There are so many sides to Richard Thompson, from the old folkie to the jazz aficionado, country-western music lover to the guy who plays with David Byrne, a lover of gas powered motor vehicles and acoustic guitars. He chooses his words carefully in his songs and in his interviews.
Richard Thompson is a man who takes his music very seriously. But also enjoys having a good time. The story goes that back in the 1960s he would make some very strange changes to Bob Dylan songs like Mr Tambourine Man, one, in particular, was Mr Margarine Man. “…it’s the vaguest of memories, to tell the truth. I don’t think we actually did Mr Margarine Man. I think that was some kind of fan joke or something. We’re talking early days of the band, 65 and 66, before we became Fairport even, when we were doing some Byrds covers. I don’t remember any actual fully formed spoof that mentioned any other breakfast commodities as well.”
Like virtually every musician, influences from previous generations tend to shape one’s sound. Thompson is no different when it comes to his influences. “James Burton absolutely, I think he really pioneered several different strains of rock and country guitar playing, one of the great innovators. Hank Marvin, absolutely, the first guy to get a truly great tone out of Fender Stratocaster was Hank Marvin, just fabulous sounding records, records that still sound fabulous today because they were recorded at the old Abbey Road.
“So, the truth is that probably I was listening to a lot more guitar players Django Reinhardt would be in there, Les Paul would be in there, Chet Atkins would be in there. Classical guitar players would be in there, and then all the other instruments I’ve been very influenced by, like piano players, Earl Hines would be a big influence on me, Bix Beiderbecke was a big influence on me. So there’s a lot of strains that to go into someone’s style and sometimes they just seep in subconsciously and sometimes you actively pursue them. You say, ‘I want to sound like that.’”
Often accused of being dire and dark in his writing, he works hard to craft his messages. Even if the messages aren’t always clear to him.
“I think sometimes they choose themselves almost. You think I’m comfortable with this as a song theme, Sometimes you might write a lyric and you think that it’s too sappy. Yesterday I did that and I thought I oh I obviously need a little bit more attitude. It’s one of those things all the music you listen to and all those things you choose as a songwriter now, not as a guitar player but as a songwriter, to have as your influences, there’s a bit of Robert Burns or something, there’s a bit of Richard Farina, all these bits and pieces come together in your mind. That kind of forms your taste.
“You write something trying to live up to those examples. And I think that’s really how you choose your songwriting. To say mine is a bit dour and a bit dark is because I grew up listening to traditional music where there’s lots of murders and people being carried off the by faeries and rape and incest. You know the traditional music. As a body it can be quite dark. There’s a lot of songs where it gets balanced out, you know mining disasters. So, that’s the music that makes me dare I say happy.”
Thompson has said that even he has trouble understanding all of the songs on his most recent disc, 13 Rivers. “I think the big mystery is why I would write them, which leads me to think of myself not really as a songwriter per se, but as more of a conduit through which music flows. In a sense that’s a good way to kind of bypass the idea that you’re a genius and you have this massive ego. Well it’s not really you, it’s just flowing through you.
“Sometimes I’m curious about what flows through me and why? So I look at songs sometimes and think well I didn’t want to write this, but why did I write it, but it’s a good song I’ll take it anyway, I’ll take it anyway I can get it.
“So on the last record particularly, there’s a lot of songs like that. They just kind of confuse me as to why this subject matter when I might be writing something more specifically about my life. I mean they’re all about me. They’re all about my life somehow but I would have thought they would have been more direct. They’re kind of veiled and I really still don’t understand them.”
Some songs become such a part of the culture. 52 Vincent Black Lightning has seemed to take on a mystique of it’s own. “The challenge with that was like Blue Suede Shoes onwards. It’s a song that’s definitely American, like Chuck Berry talks about cars. And you’ve written half a song if you’ve got Cadillac in the title you don’t need much more. If you’ve got Memphis in a title you don’t need much more to make it into a song, it’s that easy in America. It’s so hard in Britain, you’re surrounded by these unromantic place names, like Penge and Scunthorpe. It’s not easy to put those into a song. I suppose Scranton is not easy to put in a song either now that I think about it.
“So I wanted to find an object that was British and sort of fabulous and kind of mythological. I thought the Vincent Black Lighting and you know when I was a kid it was the bike, just the Vincent brand. One of my neighbour’s dads had a Vincent and wow it was so sexy, like black and just gorgeous and really, really fast. So that was the idea, I’ll write a story that revolves around the bike.”
Going from playing in front of 5,500 people at the Royal Albert Hall has its own set of problems, yet playing a solo acoustic show in front of 200 people at must also have its own set of challenges. “About 5,300 less challenges. This is a solo show really, which is a lot more straightforward frankly, it’s easier. I don’t have to think about it the three, four, five months beforehand. My partner Zara (Phillips) gonna sing a bit of harmony. But it’s easier, I can change the setlist at a whim, doesn’t really matter, I can do requests if people want them. Because it’s that time of the year I can sing some seasonal things.
“You know the Albert Hall was a big show (read the Folk Radio review here). Took a lot of planning. We had twenty guests. Getting that number of people rehearsed, we had two days of rehearsal, which wasn’t enough. We were rehearsing all the day of the show, from 10 a.m. onwards, so we were knackered before we did the show. It was complicated, really complicated. It’s not every year I do a show like the Albert Hall show, maybe I’ll never do another one again. By the time I’m ready for my next decade anniversary, I might be too old or too dead to have the energy.”
With Thompson shifting back and forth from electric shows to acoustic shows it’s fascinating to hear him talk about his writing process and determining whether a song should be presented in an acoustic or electric format. “I might think either during the process of writing or when something’s finished this is definitely a band song or this is an acoustic song. But then I like to be able to do electric songs acoustic if I can. It’s really a song-by-song decision. Before I do a record I always do acoustic demos that I send out to the band. So they can learn the songs. So, there always is an acoustic version of the most aggressive, mindless, thrash song. Sometimes we actually release the demos.”
Musicians just like most people can be intimidated meeting, let along playing with their heroes. “We mentioned the Albert Hall show earlier on, for me a guitar player I’m always very self-conscious playing with is Martin Carthy, who I think is a really extraordinary original guitar player. No one plays like Martin. In a world where there are three million acoustic guitars sold in the United States every year there’s a lot of guitar players out there, so to be truly original is extremely rare. I mean Martin might be my most intimidating guitar player.
“There’s other guitar players that kind of piss you off because they’re so facile. They can play so technically well that you think I really don’t want to be following that guy on stage. So I have to console myself with the idea that I’m also a songwriter. Think of a jam session with Django Reinhardt would be fairly intimidating.
“I used to jam with Hendrix back in the 60s and he could always upstage you, always always upstage you. He just had more tricks than you did. He played with his teeth he played behind his back he had sex with the guitar, he’d do something to up the ante, so there’s always that kind of thing.
“I was just reading about a late-night jam session between Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. And Louis Armstrong was saying how he loved Bix Beiderbecke and how they hugged each other and kissed each other and then they kind of jammed all night but they weren’t trying to cut each other they were trying to be as musical as possible to make the music just the best it could possibly be. It’s not the intimidator, remember it’s all about the music in the end. It’s not about winning, it’s not about showing off.”
The space between being a fan and being a fanatic is very small. You write about one in the song From Galway to Graceland. I assume there are Richard Thompson fanatics. “I mean you see fanatics. I get a few deranged people who should be using their time much better, to be fixated on something other than my music. There’s not many of those and usually, they come to their senses after a while and get back to their real lives.
“I’ve never been to Graceland, there are mistakes in the song about the grave (in From Galway to Graceland), I didn’t know what I was saying. I saw an Elvis exhibition, there’s a travelling exhibition that came to London and it had some bizarre things. The guy said ‘here we have a vial of Elvis’s sweat. After the show they’d probably squeezed out his towel. And here we have one of Elvis’s toenails it was from the shag carpet at Graceland.’ (Laughing) I thought this is great stuff. I thought there’s a song here somewhere. In fact, there’s probably about 50 songs, but I think that was the inspiration for doing something about Elvis.”
Richard Thompson has never been afraid to take on big projects. In the early 2000s, he was challenged to show the path the leads from Sumer Is Icumen In through Prince’s Kiss and Oops…I Did It Again by Britney Spears.
“Both of those songs Kiss and Oops are what we use in a show called A Thousand Years of Popular Music which is an absurdly ambitious project where we get from 1000 A.D to 2000-ish and we also finish with a Prince song or a Britney Spears song. The nice thing about the Britney Spears song is that it’s a song you can reinterpret in different ways because it’s a good pop song. You can take it and mould it and do it in a different way and it stands up because it has good pop music bones to it. It’s well crafted it has a nice circling lyric, nice chord changes, blah, blah, blah.
“And something else that we liked about it for the 1000 years show was that while we play it fairly straight, then we do it in the style of a 16th-century dance tune and it fits really well, the chords are perfect you know ‘plus ça change.’ But it’s a fun song and people do request it from time to time. Obviously, I capture their imagination somehow with that song.”
Asked about his conversion to Sufism, Richard was very matter of fact. “Conversion is a funny word. I tend to think you recognize who you are. It’s not like you’re converting dollars to pounds or something. You just recognize parts in other people, I am like these people, I’m just going to say it out loud, this is who I am. In the 70s there was a lot of spiritual searching, all different strains of it, you had lots of Indian gurus like Shree Rajneesh, Baba Ram Das, all these people. You had a lot of western people looking east for inspiration, the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, all that stuff. And LSD gave people a little flash of insight into another world almost, into other possibilities for life if you like.
“I was really part of that, I spent a lot of time looking around for the right thing mostly just through reading. I didn’t really practice anything until I came across the Sufis and I thought ‘I think this is where it’s at.’ Almost at the point where I formed that idea, it’s like they came to me. So it all happened very quickly. It was a very accepting climate in the 70s. I think that’s changed a lot.
“Having someone at the top in America who encourages racism is not a good thing. You see attacks on synagogues, attacks on mosques. It’s become a lot less tolerant in the states. I still think somewhere like the UK is somewhat a lot like the states, still are easier places to practice your religion, your beliefs, than a lot of countries in the middle east. We do have the same freedom. I could name 50 countries in Africa in Asia where you have a much harder time being a Christian or a Jew. So in the west we are still fairly tolerant but things have shifted, and I’m hoping they will shift back again.”
After more than 50 years performing and recording Richard Thompson still feels the challenge present in new projects. Currently, he is readying two albums of new material, one acoustic and the other electric. And in 2021 his biography should finally be published. The road goes ever onward.
Photo Credit: D.J. Fish