Richard Thompson
The folk-rock maestro discusses his raw new album, 50 years of Fairport and being a Muslim in Trump’s America
The first-time visitor to hampstead, wandering around this leafy, genteel area of London, may feel in need of a tour guide. If so, they could do worse than Richard Thompson, who’s spent much of his life pacing these streets. “It’s rather tranquil around here,” he says, leading
Uncut on a walk down the high street towards the heath. “here’s Thurlow Road where Linda and I used to live, above Ridley Scott, who went on to an undistinguished career…” Thompson points to an upmarket greetings card store. “When we lived here, this was a health food shop owned by Steve howe.”
The Coffee Cup, which the guitarist would frequent when he was at school, is still on hampstead high Street, though – “It was always full of middle-class revolutionaries” – but the King Of Bohemia pub, which lent its name to a song on Thompson’s Mirror
Blue (1994), is gone. “Another one to tick off. Oh well, easy come… I ran into my daughter outside it when she was a teenager, unexpectedly, when she was just totally out of control,” he says, explaining the inspiration behind the song. “Disturbing.”
Thompson, in contrast, has been teetotal since he converted to Sufi Islam aged 23. “It’s the fork in the
road,” he explains. “You see two choices and you think, ‘I could go down that one, for a few years…’ When you see your colleagues having a hard time with addiction, it’s a reminder that it is a choice. Not
was, but is.” We pause in the garden of Keats House, where Thompson takes a fallen plum from under a tree; Keats reputedly wrote “Ode To A Nightingale” under a similar one, now long gone, on this very spot. “It’s ripe, perfect,” Thompson says, plum eaten. “Now I feel a strange urge to write poetry…” A few minutes away is Hampstead Heath, which might have given the guitarist a taste for rock’n’roll when, as a child, he heard the amped-up music from the distorted soundsystems of visiting carnivals.
Despite his reputation as a folkie, the 69-year-old is still keen to play electric guitar, as his new album
13 Rivers attests. It’s one of his loudest, most serious collections of songs, perhaps his most powerful since 1999’s Mock Tudor. Backed by longtime collaborators Michael Jerome on drums and Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Thompson rages against the pain and ecstasy of love, the impermanence of emotions, and the madness rising in America, his main base since the mid-’80s.
“I’ve just moved to New Jersey,” he explains as we settle in Café Rouge, once another of the guitarist’s haunts, The Dome. “I’ve spent 30 years in California, but times change. I’m closer to England now, so if I fall foul of Donald Trump, then it’s a quicker escape route. I intend to spend more time here in the UK. It’s getting insane over there.”
After 2013’s Electric and 2015’s Still, produced by Buddy Miller and Jeff Tweedy, respectively, 13
Rivers finds Thompson himself taking the reins, and as a result it’s a sparser, less fussy record which hits a lot harder, both emotionally and aurally.
“It’s been a time of upheaval for me,” he explains. “We’ve had some family traumas in the last couple of years, so there’s a lot of change. Having said that, I don’t really know where these songs come from – I don’t know what happens in my head when I come up with this stuff.”
Other topics up for discussion today are Thompson’s visionary work with Fairport Convention, the stunning albums he made with Linda Thompson in the ’70s, being a Muslim in Trump’s America, and accidentally inventing folk rock. “Liege & Lief was always conceived as a oneoff, but having done it we couldn’t really see a way to go backwards. It was an exciting way to update the tradition – we were singing these old songs, in some cases 400 years old, with these extraordinary stories and very powerful lyrics, and combining that with the power of rock music.
“Have you got enough to make me sound interesting?” he says, that wry half-smile always present. “Pale and interesting? Windswept and interesting?”
13 Rivers is pretty stripped down. Did that
come in response to the songs? Stripped down is the approach I usually go for. If it sounds more like that, then it’s to do with the structure of the songs. Sometimes you get a song and you think, ‘Wow, that’d be great with a little more on it.’ So you start sticking on a few more guitars, get it nice and chimey, and then, ‘It needs more vocals…’ I think songs tell us what they want, and for the most part on this record the songs were saying, “Could you just leave us alone?” You produced this yourself – did you nick any techniques you’d learnt from Buddy or Jeff? I wouldn’t say techniques as much as attitude. Jeff Tweedy was really good at getting to the essence of a song. He’d say, “I think the groove’s a little bit wrong, take out that bass drum beat there…” I’ve done things with the engineer on this record before, Clay Blair, so I knew the sound he’d go for, and I was really happy about that. We didn’t do a lot of takes – two or three on most things. There’s a lot of sloppy soloing, but it’s the spirit of the thing. We’re not going for perfection here, we’re going for emotion. I always think a really bad note is an extreme of emotion that you just have to live with. Lyrically, there are references to natural disasters – earthquakes, storms – and even Armageddon “in the mirror”. Where do these come from? I don’t know. “The Storm Won’t Come” is a longing for a change to come in your life. In “Bones Of Gilead” it’s like love is gonna hit you on the head… the process is going to be traumatic but the outcome is positive. I say to the listener, make of it what you will, which is a great cop-out. Sometimes you finish a song and think, ‘Where did that come from?’ It’s like poetry; it’s not nailed down and not fully conscious, but somehow that communicates to other people. Sometimes you can make a career out of that! And sometimes you can’t. I’m not always that obscure, but sometimes this stuff does come out of this dream landscape.
“I don’t like people beating me over the head with their beliefs. I find it repulsive”
You use Biblical references quite a bit – “The Rattle Within” mentions Jesus, and there are various Gileads in the Bible [“Bones Of Gilead”]. Knowing your religious beliefs, how are you employing these?
I’m really using them as cultural references for people in the West. The King James Bible is one of the great works of poetry in the English language. Even though I’m not a Christian I love the language of it, and the spirituality of it.
Your religious beliefs are clearly important to you, but you don’t seem to often address them in your music.
It’s all in there – you can’t fail to reflect your own morality in what you write. It has to be in there, and I know it is. But I don’t like people beating me over the head with their beliefs; I find it repulsive, so I try not to do it to other people. I hope what I do is non-dogmatic and subtle. My songs are more about the human heart and the human condition than they are about religious factions.
Is it a strange time to be a Muslim in America?
Well, not yet. It might get stranger soon, who knows? If it becomes more authoritarian, then I think it’ll get dangerous. At this point, there are so many unravellings of so many strands that it’s hard to say which way the cards will fall. Hopefully, people will come to their senses and restore some morality and order. But right now, it’s just weird.
Talking of happier topics, that distorted hurdy gurdy on “The Rattle Within” made me think of “Roll Over Vaughan Williams” [from 1971’s Henry The Human Fly]. Was that on your mind?
No, I’m usually trying to think forwards. But old records are surprising if you haven’t heard them for 10, 20 years. It’s usually like, ‘What was I thinking when I made this record? How could I have liked that song ever?’ I always think the future is going to be better, and I’ll be more consistent. Which of your records are you most pleased by? I’ve always liked Mock Tudor.[1974’s] I Want To See The Bright Lights is a good record. More recently, something like [2007’s] Sweet Warrior is good. I really like Electric and Still, too. The Fairport records stand up really well – What We Did On Our Holidays sounds really good, Unhalfbricking… Next year is the 50th anniversary of those three amazing Fairport albums – …Holidays, Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief. ’68, ’69, we seemed to be working all the time. We were really aware of the need to write our own material. The Beatles had come up with this new model – you write your own songs and you perform them. It had become a normal thing. Was “Meet On The Ledge” really the first song you wrote? Yes, probably my first solo composition.
That’s ridiculous. Well, I think it’s ridiculous in other ways… I think it’s ridiculously naive, but we have to forgive ourselves for our naivety, especially if people want you to sing it 50 years later. I’m going to sing it this year a bit more, as it’s the 50th anniversary of recording it. I’ll do something else as well from What We Did On Our Holidays, just to show how in touch I am with anniversaries. Fairport moved towards folk pretty early on – the current was moving that way, I suppose, but still… We’d always been folkies. We invested in acoustic music, singer-songwriter music. We hung out in folk clubs as well as rock clubs – we’d go and see Davy Graham and Martin Carthy and Shirley Collins, but we’d also go and see Howlin’ Wolf or the Butterfield Blues Band or Hendrix. When we became a band, we wanted to be a folk-rock band, like The Byrds or The Lovin’ Spoonful, and at some point it became logical to us to play more music based on British traditions. It validated what we were doing for ourselves. Whoever you are, whatever music you play, you have to put something of who you are, of where you come from, into the music. You can be an R&B band like The Kinks, but you can write a song like “Waterloo Sunset”. When Fairport had the accident, when our drummer [Martin Lamble]
was killed in ’69, there was a moment where we weren’t sure if the band was going to continue. But when we said, “We have to carry on, we’ll do it for Martin’s memory,” we decided, to solidify our intent, to do this project album we’d been talking about, of traditional music played with a rock band. No-one had done anything quite like it before, and it seemed to us a clear path. It was an exciting time, and we didn’t really want to go back to what we were doing before, so we changed our repertoire completely. I think also we didn’t want to play the music we’d played with Martin.
The story is that Ashley Hutchings left after Liege because he wanted to play even more traditional stuff.
Sandy and I thought there’d be a lot more of our own stuff blended into that. But Ashley was probably more zealous about this new traditional direction and wanted to bring more people into the band – in one version, he was going to bring three more people into the band, which would have made it an unwieldy nine-piece. I think some of us thought, ‘Woah, this is getting slightly crazy.’ So Ashley went off to form Steeleye Span, a great band, and pursue his vision.
When Sandy Denny left too, surely you must have wondered whether to
remain as well? We knew Sandy was going to leave. Her biggest problem was Trevor [Lucas], who was a notorious womaniser. I think Sandy thought that if she was closer to Trevor, in a band with him, then she could keep an eye on him better. She didn’t like flying – we were about to do a US tour and she wasn’t sure she could handle that. And she didn’t turn up for a gig in Denmark. I think at that point we actually fired her, which is insane – but the feeling at the time was that she really wasn’t going to be able to continue with the band. She had been high maintenance, she was quite a package, a bundle of joy and a bundle of nerves and a bundle of other things as well. But we felt Sandy was not really replaceable, so we said, “Oh, never mind, lads, let’s carry on.” Swarb [Dave Swarbrick, fiddle player] said, “I’ve got this mate who’s a bass player up in Birmingham.” [Laughs] We said, “Swarb, you’re an expert on bass players, are you?” We didn’t trust him at all, but it turned out to be Dave Pegg, who was fantastic. We drew straws for the vocal chores at that point. You all then moved to a disused pub, The Angel, in Little Hadham, Herts – how was that?
It was on the market a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t tempted – too many memories! I was there for a year. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable place to live – it was cold, and there was one bathroom between 14 people! We only officially had one roadie, but we acquired these other people – acid casualties and cast-offs from other bands. The problem was that the pub was at the end of this hill, on this tight bend, on the A120. So you’ve got all these trucks going to Harwich, and one night a truck driver fell asleep and just went right through the house. Swarb described sitting up in bed and there was this truck coming two feet away from him. He’d moved his bed into the corner the day before, because it was too draughty, and it saved his life. The driver was killed. You had met Linda by this point? She was a friend of Sandy’s, and she came down to a Fairport recording session in ’69. I used to see her at Sandy’s flat all the time – it was a mecca for musicians. Endless games of Scrabble that never seemed to get finished, with ludicrous rules. You and Swarb wrote most of [1970’s] Full House together… Yeah, we did, which was nice. Swarb would come up with these really interesting, weird tunes. “Sloth”, say, is a weird tune. I’m not quite sure where his influences came from – I’d ask him and he’d say, “Ooh, The Alexander Brothers.” And I’d think, ‘Who the
hell are The Alexander Brothers?’ Then I’d come up with some harmonic structure for his tunes, and write the words afterwards. We wrote some good songs. [Richard and Linda’s debut] I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight is one of my favourite albums… You need to get out more! Get dancing, get a bit of rhythm in there. Yeah, sorry…
Did you realise it was so strong when you made
it? At the time it felt lucky. There are lucky records – you go in and record fairly quickly and nothing really holds you up too much. There’s no red-headed stepchild of a track, that you labour over for hours and never really get. The budget was £2,500… that’s all the musicians, all the studio time! So we did it quick. I think we recorded it in ’72 or ’73, but it didn’t come out until ’74 because of a ‘vinyl shortage’. Our A&R person at Island just didn’t like the record, so I think they were hoping it wouldn’t come out. But then he got replaced and [Uncut contributor] Richard Williams got behind it – magically the oil shortage was over and it got released. Politics, politics… Linda’s voice is so good on that record.
Yeah, fantastic. I think she’s one of the triumvirate of great folk-rock singers – there’s Sandy, there’s Maddy Prior and there’s Linda. I shouldn’t sound like a Svengali, but she was very malleable. I could give her musical direction. I couldn’t do that with Sandy. Linda, as well as being a folkie, knew how to sing straight pop. She’s somewhere between Shirley Collins and Connie Francis in her influences.
[Bright Lights closer] “The Great Valerio” is a fascinating song. What do you remember about
writing it? I was thinking of people like Maurice Ravel, who’d have a simple tune, almost a pentatonic tune, but with unusual harmonies underneath. As for the lyrics, I think I was in a Glasgow art gallery and saw a painting of Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. I don’t know what it’s about – maybe false idealism, investing your faith in figures that you perceive to be higher than you, and that’s dangerous. But Valerio in the song is kind of a hero, he comes through. But there’s plenty of false prophets who fall off, who lose the focus. If you don’t keep your eye to the end of the rope, if you waver, that’s when you’re in trouble.
richard thompson You worked with Joe Boyd again in the early ’80s after a long gap. Were things very different from
those early Fairport albums? Joe approached me for Shoot Out The Lights. I’d just recorded with Gerry Rafferty as producer, which was a bit of a disaster. Gerry loved to multi-track everything, which for his music works great, but we hated it for ours. Gerry was very difficult to work with – he’d come in the studio with a pint of what I thought was apple juice, but it was actually whisky. We wouldn’t allow him to release the record or shop it, but five or six of the songs ended up on Shoot Out
The Lights. Joe suggested we go into Sound Techniques, make it quickly and cheaply and put it out on his label. That was also the end of mine and Linda’s relationship, so it was a bittersweet time. The album did OK in America, yeah, but unfortunately the publicity was all about us splitting up – yes, we got in Time magazine, but it was all “Oh, the record’s telling this story…”. Which it never was at all. I love Joe, he’s such a great musical human being, and he wrote the best book on the ’60s. He might have been the only person in Britain who had the ears and the musical background to allow Fairport to be ourselves.
“One night a truck driver fell asleep and went through the house”
Working with Mitchell Froom in the ’90s must have been very different.
Fairport were considered very unfashionable in the ’70s, and it didn’t really change too much in the ’80s. I suppose I escaped to America, where I was treated like a new alternative act, which was quite fun. I was there with REM and 10,000 Maniacs and Talking Heads, so that was OK. Joe had a naturalistic attitude to recording, but working with Mitchell involved tweaking something natural to make it sound a bit funkier, almost like it’s recorded badly. But ‘bad’ in this instance equals ‘attitude’. It was a lot of fun. The budgets were larger, and because of the ways corporations work you’re expected to spend the budget. I still owe EMI a fortune, I’ll never recoup!
13 Rivers might be closest to Mock Tudor, in many ways. That must have been a happy
period for you? I like Mock Tudor a lot, it’s a good sounding record. Again, that was a lucky record. A great studio, Capitol B. The Be-Bop-A-Lula Room, as they call it. I just did a chamber orchestra soundtrack there for a film called The Cold Blue. It’s made up of footage shot by William Wyler, the Hollywood director, about the Memphis Belle, the B-17F bomber. You must have a lot of touring coming up.
I have three different tours of the States in November, December and January. They’re bus tours – I love them, it’s the best. The camaraderie of the road… It’s just the three of us, yeah, plus our crew of 72. Hair, makeup, costume, choreographer. One costume change per song. In October I’m back here.
So you’ll be spending a fair bit of time in
Hampstead, then? I want to spend more time in London, basically. I’m feeling the old pull. It’s a civilised place to live. I love the galleries, the LSO… I never get to spend enough time here, so I really want to change that. One tends to gravitate to what one knows. Now, are we going to pay or just do a runner?