After the response to and success of his first album of new acoustic versions of old tunes, it’s now time for Acoustic Classics Volume II. We cornered Richard Thompson to discuss the record, the longevity of a decent piece of writing and the protective nature of fans over material.
The idea of rounding up an extra long career’s worth of material and creating a series of acoustic albums, showcasing and re-energising it, is one of simple inspiration; we were intrigued as to how it came about. “Well originally I was thinking that it would be nice to have something on the merchandise table for the first time listener or somebody who had come to a concert for the first time,” Richard explains. “I wanted it to be a record that was something like what they had just heard, which was me doing an acoustic show of stuff pulled from all different periods of my career and all over the place, really. I thought an acoustics album really filled that niche, so it wasn’t necessarily intended for the seasoned listener, but more for the first-timers.”
As it turned out, the guys at Beeswing also thought it a good idea and put the album out in the UK, where it reached the top ten. “It was fantastic,” Richard recalls. “And at that point I decided to do a follow up, so this is volume two. I think it shows that there’s an untapped market for that particular type of record, so it certainly exceeded expectations. And if it inspires people to go back through the back catalogue and listen to more of that stuff, then that’s great too. I guess for this set I went through my records and picked about a hundred songs and then cut them down to fifty or so and then again until I had the fourteen that are on the record. So I wasn’t killing myself in trying to be definitive,” he smiles, “and if this one sells well, I could always do volume three…”
For now though, with many of the tracks on both of the sets, for the newcomer to head back in time to the original studio recordings would be an interesting discovery, so different are they to the acoustic songs cut on the new series. ‘Gethsemane’ and ‘The Ghost of you Walks’ fair particularly well on this outing, with Thompson’s signature Lowden guitar and voice creating ample atmosphere. “It’s a more intimate thing acoustically,” Richard tells us. “And it’s a different interpretation too. Sometimes I think that a song can be interpreted both in a band arrangement and solo, if it has an inbuilt versatility. It’s interesting to take a band song or even a rock song and do it in an acoustic setting and turn it into more of a folk song; to work in both natures it needs a certain flexibility. It needs to lend itself to a setting with more energy in a band format, but it also needs something reflective in the lyric that you can hear and think about in that acoustic environment.”
The consistent set up on the new album meant that, much like the concert through the stereo effect that Richard was after, he could whittle down a gargantuan amount of songs from all walks of his musical career, an odd part of the trade the singer is well aware of. “It’s a weird thing for a singer-songwriter to be getting up every night and playing material from their whole career; playing a song that they wrote when they were eighteen years old!” he says, with a laugh. “I find that very strange. If you’re a painter, you paint a picture and sell it to somebody in South America or wherever and you never see it again. As a songwriter you’re revisiting your songs periodically and I think you learn to reinterpret them and find different things in them. Some songs might be a bit juvenile or you don’t feel the emotion that you used to, but you can still find different ways to interpret them.”
But of course, for the reinterpretation to work, the song needs to be good, solid and layered enough to withstand many prongs, hence the longevity of some of the very best traditional songs. “I do think that’s absolutely true,” Richard nods. “But it’s still an odd feeling revisiting these songs. And I think you have to forgive yourself sometimes for what you might now see as juvenile thoughts, lack of skill or even the wrong point of view in a song. You have to have a certain amount of forgiveness and learn to embrace that. At a certain point, a song doesn’t really belong to the singer anymore, it belongs to the listener, and it gets hard to change lyrics down the road that you might find embarrassing, because people tend to get upset!”
Perhaps the above swayed Richard to consider what will be his second release of the year, after Classics, which is Acoustic Rarities, a set of unsung heroes he is enthusiastic about. “For me the rarities one is a more interesting record,” he says, simply. “It’s music that hasn’t really been heard in this context, although there are a couple on there that have been recorded with different singers or recorded by other people.” So something for the slightly more discerning Thompson fan then? “Yes, exactly,” he agrees. “Probably half of the record is songs that people wouldn’t have heard before, which I think will be more interesting for the long term listeners and fans.”
Order Acoustic Classics II – http://smarturl.it/dq5ug2
Acoustic Rarities will be released later in the year.
RICHARD THOMPSON TOUR DATES
Plus support Josienne Clarke + Ben Walker
Wed 11 October – Brighton Dome
Thu 12 October – Guildford G-Live
Fri 13 October – Poole Lighthouse
Sat 14 October – Bristol Colston Hall
Sun 15 October – Cardiff Wales Millennium Centre
Tue 17 October – Edinburgh Usher Hall
Wed 18 October – Gateshead Sage
Thu 19 October – Salford Lowry
Sat 21 October – Saffron Walden Saffron Hall
Sun 22 October – Coventry Warwick Arts Centre
Mon 23 October – London Cadogan Hall *Extra Date
Wed 25 October – Sheffield City Hall
Thu 26 October – Leicester de Montfort Hall
Fri 27 October – Basingstoke Anvil
Sat 28 October – Norwich Theatre Royal
Mon 30 October – London Bridge Theatre
Photo Credit: David Kaptein