CHAIRMAN OF THE (FRET)BOARD

Richard Thompson
The Independent, January 2003

IT is possible that the best thing that ever happened to Richard Thompson was something that never happened: his “American Pie”, his immortal worldwide hit that has nostalgic audiences fidgeting irritably through concerts as they wait, like tourists on a bus bound for some much-photographed attraction, for the inevitable encore.
“That has been a help, yeah,” he nods. “If you have a song like that, it means you’re playing to 10,000 people a night, and it’s a long way down from there. I have minor peaks and troughs, but I have a very steady audience.”
Thompson’s career, now halfway into its fourth decade, has yielded its share of crowd favourites from his work with Fairport Convention, with his ex-wife Linda Thompson, and under his own name – “Meet On The Ledge”, “Wall Of Death”, “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight”, “Shoot Out The Lights”, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (a version of which by the Del McCoury Band was Song Of The Year at the 2002 International Bluegrass Music Awards). However, he is able to walk the streets, and make his records, without being That Bloke Who Did That Song. It might be bad news for his bank balance, but it has been good news for Thompson’s view of himself: the Englishman in Los Angeles, the Muslim rock’n’roll singer, the eternal outsider, comfortable with everything except being comfortable.
Thompson is in the Islington home of his publicist, on an if-it’s-Thursday-afternoon-this-must-be-London promotional tour in support of his new album, “The Old Kit Bag”. The title is appropriate insofar as it finds Thompson packing up and taking his songs to a new label; after six albums for the American monolith Capitol, he is now signed to the independent Cooking Vinyl.
“It was time I moved on,” he says. “Big labels now can’t see under about 500,000 copies. They can do Britney and the Burger King tie-in and the Disney tie-in, but the days of major labels being able to find audiences of jazz fans and folk fans are over. It has become a much more corporate world. Bad times in popular music happen when the business understands the music and understands how to market it exactly. It’s so easy now to produce hit music. It is all done by machines. Musicians aren’t involved in the process at all.”
It is easy to appreciate why this situation is anathema to Thompson. Ever since the first Fairport Convention recordings, he has been a musician’s musician: a guitarist whose abilities reduce other guitarists to whimpering awe and envy, or lengthy and incomprehensible technical analysis, or both. “The Old Kit Bag” is riddled with reasons for this: dazzlingly fluid electric solos, and acoustic picking so impossibly intricate that it comes as something of a surprise to discover that Thompson has just the five fingers on each hand. This virtuosity had been reined in slightly on Thompson’s previous album, 1999’s superb “Mock Tudor”, which was a suite of songs telling a story. “The Old Kit Bag” is more reminiscent of the concerts Thompson played on the tour accompanying “Mock Tudor”, which were memorable for exuberant instrumental excursions by Thompson; decent-sized matchstick models of the Cutty Sark have been built in less time than he took over some of his solos.
Thompson wrote most of “The Old Kit Bag” at home in Los Angeles, where he has lived for five years (“I like the sleaze and decadence,” he explains) with his second wife, and two sons. Of his three children from his marriage to Linda Thompson, at least two have taken up the family trade. His son, Teddy, has released one solo album, and played guitar in Richard’s band on the “Mock Tudor” tour, and on the recent (tremendous) comeback album and tour by Linda. A daughter, Kamila, also formed part of Linda’s touring band as a guitarist and singer. Richard Thompson saw the three of them play together last year in Los Angeles.
“It was quite strange in some ways,” he says, “but I thought it was really good. I was very proud of the kids. I thought Teddy did a good job and Kami did a good job, so. . . heart-warming for Dad.”
Thompson plays an extremely dead bat to any questions about his relationship with Linda, and this is understandable. Their last tour together, in support of “Shoot Out The Lights” in 1982, has become legendary. Richard had already told Linda he was leaving her for another woman, Linda was pregnant with his third child, and every night they were performing some of the most cruelly intimate songs about heartbreak in the rock’n’roll canon; contemporary reviews of the gigs make them sound something like “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?: The Musical”. Richard and Linda now seem more or less reconciled – Richard contributed vocals and guitar to the opening track on her new album, and the record closed with a song Linda wrote about him, a bittersweet tribute called “Dear Old Man Of Mine” (which, incidentally, contains the perfect description of Thompson in full cry: “Singing like he’s got a gun to his head”). All things considered, however, it is unsurprising that he didn’t invite himself on stage with his family.
“I didn’t think that was appropriate,” he says. “If you get divorced, there’s animosities, and a lot of baggage. I don’t think I’d want to play with Linda again. Not for musical reasons, but for personal ones. I’d rather say that was a chapter, and it’s finished, and I’ll leave it alone. I don’t think I want to go back.”
Thompson is equally defensive when asked about his faith. He converted to Islam in the mid-70s, and though he and Linda initially withdrew to a commune near Norwich, he describes himself today as a moderate. Again, he has reasons for his reticence. After September 11th 2001, to Thompson’s evident and enduring bemusement, a number of media outlets contacted him asking him to speak for an entire religion.
“Most of the time I didn’t want to do it,” he says, “as I don’t want to be a spokesman for a whole bunch of people who I don’t know, and who I don’t always agree with. The Taliban would probably have had me hung, drawn and quartered.”
One song on “The Old Kit Bag”, “Outside Of The Inside”, is sung from a perspective utterly unimpressed by everything that the western world has produced: Einstein, Botticelli, Shakespeare, Van Gogh and Charlie Parker are among those written off by the narrator.
“That’s basically a Taliban-eye view of western civilisation, arguing that the last 500 years of innovation has been a waste of time. They’re ignorant people whose knowledge is in a very small area – they’re actually very ignorant of their own religion in many respects. I’m very contemptuous of fundamentalists – Muslim, Christian or whatever. I wrote it because at the time I was actually feeling very defensive about the West.”

THOMPSON, now 53, says he doesn’t listen much to new music anymore, finding most contemporary stuff predictable, formulaic and sanitised (asked to pick a couple of honourable exceptions, he comes up with Radiohead and The Hives). He admits that he occasionally wonders if he’s too old to be doing this, if he should be painting or writing plays or something more grown-up instead, but can never think of quite what, and besides which, he enjoys what he does. He is also, as “Mock Tudor” and “The Old Kit Bag” have confirmed, doing it better than ever before. Where some middle-aged rock’n’roll singers have made the grievous mistake of pretending that clocks stopped ticking in 1970 – The Rolling Stones are an especially egregious example – Thompson, like Elvis Costello, like Johnny Cash, is finding that the genre responds surprisingly well when the middle-aged embrace it on their terms.
“Well,” he smiles, “we can deal with adult things, lyrically. We can bring more weight to the lyrics, we can bring ideas from classical music or jazz, and that just stretches the genre a little more. It would be nice to think that the art of the singer-songwriter can contain more musically and lyrically than it has so far, that it can still encompass more. I’m not 22 anymore, but that can be a good thing.”