It is possible, in the murky and muted fashion of his long and curious career, that Richard Thompson has proved to be one of the European artists most influential on American pop music.
Often cited today as a primary figure by roots and rock artists and fans alike, Thompson first appeared 37 years ago as an expressive (if elusive) lead guitarist and songwriter with the groundbreaking British folk-rock group Fairport Convention. His decade-plus as one half of a celebrated, oft-emulated and musically unclassifiable duo with Linda Thompson furthered both his legend and his reputation. For the past twenty years, as a solo artist and as leader of the Richard Thompson Band, he has been a musical innovator and synthesizer, and a masterful instrumentalist.
And, as his multi-cornered, endlessly surprising song catalogue reminds you, he's one complicated cookie.
Thompson's haunting 1986 song "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again", typically singular and subtle, evoked a soldier's response to a war-ravaged yet innocent woman. The song's title question, applied to its author, inevitably evokes the counter-query: "When was he ever?"
He's been described, reductively, as a purveyor of "gloom and doom from the tomb," but he regularly mixes the wittiest stand-up repartee heard on acoustic music stages with his songs, some of which are hilarious. And he often shows one of the lightest, most calibrated touches in contemporary lyric writing.
Often filed in the folk section of your local record store, and used as the very model of the master adapter of traditional British and Celt music, Thompson has explored a wide range of tones having little to do with either, and is a master electric guitarist. And in recent times, he's actually lived in Los Angeles at least as much as in London.
In 2005, at age 56, Thompson remains entirely likely to engage, provoke and surprise you on an ongoing basis. Front Parlour Ballads, featuring thirteen new originals performed in acoustic arrangements, has just been released by Cooking Vinyl. He's done the soundtrack for a new Werner Herzog film set for this fall, Grizzly Man. And, in his spare time he's researched and presented a show, 1000 Years Of Popular Music, which was previewed on a CD and is soon to be expanded into a more inclusive video performance on DVD.
NO DEPRESSION: You've taken some time recently to survey the last thousand years or so of popular music. So tell us, what makes a song popular?
RICHARD THOMPSON: You could say that melodically and harmonically, things are going to be pretty simple, and that thematically it's going to be about dancing or love, but there are too many tunes that defy all that! Whenever you come up with a formula, you can think of an exception that doesn't follow the rule; I don't think there are rules.
But in terms of our show, I have to make a slight disclaimer: The songs that we sing are not necessarily popular; they're ones that we like! If we did a true portrayal of "A Thousand Years Of Popular Music", it would be heavy on Julie Andrews numbers sung by the Archies.
ND: Somebody might look at that wonderfully motley list of songs you do on the 1000 Years CD, everything from the oldest-known English round to Britney Spears, and say, "Some of those things are traditional folk songs, and some of those are, well, you know -- pop." After decades of playing around the boundary where those meet and intermingle, what would you say is the difference between the two -- and do you care much which side of the line you're on?
RT: This gets into difficult territory.
ND: Yeah; that's the idea.
RT: A word like "folk" is very difficult to define; almost everyone has their own. I tend not to use it; it's so loaded. Some say folk is the music of the people; some say of the underclass. In which case -- is rock 'n' roll folk music? Can classical music be? Jazz? So I tend to say "acoustic" -- which is all that some people mean, anyway.
ND: Or "traditional?"
RT: Yes, "traditional." The difference, as you go back through those centuries, may be about the function of the song -- what it was really used for. An old song from Scotland would have been sung around a table in a pub or somebody's front room, and the function was to be amusing, or to tell a story, to express a political viewpoint, or just relate the local news.
ND: It had a job!
RT: It was TV, radio and the internet. That wandering minstrel of history had a function as a culture carrier, even from one country to another.
ND: You seem to fill some of those functions even now. So, Richard, are you in pop music?
RT: Yeah, that's a good question. I suppose I am, in one sense. I'd say that I'm on the fringe of the music industry. But I do perform music a bit like those troubadours; I go from town to town and I bring what I have to offer -- on a yearly basis!
ND: Some would say that rock 'n' roll is itself a traditional music now -- a set, period genre you can choose to pick up and play with.
RT: It is a traditional music; it's a classical music. You accept that when you pick up an instrument and start playing it these days. It's, "I play, you know, middle romantic period rock" or "grunge with a hint of punk and some New Romantics thrown in." It's always in terms like that!
ND: Songs of yours, all through the years, including "Miss Patsy" or "Row Boys Row" on the new album, seem to bring together really old language, sounds and rhythms, and the very current -- so seamlessly that it can feel unplanned. Do you still set out to write something that way, or does that old/new mix just happen now?
RT: It's just what comes out. I think that if you're steeped in a tradition, if you're, say, a bluegrass musician or something, when you sit down to write a song it sounds like a bluegrass song. You're not thinking, "I need a verse that sounds like Bill Monroe here and a bridge that sounds like Jim & Jesse." It's an unconscious thing. Very occasionally, I will sit down and say '"Well, what is it that I do -- and why do I do it?" I'll ask myself these larger questions.
ND: Would your latest self-exam show sophisticated, theater-style pop song-making speaking to you more strongly lately? "Let It Blow" on the new Front Parlour Ballads CD, or the very witty "I've Got The Hots For The Smarts" song which you've been doing live, seem close to Broadway or West End musical theater material, with more complex musical lines and lots of wordplay. They bring to mind the likes of Cole Porter.
RT: Well, I am a longtime fan of people like Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart -- stuff that I both grew up with and which was part of the general mix. And obviously, I listened to some Paul McCartney then, and he knows that music very well. It's just in there, part of the family music diet on the old gramophone. So it's fun to sit down and write those kinds of lyrics sometimes.
ND: You brought up bluegrass. Did the Del McCoury Band version of your "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" take you by surprise?
RT: I didn't know that they were going to do it! I'm glad that the song translated that way. I wrote it as almost a contemporary version of a 16th-century Scottish ballad, so I'm glad that it seemed contemporary enough to cover, and that there was enough common ground with Scots-Irish music and Appalachian.
ND: It's a big request song for you, of course, but it's definitely the song people ask Del for most these days, too.
RT: And now other bluegrass people have covered it. I've had a few country covers. There's a new one by Patty Loveless; it's a great version. Melodically, particularly, but I'm sure emotionally too, there's some common ground there.
ND: Yes. Patty's new version of "Keep Your Distance" leads off her new CD, and, I'm told, is the first single. Has there ever been a concerted effort to get more Richard Thompson songs recorded by country artists? The storytelling or situation-setting part of what you write would have its most logical American pop spectrum home in country.
RT: I think that's absolutely true. As you say -- the story is important in country, and I write a lot often, so I'm with you all the way there!
ND: You're in favor of seeing more of that.
RT: I'm always in favor of covers, thank you!
ND: It's been twenty years now since you emerged as a solo performer and singer. That whole package seemed so very different from the shy, songwriting guitar player over on the side there, which you'd been for nearly twenty years before that!
RT: That's true. I thought it was a challenge; as early as the mid-'70s I'd do the occasional solo show, just to prove that I could stand up there and do it. It's almost a test of who you are as a musician. Can you really sing? Can you really play? Communicate with an audience? Can you really perform? Well, here's the test.
I enjoyed doing that from time to time -- and then in the early '80s there was the financial aspect; sometimes I had to go out solo. To be able to both have a band and play solo is a great luxury that I've had since then.
ND: I can recall an early U.S. solo performance of yours at the Town Crier club just north of New York in '85...
RT: Oh, sure!
ND: You hadn't, I think, done that many shows like that yet, but it all seemed just to flow, including "Willie And The Hand Jive" with all the hand moves. You seemed instantly more polished and comfortable up there than a lot of people ever get. Where did that come from? Had you sort of worked up an act?
RT: I just tried to develop ideas around that solo format, to write songs for it, and to develop a guitar style for it. The only way you really work up an act is to do it, unless maybe you're a comedian and you can stand there in front of a mirror and tell jokes to yourself! I think you just have to perform.
The thing is not to be satisfied with the style of the folksinger sort of singer-songwriter; to come out and push the limits of what you can do to accompany yourself as a singer, on the guitar.
There can be something kind of seductive about somebody who's very introverted onstage, who stares at those shoes, strums, doesn't say very much -- and draws you into their world. I think that can work, in terms of performance, though it's not the right way for me. I was nervous onstage, and didn't want to be standing there looking nervous, so I figured I'd use some bluster, use the personalities of a couple of male friends of mine...
ND: Would you like to name names?
RT: Uh -- no! They were a couple of loud bass players who shout in restaurants. I decided to be loud onstage, tell jokes between numbers, so if the songs were kind of quiet and introverted, there'd be some contrast. I could put the audience a little off-balance; they wouldn't know what to expect. There's probably more mileage in being the silent tortured genius, though; maybe I should have stuck with that.
ND: There were times, in the mid-'80s, where people would compare your vocal handling of your own songs to Sandy Denny's, and to Linda's, and not so positively. But at your show here in Nashville a few weeks ago, I was really struck by how expressive and spot-on your singing can be today, and on challenging, dramatic songs, too -- "1952 Vincent" or "King Of Bohemia" for two.
RT: Oh -- I have improved! Absolutely. From being out on the road, year after year. In my head, I always knew what to do, how to phrase -- but it's a matter of having the tonsils to pull it off. And now I think I am a reasonable singer of my own material. It's about opening up your lungs, and figuring out how much pressure to put on your vocal cords, which comes from practice.
ND: Given that choice you have of the more intimate acoustic show or a Richard Thompson Band electric bash, do you have a preference?
RT: No; I enjoy both, and like the contrast. It's like having a whole other life or career. I don't get tired of music because I have these two contrasting opportunities.
ND: So though the new album is all-acoustic, we need to talk about your electric guitar work. When you were already playing that instrument onstage, as early as age 11, who were your guitar heroes?
RT: My early ones included Les Paul and Django Reinhardt, from my father's record collection, and then, for rock 'n' roll it was Scotty Moore, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Cliff Gallup, who played with Gene Vincent, and also Hank Morgan of the Shadows. He got such a great tone out of a Stratocaster; he was a great pioneer of that instrument.
ND: With your distinctive sound and attack, you're rarely compared to other electric guitar aces at all. Do you see any working guitar players as musical kin?
RT: Well, there are plenty of great players out there. But I'm not really in the musical mainstream; I'm a little bit off to the side -- just because of the influences on what I play. And I'm glad about that! If anything, I've worked at trying to be an individual, and having true roots in my music, and a root that's true to the country I come from, and the heritage that I have. So I play a little different.
ND: It's interesting, though, that American music has had a continuing role in your mix, all through the years -- even as you were pegged as the Anglo or Celt folk-rock king. There were Jerry Lee Lewis songs, Cajun numbers, and Buck Owens' "Together Again" in your live shows. Did these things first seem a charmingly exotic music for you -- as the Morris Dance songs and "Blackleg Miner" sorts of old English ballads have to be, in part, for fans from this side of the water?
RT: I thought that it was exciting music; growing up in the '50s in England, rock 'n' roll like that saved us all, saved our lives -- for which we're just eternally grateful. I suppose we did try to bring a slightly European influence to those, rather than just play straight Jerry Lee or something.
ND: In the late '80s and early '90s, old friends of yours like bandmate John Kirkpatrick complained in print that you were being "Americanized" in location, use of musicians, studios -- and sound.
RT: Well, they had a point! In the '80s and '90s, on the records I made, there was pressure to fit in with American radio formats and to use American musicians. I'm more my own boss these days, and I can pick and choose musicians and make the records that I want to -- not that I care where a musician comes from.
RT: That early interest in one sort of American music, Cajun, was pretty surprising, because there weren't that many people bringing those sounds into rock 'n' roll in the late '60s.
RT: Well, in Fairport we were very eclectic -- to a fault. In '65-'66, in the blues rack at the local jazz record shop, there appeared these Clifton Chenier and Hackberry Ramblers records, and we saw they were singing in French, with German accordions, on kind of blues songs. It was so bizarre! So we were very excited by Cajun music; it was one of the things that helped us to form our own ideas about playing our own traditional music.
ND: From then on, there would be an interest in your gang, and in the music you've come up with since yourself, in developing a kind of rock that was not blues or R&B-based. What was behind that choice of direction, originally?
RT: We were a bunch of suburban, white intellectual schoolboys, and we used to think about what it was we were playing. At some point we said, "We're never going to play the blues as well as Muddy Waters, we'll never play country as well as Hank Williams, and we're never going to play soul as well as Otis Redding."
ND: This was a bit of reticence and perspective that a lot of other suburban English boys notably didn't have!
RT: Possibly true. We looked at the immediate scene, and there were 5000 blues bands! It was kind of a treadmill, and we wondered if we wanted to go down the same road.
We wanted to be more individual, and we stretched, first of all, by being more of a "lyric band." We were very influenced by the Byrds and Dylan, so we said, "Let's focus on songs that have strong, interesting lyrics." We were performing songs by Leonard Cohen, and Dylan, Phil Ochs and Richard Farina -- people from the American folk revival.
But then, at a certain point, we felt that we were still being imitators. We were an English band, but that was not what we sounded like; we were still imitating an American style. So we decided that what we should do, really, was take traditional British music and soup it up, bring it into the 20th century, make it something that's vital to us and to our audience -- and give people back their own tradition.
And that's something at which, I'd say, we were only partly successful, the idea that that would become popular music. We had been hoping that it would be popular enough that people of Britain would not see it as a novelty, that they'd actually embrace it and say, "This is our rock 'n' roll."
It's a shame, really, that the classic lineup of Fairport with Sandy Denny never took the stage here [in the States]. I do think that if we'd toured the U.S. with that band, there would have been some interesting results.
ND: Is it true that you were asked to join both the Eagles and The Band at different points? Those were not exactly traditionally British organizations!
RT: Apparently, yes. Nobody approached me directly, but through the record companies or management, there was an approach from the Eagles. There was also, I think, a point where Traffic asked about me.
ND: That one seems more obvious; I doubt that there would have been a John Barleycorn album from them without the music you'd done earlier.
RT: That's probably true. In terms of The Band, I was approached in the early '80s after they'd split up and were putting it back together again, and couldn't get Robbie. It's a gig I could have done, as a guitar player -- but I don't think my heart would have been in it.
ND: Speaking of transatlantic influence, there is a theory -- and I think this line of thinking has a point -- that with your experiments in working out a sort of extended, hard, electric rock 'n' roll that was not blues-based, not R&B-based, you were, in effect, one father of modern alternative rock. After working with you so much, producer Joe Boyd goes on to work with R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs -- a direct link -- and before long Bob Mould and X and R.E.M. are on the Beat The Retreat CD salute to you. Do you accept that designation, as one conceptual father of alternative, who helped open a door for a new rock era?
RT: In a small way, yes. Maybe. I don't think we were totally responsible for that kind of thing -- but maybe a small part of it. Maybe. I make no claims!
ND: Well, when we get to your 1991 Rumor & Sigh CD, it gets nominated for a "Best Alternative" Grammy. There was such a thing, and there'd soon be Triple-A radio. If you were not precisely Nirvana, it did seem then that, in a way, the pop world had caught up with what you were up to.
RT: Yes to that -- for the radio, I was treated pretty much as a new artist beginning in the '80s, even though I was in my 30s!
ND: Those 1990s records, produced by Mitchell Froom, were from your 'big label' years -- and they sounded notably different.
RT: A lot of that had less to do with Mitchell, and more to do with the label -- the kind of pressure Mitchell was under to come up with a big drum sound. The record company was really saying, "If you want to get this on the radio, here's what you have to do," blah blah blah. And with the unspoken subtext being -- or forget about your contract!
I think that the first couple of records that I did with Mitchell were overproduced, but after a while we got more comfortable with each other and found ways to get around the word from upstairs.
ND: You've been on small, medium-sized and very large labels along the way. As places to make music, which do you prefer?
RT: I'm very happy where I am now -- which is with a small label, Cooking Vinyl, which sees and releases more records that we make as viable. It's the ideal-sized label for us, a label that might employ only six people -- but they're six people who will be working their socks off for you.
ND: Front Parlour Ballads is actually the first album's worth of new songs that you've ever brought out in basically solo acoustic style. Why not before now?
RT: It was an oversight. Really! We've made live acoustic shows available over the years, and that filled the gap to some extent, though those were not exclusively new material.
ND: Were these songs written recently, or saved up and brought forward because they fit this approach?
RT: They're from within the last couple of years, but written specifically for this project. I write in piles -- a pile of songs for the next band album, a pile for that acoustic project, a pile of weird songs in case I do a weird project for a limited audience. At some point, when a pile gets to twelve or fifteen songs, then I'll say it's time to do something about it.
ND: In calling these songs "front parlour ballads," what are you suggesting that they having in common?
RT: They're small, intimate songs, nothing bombastic or grandiose -- and in some cases, quite short. They're almost one-on-one songs, as if you were singing to just one other person, face to face, in a small room. You know, at least 60 percent of the houses in Britain were built in the Victorian era, with a front parlour for visitors and a back parlour for family.
ND: Some of the songs tie the words closely to very un-folk, intricate note runs, in a way that seems almost classical or out of the "art song" mode. "How Does Your Garden Grow?" and "Precious One" could sound good with a string quartet or a chorale.
RT: Classical music is also something I've listened to, and I've been particularly interested, in the last couple of years, in the way early 20th-century composers like Debussy and Ravel or a Kurt Weill tackled the idea of a song -- the structure, the way the music relates to the words. I wanted to see if I could build a bridge between the styles I play, based on traditional music, and that particular classical area.
ND: The results sound like they're fun to sing!
RT: Well, those songs are fun to sing; yes. But then, they had all better be. Because if it's not fun, I say -- don't sing it!
ND senior editor Barry Mazor first became aware of Richard Thompson's music playing the early Fairport Convention LPs as they were released in the late '60s on his Washington, D.C., college radio show "Heartbreak Hotel" -- a show otherwise dedicated to country music old and new, rockabilly, and that new-fangled American country rock.
pull quotes [note: I'll use some of these, instead of the section heds of our previous format, but how many will depend on the vagaries of space and design]:
If we did a true portrayal of "A Thousand Years Of Popular Music", it would be heavy on Julie Andrews numbers sung by the Archies.
I am a longtime fan of people like Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart -- stuff that I both grew up with and which was part of the general mix. And obviously, I listened to some Paul McCartney then, and he knows that music very well. It's just in there, part of the family music diet on the old gramophone.
The thing is not to be satisfied with the style of the folksinger sort of singer-songwriter; to come out and push the limits of what you can do to accompany yourself as a singer, on the guitar.
I decided to be loud onstage, tell jokes between numbers, so if the songs were kind of quiet and introverted, there'd be some contrast. I could put the audience a little off-balance; they wouldn't know what to expect. There's probably more mileage in being the silent tortured genius, though; maybe I should have stuck with that.
If anything, I've worked at trying to be an individual, and having true roots in my music, and a root that's true to the country I come from, and the heritage that I have. So I play a little different.
We were a bunch of suburban, white intellectual schoolboys, and we used to think about what it was we were playing. At some point we said, "We're never going to play the blues as well as Muddy Waters, we'll never play country as well as Hank Williams, and we're never going to play soul as well as Otis Redding."
It's a shame, really, that the classic lineup of Fairport with Sandy Denny never took the stage here [in the States]. I do think that if we'd toured the U.S. with that band, there would have been some interesting results.
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