Richard Thompson is well into his fourth decade of music making. His
potent, quirky songwriting, stinging vocal delivery, and stunning instrumental
work on both electric and acoustic guitars have won him an ardent following
among music lovers, critics, and musicians alike. Yet despite the rabid
fans, consistently positive reviews, fanzines, and Web sites—not to
mention a tribute album, Beat the Retreat, with contributions
by the likes of Bonnie Raitt and R.E.M.—the buzz about Thompson remains
largely sub-rosa, and Thompson’s success is marked more by his sterling
creative output than by public acclaim. Thompson last graced the cover
of Acoustic Guitar in November 1993. Since then he has recorded
four critically acclaimed studio CDs, released several live acoustic
recordings on his own label, and toured incessantly with his crackerjack
band and as a solo artist.
Mirror Blue, featuring short, poppy songs and crisp production,
appeared in 1994, and although the subject matter was hardly lollipops
and roses, it is Thompson’s most commercial effort to date. This bent
towards the mainstream did not catapult Thompson to the top of the charts,
however, nor did it carry over to his subsequent projects, which were
driven by artistic expression more than the whims of the marketplace.
You? Me? Us?, released in 1996, is a double-barreled volume
with an unplugged "nude" disc of mostly solo acoustic pieces and a "voltage
enhanced" disc of electric rock songs. It suffered from heavy-handed
production, but the songs were as strong as ever, and the simplicity
of the stripped-down acoustic disc was a revelation.
Thompson’s decade-long collaboration with bassist Danny Thompson inspired
Industry, a 1997 collection about the Industrial Revolution in England,
which showcased the two Thompsons’ instrumental interplay. In order
to combat the pirating of his live shows, Thompson has also been releasing
his own "official bootlegs" of his concert performances. Celtschmerz,
consisting mostly of Thompson and his acoustic guitar delivering knockout
renditions of 16 concert favorites, was one of the hidden musical gems
of 1998. Last year’s Mock Tudor was Thompson’s strongest
project since he released Rumor and Sigh in 1991, and several
of its songs made a blip on the radar of mainstream radio.
I met with Thompson at Palookaville, a club in Santa Cruz, California,
before the penultimate gig of his grueling summer tour. As a queue of
die-hard enthusiasts formed outside the club, Thompson and cohorts pounded
through full-band versions of "Bathsheba Smiles" and "Uninhabited Man"
while the engineers tweaked the monitors and house speakers. During
the brief lull between sound check and concert time, Thompson invited
me into the black-upholstered inner sanctum of his tour bus for a chat
about dream-state songwriting and low-tech guitar slinging.
Your latest studio album, Mock Tudor, is a collection of
songs about London. The songs themselves seem to cover familiar Richard
Thompson territory. What’s the London connection for you?
Thompson It’s a collection of songs
about my experience in the suburbs of London, really, not about London
town as such. They aren’t songs about what happens in the subways. They
aren’t about the architecture. The album is more about growing up than
it is about the setting. London is just the backdrop for the human drama.
There are a lot of songs about early experiencesearly disappointments,
early frustrations. I don’t know why it was a good time for me to write
those kinds of songs, but that’s the way it turned out.
Did you intend for the collection to have a unifying theme when
you started?
Thompson Yes. I had a couple songs
along those lines and thought it would be fun to try to expand that
into an album. I got some songs fairly quickly, so it seemed like a
good thing to pursue.
What was your songwriting process on this project? Did you work
on the lyrics first or the music?
Thompson I probably wrote three-quarters
of the songs without an instrument in my hands. I have a guitar there
for reference, but just so I can say, "Right, I’ve got an F chord there."
I think the thing that’s good about leaving the thing in your head as
long as possible is that it kind of swims around; you haven’t fixed
it yet. When it’s floating around out there, it can sound quite magical,
but then you have to nail it down. Before that it’s almost as if you
are dreaming the song, but when you wake up you realize it’s slightly
more mundane than the incredible feel you had going in your imagination.
What’s that great Benny Golson story? Golson [the jazz tenor saxophonist
and arranger] has this incredible dream about this amazing, wonderful,
celestial music. And in the dream he says to himself, "Right, this time
I’m going to wake myself up and write this down." Right then, in the
middle of night, he turns the light on and automatically writes this
fabulous tune down and goes back to sleep. He wakes up in the morning
and looks at the tune, and it’s the middle eight to [Hoagy Carmichael’s]
"Stardust." [Laughs.]
Does noodling on the guitar ever spark a new song for you, or does
it always flow the other way?
Thompson I like to sit and watch TV
while noodling on the guitar, because sometimes your fingers just discover
things by themselves. You think, "Oh, that sounds nice. There’s a song
in there. That’s a good riff. That’s a good start." I’m for every possible
approach.
I thought that "Persuasion," a song you wrote with Tim Finn, was
a standout track on Celtschmertz. Is it likely you’ll do more
collaborative songwriting?
Thompson That was a good track, but
I’m a reluctant collaborator. Sometimes it works great, but I’m always
shy of it. I always think it’s not going to work. "How can I do this?
How can I get into that person’s mind? How can they get into mine?"
Sometimes it opens up a whole new world, and that’s wonderful, but I’ve
never gotten into that Nashville mindset where you go, "Monday I’m writing
with so-and-so, Tuesday I’m working with this other guy, Thursday I
write with somebody else." Writing with another person seems more like
work to me. When it works it’s just a natural thing. It just happens.
I used to write with Dave Swarbrick in Fairport Convention, but that
was a fairly straightforward thing, because our roles were so clearly
defined. Swarb would have a tune, and I’d figure out some kind of harmonic
structure for it, define the chords, and then write the words. That
was fine and we never argued about it. When you are both working on
both the tune and the lyrics it gets a bit more difficult.
The Celtic influence on your music was very pronounced on your early
recordings. Is traditional music still a conscious influence on your
songwriting?
Thompson A lot of the structures of
traditional material inform my songs—the verse form and that kind of
thing—but I’m not trying to make anything in an obvious Celtic vein.
Listening to "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" recently, I was struck
by how similar it is to a traditional ballad.
Thompson At the time of writing it,
I wasn’t conscious of the form. Thinking of it now, it seems obvious
to me. But that song is very romantic, with a criminal, a dangerous
love, and a trusty charger—all the elements of a ballad.
Many of your songs are populated by criminals like James Adie in
"Vincent Black Lightning" and other dangerous characters with shaky
moral underpinnings. Meanwhile, you have a deep commitment to your family
and to a spiritual way of life. Is this split between wholesome soccer
dad and composer of the dark side ever a conflict for you?
Thompson Not really. Creatively—when
you set out to write songs—you write fiction. Now, that writing reflects
your own life to some extent. It varies, but your own experience goes
into the songs. In writing songs, you ought to pull things into a sharper
focus, so you draw characters who are larger than life, and you write
about experiences that perhaps most people don’t have from day to day.
People are not really interested in the story of a soccer dad, necessarily.
Unless it’s the story of a soccer dad who can’t take any more and shoots
his family. There’s a ballad. There’s your contemporary "Tom Dooley."
People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things
that are larger than their own lives, and more romantic, and not necessarily
of their own experiences. People want to hear stories that are a bit
more of an escape, and I want to write stories that are a bit more of
an escape. To write about my own life seems mundane. To twist the stories
of your own life or to write fiction without any real intention other
than to entertain yourself seems far more interesting.
You haven’t got time to write a song as long as a Henry James novel,
where you could take ordinary people and watch the slow convolutions
of human nature. You have to write about human nature in a very immediate
way, because you’ve only got three verses and three minutes. Sometimes
you have to put characters into extreme situations: characters clinging
to a life raft or a bit of flotsam in the middle of the ocean, desperate
people, frustrated people, disappointed people. This happens to everybody,
but to write a song about a frustrated dentist is not very interesting,
because the guy’s affluent and his frustration isn’t as immediate as
a car worker who’s been thrown out of work, who’s got seven kids, and
who’s desperate because he doesn’t know where his next paycheck is coming
from. Whereas the dentist will fall on his feet. Sometimes you have
to take from the fringes of society, from the edges, if you know what
I mean.
Your audiences are incredibly devoted to you. There are lots of
Richard Thompson completists, Web sites for the sharing of Richard Thompson
ephemera, and so forth. Does your cultish following ever create problems
for you?
Thompson My audiences are very loyal,
which is a great thing, because it means that I can be fairly unsuccessful
in conventional commercial terms, but still the audience knows who I
am, and the audience comes back and doesn’t forget about me from year
to year.
Do you feel pressure to meet their expectations?
Thompson Yeah, but it’s a good expectation.
There’s an unspoken pact with the audience. Because my crowd knows me
and what I do, they expect me to push a little bit. They expect me to
not sit back and play the ones they already know. They expect to hear
new songs, they expect me to be experimenting. Which is great! I know
that every six months I need to come up with new material, new arrangements.
I have to rearrange the set so there are different songs. It’s very
good. It helps me.
Does your crowd appreciate the acoustic segments of your show?
Thompson I don’t know, but they’ll
have to put up with it, won’t they? In most full-band shows we’ll play
at least six or eight acoustic things out of 23 songs, which to me seems
about right. People are standing, so you wonder how long they can handle
the acoustic stuff, but they don’t seem to mind. I think perhaps audiences
appreciate that you’re trying to show some range, and perhaps for some
of the older farts in the audience it gives their ears a rest—stops
the ringing for a few minutes. I probably work three-quarters of the
time solo, so most of my crowd are pretty used to the acoustic thing.
Do you have to change techniques when you switch between the electric
and acoustic guitars?
Thompson Totally.
Is that confusing?
Thompson It’s not too bad. Although
sometimes I won’t play electric for a few months because I’m at home
just playing acoustic, and I think, "Whoa! That’s a real shock! I suddenly
feel very strong! Look how far I can bend a string. Whoops!" But actually,
when I’m on the road I’m playing them both every day in shows, so it’s
very easy to switch. But it’s a completely different technique. Totally
different feel. I’ve got pretty light-gauge strings on the electric
because I like to do different things with it—stretches and bends that
I don’t do on the acoustic.
What do you play for fun?
Thompson Sitting around home I mostly
play acoustic. I’ve got seven or eight guitars of various sorts, including
a baritone. Sometimes at home, because a guitar is just lying around,
that’s the guitar I pick up rather than actually choosing something.
I try to plan ahead for my laziness by leaving interesting things scattered
about. If I leave a baritone guitar lying around, that’s the one I’ll
pick up, and I’ll start writing baritoney things.
That reminds me of the dulcimer part on "Uninhabited Man." Tell
me about that dulcimer melody. Was it meant to sound ancient?
Thompson No, just the opposite. That
sounds like bebop to me. Modal bebop over a traditional Scottish mode
played on an Appalachian dulcimer. The line is really just the upper
part of the chords.
Have you incorporated the baritone guitar into the act as well?
Thompson I haven’t used it much in
the band context, because in a live situation with other players there
isn’t room for it sonically. Too muddy. But it’s something I have in
mind for a solo record as a second guitar. It creates that great low
end.
Does that mean you have plans for an acoustic studio record?
Thompson That’s a good idea. I’ve
got plans to do a studio solo album, and I’ve got an acoustic one fairly
ready to go, which would be fun to do sometime, but I don’t know what
the next move is. I’ve left Capitol, but most any label would probably
see it as a side project. If I put out an acoustic record it would get
played on public radio, which is mainly where I get played anyway. Might
get played on college radio. Which is fine. Because I’m jumping labels
I need to get that straight before I decide what kind of recording to
do next. We have a new "official bootleg" band album coming out on Flypaper.
My new Web site (richardthompson-music.com) will be a good place to
find out about the next studio project.
Considering the big acoustic presence in your live shows, your studio
albums have been consistently electric over the years. Is that a commercial
decision or an aesthetic one?
Thompson Well, the choice to go electric
is mainly an aesthetic choice, but I could look back and say that the
drum sound on Rumor and Sigh, for example, was a record company
thing. You need a bigger drum sound to play on the radio, so you go
back and make the drums bigger. Your tracks need to be compressed for
the radio, and things get tweaked in ways that aren’t always the way
that you want them, but that’s life, really. I’m on the edge of a commercial
industry. I jumped in with both feet, but I’m still on the edge.
Have you been concerned about what the Napster phenomenon might
mean for artists on the edge of the industry?
Thompson Not really, no. I’m not a
rich rock ’n’ roll star. I didn’t make a big fortune in the last decades,
so I have to get out and work. I have two income streams—playing solo
and getting songwriting royalties. If one of those is nibbled away at,
I’ll need to find something else. But the CDs don’t make money, and
the band tours don’t make money, either, so free downloads aren’t the
threat to me that they might be to others. The recording contracts are
not really fair, and I think that the record companies will have to
be more competitive with the contracts they offer artists in the future.
Hopefully that will happen as a result of this challenge.
I really enjoyed hearing you sing and play with your son Teddy in
recent concerts, and on Mock Tudor and Celtschmertz. Are
you two still working together?
Thompson Working with Teddy’s been
great. The year that Teddy was in the band was really nice for both
of us. It was nice to hang out together and to make music together,
and I think we had a good blend on the vocals, as well. He’s off on
his own now, in the Midwest somewhere, supporting his new album [Teddy
Thompson] on Virgin.
Beat the Retreat was a collection of other artists covering Richard
Thompson songs. Have you ever thought of turning the tables and doing
an album of covers?
Thompson I think that I became a singer
through circumstance rather than choice. I sing because I need to sing
my own songs, and that’s how I get away with it. When I do covers, I
always think that a real singer should be doing it rather than me. But
I am getting better. Pretty soon I’ll be ready for light opera or something.
[Laughs.]
What are you listening to these days?
Thompson Um, um, um . . . a real variety
of stuff—jazz music of all eras, classical music, opera, world music
as well. A wide range of music. But I don’t listen to anything on the
road. In fact, I don’t really listen to a lot of music at all. I like
to treat music kind of reverentially, to put on one track, get it set
right, and really, really listen.
What question did I forget to ask you?
Thompson Where’d you get those fabulous
shoes?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpted
from
Acoustic Guitar magazine,
February 2001, No. 98.
That issue also
contained a transcription of Thompson's "Turning of the Tide,"
a "Great Acoustics" story about his Lowden acoustic guitar,
a discography, and a "What They Play" sidebar about Thompson's
instruments, accessories, and stage setup. The discography is below.
Click
here to read about Thompson's instruments and gear.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Richard Thompson
Selected Discography
SOLO
Mock Tudor, Capitol 98860 (1999).
Celtschmertz, Flypaper 007 (1998). Flypaper, PO Box 391,
Wainscott, NY 11975; www.thebeesknees.com.
You? Me? Us?, Capitol 33704 (1996).
Mirror Blue, Capitol 81492 (1994).
Watching the Dark, Hannibal/Rykodisc 5303 (1993).
Rumor and Sigh, Capitol 95713 (1991).
Amnesia,
Capitol 48845 (1988).
Daring Adventures, Polydor 829728 (1986, out of print).
Across a Crowded Room, Polydor 825421 (1985).
Small Town Romance, Hannibal/Rykodisc 1316 (1984).
Hand of Kindness, Hannibal/Rykodisc 1313 (1983).
Strict Tempo!, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4409 (1981).
Henry the Human Fly, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4405 (1972).
Morris On, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4406 (1972).
WITH DANNY THOMPSON
Industry, Hannibal/Rykodisc 31769 (1997).
Live at Crawley 1993, Flypaper 005 (1995).
WITH LINDA THOMPSON
The Best of Richard and Linda Thompson, Island 542456
(2000).
Shoot out the Lights, Hannibal/Rykodisc 1303 (1982).
Sunnyvista, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4403 (1979).
First Light, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4412 (1978).
Richard Thompson Live! (More or Less), Island 9421 (1976,
out of print).
Pour Down Like Silver, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4402 (1975, out
of print).
Hokey Pokey, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4408 (1974, out of print).
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Hannibal/Rykodisc
4407 (1974, out of print).
WITH FAIRPORT CONVENTION
Full House, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4417 (1970).
What
We Did on Our Holidays, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4430 (1969).
Unhalfbricking, Hannibal/Rykodisc 4418 (1969).
Liege and Lief, Island 9115 (1969).
Fairport Convention, Polydor 835230 (1968).
