Richard Thompson

Inimitable guitar and songwriter. By Andrew Male. RTSURE

Raised in north London’s Muswell Hill in the 1950s, Richard Thompson was a shy kid with a pronounced stutter, who spoke through his guitar. His father, a Dumfries Presbyterian who worked as a Scotland Yard detective, gave him two significant gifts, a love of Django Reinhardt and Scottish folk music, and the cold eye of the secret observer. Through a friend of a friend, Thompson was invited to play guitar with a pair of local grammar school kids, Simon Nicol and Ashley Hutchings who practised above Nicol’s father’s dentist’s surgery, in a gabled Arts and Crafts house called Fairport. Thompson’s work with Fairport Convention combined the romance and mythology of indigenous British musics, with a unique guitar style that seamlessly bent, blended and interweaved a travelogue of different modes, scales and genres. Growing up fast, after surviving the tour-van crash that killed his girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn, and the band’s drummer, Martin Lamble, Thompson looked for new spiritual directions on the shelves of Watkins’ esoteric bookshop in Charing Cross, before settling on Sufism. Illuminated by poetry and mysticism, and his

“THE STRANGE LANDSCAPE OF HIS SONGS CAN BE REPEATEDLY REVISITED.”

marriage to singer Linda Peters, Thompson finessed a songwriting world-view he himself described as “beautiful tragedy”, with dark meditations on romantic defeat elevated to rapturous heights by his effortlessly lucent guitar and Linda Thompson’s sweetly mournful harmonies. The high standard of the first three Richard and Linda albums, and Thompson’s own self-effacing manner, has, on occasion, tended to overshadow the astonishing solo career that followed the couple’s divorce in 1982. His voice has become a nuanced and often fiery instrument that perfectly echoes and answers his preternatural guitar playing, while the strange landscape of his songs – a Middle England of dark gothic imagination bordering an abyss of pain and despair – is a world that can be repeatedly revisited without ever losing its peculiar magic or giving up its secrets.