RICHARD THOMPSON
Lots of musicians write books. But when Thompson does it, clued-up reader takes note. Here he previews his frank and cathartic memoir Beeswing.
“You think you deal with everything, but you don’t.” RICHARD THOMPSON
THERE IS a powerful moment near the start of Richard Thompson’s memoir, Beeswing. He is describing the terrible guest houses that Fairport Convention stayed in during their early gigging days, rooms with damp nylon bedding and single-bar fires. “Mostly we avoided staying overnight anywhere,” he writes, “preferring to save money by driving back to London.”
If you know the tragedy that overshadowed the group’s early years – that drummer Martin Lamble died in a crash when they were returning from a gig in Birmingham on May 12, 1969 – you’ll feel a chilly sense of foreboding. If you know Thompson’s skills as a lyricist, you’ll recognise an unromantic matter-of-factness, an unwillingness to embellish, to let the cold facts drill down.
“I think I’m incapable of being romantic,” says Thompson, with a dry chuckle. “I’m romantic in life but not in my writing. I’m glad that works. I mean, it’s my first book.”
Conceived some years back with the late arts journalist Scott Timberg, Beeswing recounts Thompson’s life story from 1967 to 1975, from joining Fairport Convention to the spiritual questioning that came in the wake of 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver.
“That was Scott’s idea,” says Thompson. “I also thought, There’s a story to tell there. If someone said: Write a book about your life from 1985 to 1995, I’d think, My God, are you serious? Nothing new happened. But in the ’60s and ’70s, everything was new and vivid, and I thought that was worth conveying.”
Thompson’s prose style, like his lyrics, is simultaneously vivid and dreamlike, yet faithful to the facts. His encounters with Jimi Hendrix and Nick Drake are unadorned by subsequent knowledge. Yet his recounting of the Fairports’ tragic tour-van crash, the recording of Liege And Lief, or his complex relationships with former band members Sandy Denny and Dave Swarbrick are explored in haunting depth.
“You think you deal with everything,” says Thompson,
“but you don’t. You kind of tuck the past away and don’t challenge yourself about it. But if you’re writing a book, you really have to deal with this stuff. In that sense writing the book was really cathartic for me.”
Yet while Thompson enjoyed the writing process (“I might do detective fiction next”) he hated the editing. Early drafts of Beeswing were more impressionistic, the chapters interspersed with vivid encoded dreams. Much of his hallucinatory prose remains intact, but those dreams are consigned to the book’s appendix. “The editors pushed me to be more chronological,” he says. “If I’d had my way, the whole thing that would have been much more like a dream.”
He also had to leave out a lot of the spiritual elements regarding his life as a Sufi (“That’s another book,” he admits). As the book is now due for release in spring, MOJO wonders if it still has to be read by lawyers.
“Why?” asks Thompson, slightly startled. “I’m nice about everyone. I mean, [ex-wife] Linda’s asked for a copy but only because she’s bored in lockdown. She wants something to read, and it’s always more exciting to read a book that you’re actually in.”