the reasons that I played it, and to study other kinds of music," he explains. "I felt enslaved by music, actually. It's a cruel mistress. I had an emotional dependency on music, and I wanted to know what would happen if I didn't sit down and play. Getting away from music helped me understand the reasons I do it, and told me that I am a musician, that's where my talent lies and that's what I should do, and that it's fulfilling for me."
Certainly Richard's restoration to the world of music was hardly the antique world's loss; "It wasn't something for which I had any flair, so there wasn't any point in continuing to do it."
Richard continued to pick up a guitar and even, he dimly recalls, might have played the odd tour - "It's actually very hard to remember exactly."
Richard's memory is glowing like a 20-watt bulb here, as we proceed inexorably through his dark ages. After two less than entirely satisfactory (but still very good) albums for Chrysalis, Richard renewed his association with Joe Boyd, who'd just formed the Hannibal label. Their plan was to make a low-budget record, which would quickly recoup its costs. The result, Shoot Out The Lights, did that and more, selling 100,000 copies (he would normally expect to sell 5970,000) and receiving glowing critical testimonials. "For a very small independent label, I think we did very well," Richard deadpans. "It got to about 196 in Billboard."
Shoot Out The Lights also ended the era which had begun, ironically, with I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight. Three children into the marriage, Richard told Linda he'd fallen in love with someone else and so wanted out - but not before they fulfilled their obligation to tour. Linda got through it on vodka and antidepressants, and her fury unlocked the monster within the hitherto demure performer. Their fellow musicians tried to keep well out of the way as Linda slagged off her husband from the stage and tried to trip him whenever he came too close. In Canada she even stole a car. "I was a very wild girl," she confessed a few years later, and there are a few people who still recall 1982 with a shudder. "Yes," admits Richard, "that was a very difficult year, very hard."
In 1985, when Linda was promoting her fine solo album One Clear Moment, she described Richard as "severely morbid" and their marriage as "abject misery".
"Well, when people split up they tend to be acrimonious about each other. It's pretty standard stuff," he sighs, not unnaturally ill-at-ease with the direction the interview has taken. "It's very hard to say."
With a regularity bordering on arrogance, Richard Thompson has released a brilliant solo album nearly every year of the '80s. But despite his lean way with a guitar solo, his earthiness of vocal timbre and a certain loftiness of forehead, he still does no more than pick up Mark Knopfler's loose change ("Dire Straits to me are a very diluted band," he thunders mildly," and it's the dilution that sells"). He has also collaborated with, among others, Elvis Costello, The Golden Palominos, Pere Ubu's David Thomas ("He'd heard Henry The Human Fly and thought I must actually be like that!"), Crowded House and, of course, his old chums in Fairport Convention, who every year reconvene in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in an event whose popularity has now overtaken that of the Cambridge Folk Festival. At 39, Richard Thompson is an elder statesman of British rock.
"In the last few years that feeling has crept in," he laughs. "It seems strange to me that an elder statesman should be someone who I think of as on the young side - though perhaps they see me as an incredibly old fart."
One such are the Pogues, who Richard had supporting him in 1985 in the first flush of their popularity in particular and that of the folk-rock revival in general. "I think the Pogues are better in theory than in practice," Richard reckons. "I like the punk-traditional idea, but they do Irish music a disservice. They do lreland a disservice! The image of Ireland doesn't need a music-hall fall-down drunk Irishman representing the new wave of Irish traditional music. It's a time when Ireland needs to be respected much more as a country and as a tradition. People will just laugh at a band like the Pogues, and people do. I wish the Pogues were a band to be taken seriously, because they write really good songs and are becoming a musical band. Their image is the only problem I have with them. I wish they presented something a bit more noble, like when Christy Moore gets onstage and he has a lot of nobility as an Irishman, whereas Shane MacGowan confirms all your suspicions.
"I have sense of mission," Richard admits. "In a funny way. I'm a sort of moralist; there's a moral aspect to my music. When I find myself doing it I slap my wrist! In the sense of Dickens or Fay Weldon, there's a kind of hidden morality."
So we come full circle. Richard Thompson and his second wife Nancy live in Belsize Park, just a bus-ride away from where he grew up. "Not too far," he smiles. "It's easier that way; it saves you from having to find a new Tesco's…"
© Mat Snow, 1988.

*

Watching The Dark The History of Richard Thompson 
Geoffrey Himes, Request, June 1993.
LIKE MUCH OF his later writing, Greil Marcus' introductory notes to the new Richard Thompson box set, Watching the Dark, are a hodge-podge of strained analogies and brilliant insights. On the brilliant side of the ledger is this comment: "Trace Thompson's songs and performances over time and there is little or no sense of development, maturity, refinement. As with Van Morrison or Neil Young, perhaps Thompson's only true pop likenesses, a listener can believe it was all there from day one."
In other words, Richard Thompson was born old. Not old in the sense of being worn out but old in the sense of knowing too much to ever be silly or shallow. Even as a 17-year-old co-founder of Fairport Convention in 1967, Thompson was already too old to get caught up in that decade's romanticism for causes he instinctively knew would go the way of all things: disappointment and death. He was even too old for the callow black-leather nihilism that takes up death as a cause rather than simply accepting it as an inalterable fact of nature. Thompson's stoic acceptance of that fact makes possible the liberating thrill of facing things as they are, and this exhilaration courses through his music, belying his reputation as "Mr. Gloom and Doom."
Thompson's early efforts with Fairport Convention in London and his latest efforts for Capitol Records in L.A. may be 22 years apart, but they seem interchangeable in terms of attitude and approach, as if Thompson had always been the 44 he is today. Oh, he has gotten better as a craftsman with words, harmonies and guitar strings, but the central thrust of the work is the same. As a result, this 47-track, three-CD box set gets away with its scrambled chronology; a brooding 1987 Sufi hymn with the art-rock quartet French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson leads naturally into a brooding 1970 Christian hymn with the folk-rock Fairport Convention. (Actually the anthology is divided into nine segments, each covering three-to-seven songs from a two or three year period; the segments are then randomly distributed over the three CDs.)
The aged quality of Thompson's music may explain one of pop music's most perplexing questions: Why has this man, a hero to critics and fellow musicians, failed to connect with a broad pop audience? No matter how good the songwriting or guitar-playing, no music is going to connect with large numbers unless it has a certain naive romanticism, unless it makes the sweet promise that everything will work out for the best. From the beginning, Thompson has refused to make those promises, and he has paid the price commercially. (It's no coincidence that of the Thompson-Morrison-Young triumvirate, the often-romantic California hippie sells the most records.) Even Thompson's surprising on-stage wit and his bouncy, funny songs like 'Two Left Feet' or 'Tear Stained Letter' are steeped in irony, the awareness that things are never quite what they seem. 
Thompson's obsession with the way love and life wear down is apparent not only in his lyrics but in his singing and guitar-playing as well. Born with what he jokingly describes as a half-octave voice, he uses his own vocal limitations to mirror's nature's. On a song like 1988's 'I Still Dream', where he longs to recover a lost love even as he admits it will never happen, his vocal eschews the flourishes of melodrama and drones on with the implacability of the fate implied by the words. Even his guitar work, which has none of the limitations of his voice, passes up the easy licks and cheap sentiment of so much rock guitar to burrow into unorthodox harmonies and time signatures where the tension reinforces the lyrics and vocals. As early as 1969's 'Genesis Hall', where his electric guitar added a jagged counterpoint to Sandy Denny's keening vocal about feeling trapped, Thompson's playing carried a weighted fatefulness.
Watching the Dark is invaluable for allowing us to step back far enough from each Thompson album to see the unchanging qualities that run through his entire career. Even for those of us who have worn out every album in his discography, there are plenty of surprises here, for 23 of the 47 cuts never appeared on his in-print albums. There's the non-album Fairport Convention single 'Now Be Thankful', an alternate take of Fairport Convention's 'A Sailor's Life', a remix of 'Beat the Retreat', the traditional 'Poor Wee Jockey Clarke' which Thompson recorded specifically for this collection, 16 live performances of songs both familiar and rare and three songs from a 1980 Richard & Linda Thompson album that was never released.
As Leslie Berman explains in her detailed biography that comes as part of the 24-page booklet, Thompson was emerging from several years of seclusion in 1980 and was ready to make a commercial album. He went into the studio with Gerry Rafferty (fresh from his hit single 'Baker Street') and Hugh Murphy (who produced Rafferty's hit and later produced Linda Thompson's solo album). They taped many of the songs that were later redone as Shoot Out the Lights (including 'Back Street Slide', which is included here) as well as a remake of 'For the Shame of Doing Wrong' (from the 1975 album, Pour Down Like Silver) and an early version of 'The Wrong Heartbeat' (later released on Richard's Hand of Darkness, but done here with Linda singing lead). These sessions included subtly harmonic strings and punchy accordion/piano/hurdy-gurdy riffs that mimicked Stax horn charts. Thompson abandoned these tapes to make the incomparable Shoot Out the Lights album in '82, but the '80 sessions have a definite charm.
The most important revelations of the box set are the five live performances recorded with Thompson's great mid-'80s band (Kirkpatrick, Clive Gregson and Christine Collister with various drummers and bassists). The previously unreleased 'Crash the Party' (an encore on the '88 tour) is one of Thompson's Randy Newman-like black comedies sung from the perspective of a social misfit. The real triumphs, though, are the nine-minute version of 'Can't Win' and the seven-minute version of 'When the Spell Is Broken'. They trump the original studio versions with an unflinching ferocity that tranfixes the listener like a deer staring into oncoming headlights. And when the vocals have gone as far as they can, the guitar takes over and goes a little further. 
One can quibble about the other choices made by compiler Edward Haber. Does he really think 'Keep Your Distance' is the most interesting song on Rumour and Sigh? Did we really need 11 minutes of an underwhelming alternate take of 'A Sailor's Life'? Did we need a version of 'Tear Stained Letter' from Thompson's mediocre '91 road band? And where are some of Thompson's very best songs: 'How Will I Ever Be Simple Again,' '1952 Black Vincent Lightning,' 'Read About Love,' 'She Twists the Knife Again,' 'Did She Jump,' 'Hard Luck Stories' and 'Farewell, Farewell'? Where is the live rearrangement of 'Valerie' with the traditional folk dance tunes interspersed with the verses? Where are the tapes from the chilling '82 tour with Linda?
In the final notes, Joe Boyd (Thompson's producer off and on from 1969 to '84) praises his client as "a crusader for Britishness and for history in a time of fashionable transience and mid-Atlanticity." Indeed, Thompson sounds so English on this box set that even Ray Davies and Pete Townshend seem like Yankee Doodle Dandies by comparison. Thompson's refusal to borrow anyone else's culture, even that of his heroes Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, is part of his refusal to trust anyone's experiences but his own. Ironically enough, it's the very specificity of Thompson's British roots and the very ancientness of his approach that makes him so universal and timeless. In 20 years, when the R.E.M.s and Stings of the world have faded from memory, people will still be listening to Watching the Dark.
© Geoffrey Himes, 1993.

*

Richard Thompson - Hand Of Kindness 
Richard Cook, New Musical Express, 30 July 1983.
From a maker of acclaimed albums, something that is more of the same, as dependable as any itching in the heart, toothache, telephone bill: it jogs, slows to a crawl, lurches in good-time, stabs at a waltz and snuffles to itself in a corner. Pretty much what you think - not pretty. I'm bored with it.
Thompson's art has retreated to a point where its supposed recalcitrance - the tension between his grey reluctance to speak at all on this stinking life and the troubadour's addiction to playing - has stiffened and set in a shrewd, appeasing play of gestures. Hand Of Kindness - well, you'll know how it moves: It starts like this, slows up like that, cries just then etc etc. If it was something more than the pains of remorse cleverly sweetened by painstaking craft it could have awoken some ghosts, perhaps, instead of stirring the dregs, rooting around in the aftermath of someone else's passion.
Specifics, really, are what call these tunes, and specifics are something always to invoke suspicion. Every singer must live a life in public but they shouldn't give anything away which has MY LIFE writ so large on it, unless they are already torched to a shadow ('Lady in Satin'). Thompson is like Hammill or Martyn: everybody has to feel his pain. Whether he intends it or not, his broken marriage is daubed all over titles like 'A Poisoned Heart And A Twisted Memory' and 'The Wrong Heartbeat' as if they were divorce papers doubling as open letters.
And it's so blithely agonising, this bleeding heart, so obviously knowing. Costello or, more immediately, John Hiatt (who sings a bit somewhere here) would explode these stories from the inside and set the viewfinder so askew you could penetrate nothing but the hints and the commas and the sticking pins. Thompson insists on a clear monochrome focus, and he distends it all into a straggle with his folk-bloodied instruments. He is a good guitarist, although most of the time he sounds loquacious instead of eloquent.
Tears staining the pages - I daresay they aren't faked, but I'd rather see the act that has the real hurt at a remove from the surface. This is as inevitable as a wolfman on a moonlit night. There - another Richard Thompson record.
© Richard Cook, 1983. 

*

Richard and Linda Thompson 
Mick Brown, Rolling Stone, 4 May 1971. 
"If I don't seem a part of the recording industry, it's probably because I don't feel a part of it," says Richard Thomson, the guitarist/songwriter/singer half of Richard and Linda Thompson, during tea at his manager's London home. "I'm prepared to use it, but I try to avoid it using me. If I had the means to avoid the industry altogether, I would."
A thin, earnest man, dressed down in jeans and a well-worn sweater, Thomson is obviously the sort who believes he functions best without drawing undue attention to himself. There are those who maintain that were he less different about matters of self-promotion, the duo's sales figures would equal their considerable standing among critics. But Thompson, who handles most aspects of the pair's creative work, has pursued his own course. He's done five albums (four with wife Linda, also a singer) for various labels in the eight years since leaving Fairport Convention, the seminal British folk-rock band he co-founded. And he has toured infrequently, remaining oblivious to his reputation as one of Britain's most gifted writers and guitarists. Fame, he says, has always struck him as rather an absurd thing.
As a member of Fairport Convention in the late Sixties, Thomson was instrumental in the development of British folk-rock. His 'Genesis Hall' and 'Meet On The Ledge' were the apotheoses of the movement, placing traditional sounding airs in an electric setting and evoking a timeless purity that suggested the songs might have been written and understood in any era. Fairport achieved considerable commercial success. When Thomson left the band in 1971, he returned to his musical origins, recording with folk ensembles and performing in clubs rather than halls. His own albums, solo and with Linda, whom he met in 1972, established him as a cult figure in Britain.
"It has been put to me that I could have sold more records if I did this or that, joined certain bands at certain times, used up-market record producers or toured more," he says. "But I've never wanted to do that just because I've always had a certain freedom in playing that I didn't want to lose. It's a fault of mine, but I'm a very perverse person in that if someone says, oh, 'terrific guitar playing,' my first instinct is to think I should take up another instrument."
In 1974, Richard and Linda Thompson converted to the Moslem faith. A year later, following the release of Pour Down Like Silver, they quit the music world altogether, retreating to the remote, rural area of Norfolk, 100 miles from London, to establish a Moslem community. It's ironic that First Light, the Thompson's first LP in three years, is their most accessible album to date. It is inspired, in part, by Thompson's enthusiasm for the British New Wave - young musicians addressing themselves to contemporary issues: folk music in the true sense. Not that Thompson himself has dramatically modified his musical stance. First Light bears his distinctive imprint: rich melodies and ragged harmonies that echo classic English folk songs. But a larger studio budget, furnished by Chrysalis, the addition of a rhythm section consisting of Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks and an altogether more high-spirited and exuberant tone add breath to Thompson's customary depth.
"If anything, the previous albums have been too one-dimensional," he says. "All people would get from them is a kind of recognition of a mood or emotion; like, if you're feeling despondent you put on a despondent record and relate to that. But those kinds of emotion in music aren't interesting to me anymore. What's more interesting are things to do with the heart, which is beyond emotions, or to say things of a social or even political nature."
In Thompson's hand such themes have a subtle, often ambiguous bent. 'Layla' (not to be confused with the Clapton song), from First Light, is based on a traditional Moslem song that uses a romantic theme as an allegory for man's search for knowledge. And 'Don't Let a Thief Steal into Your Heart' can also be taken as either a love song or a warning against what Thompson calls "the hidden manipulators". "We live in a very anesthetic society in which people are not only manipulated but, for the most part, are unaware it's happening," he says. "At the highest level, things like political parties are farcical and totally powerless. If you don't believe in anything beyond the solidarity of this world, then the world is a terrible place, and I don't see it will ever change.
"There's no victory in this world in the end; all you can do is get out of it. And the way to get out of it, as far as I can see, is to look inside yourself."
© Mick Brown, 1971.