Richard Thompson: Master Craftsman

Bonnie Raitt clearly is a big Richard Thompson fan, but her statement is no anomaly. The ultra-high esteem in which Thompson is held is evidenced by the attention given to him by, to name but a few, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page (both of whom jammed with the young Thompson), the Rolling Stones (who championed his Shoot Out The Lights album), and UK folk legend Martin Carthy, who called him “the English Bob Dylan” — and noted that it’s as valid to call Dylan “the American Richard Thompson.” Thompson’s characteristic guitar work graces albums by Nick Drake, John Martyn, JJ Cale, Crowded House, T Bone Burnett, Suzanne Vega, John Cale, Nanci Griffith and Bonnie Raitt. And his songs have been covered by Raitt, R.E.M., David Gilmour, Mary Black, Elvis Costello, the Corrs, Shawn Colvin, Norma Waterson, June Tabor, Linda Ronstadt, the Neville Brothers, Los Lobos, Pearl Jam, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and many others. He has also received the Ivor Novello Award for songwriting and the 2006 BBC Lifetime Achievement Award.

Richard Thompson is inarguably one of the world’s greatest living songwriters. He’s also extremely prolific. More than four decades after he first sprung to fame with Fairport Convention, there are 50-odd discs available on which he appears as a main artist, featuring more than 250 of his songs. It’s an impressive oeuvre, and the 71 songs on the forthcoming Shout! Factory four-CD box set Walking On A Wire, chosen by Thompson himself, give a comprehensive career overview. Thompson chose to start the set with Fairport’s American-influenced cover of Emitt Rhodes’ ‘Time Will Show The Wiser’, but after that it’s deep into British folk-influenced territory, with Thompson, as Fairport’s rhythm guitarist, Simon Nicol, once put it, trying to write songs that could have been written hundreds of years ago. Thompson went solo in 1971 and subsequently released a number of albums with then wife Linda, during which time his direction gradually became more rocky and modern. Since the early ‘80s, the British folk influences have become increasingly subtle, noticeable mainly in Thompson’s unusual solo-guitar style, featuring many large-interval hammer-ons and pull-offs — echoes of playing lots of jigs and reels —the incidental folk song performed live, and the occasional use of instruments like mandolin, hurdy gurdy, accordion, fiddle, shawn and crumhorn.

Much has been made of the dark side of Richard Thompson’s songwriting, particularly what it may or may not say about the man’s state of mind. The songwriter himself tends to deflect these questions, in part by using gallows humour, for instance calling two collections of rare material (available via his website) Doom And Gloom From The Tomb (1985) and Doom And Gloom II (Over My Dead Body) (1991). The almost incessant emphasis in Thompson’s songs on betrayal, loss, heartbreak, alienation, love lost, cruelty, war, death and so on is no doubt extreme by modern standards. While some of the more grotesque lyrics may well have been written with a twinkle in his eyes, what often appears to be missed in the standoff between Thompson and his interpreters is that his songwriting needs to be understood in the often-bleak British folk song tradition.

Fairport’s showstopper ‘Matty Groves’, for instance, tells the tale of a wife and her lover murdered by her husband, while in ‘A Sailor’s Life’ a young woman runs her boat on the rocks when learning that her true love has drowned. Songs of love lost that end in death and destruction are the norm in British folk music. These songs clearly are attempts by the people of old to come to terms with the world as a scary and dangerous place. And so while, for instance, ‘The End Of The Rainbow’ may appear callous and cruel from a late 20th-century perspective, understood as a modern English folk song it can also be seen to be telling some universal, impersonal truths, about the darker sides of parents and about the suffering in life that’s in store for all of us.

On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Richard Thompson seems to almost sigh with relief when the above interpretation is put to him, and concurs. “That’s absolutely right. The subject matter of folk songs is much darker than the subject matter of popular music, and I would put my subject matter a lot closer to the folk tradition.” Thompson has noted in the past that he’s “a writer from a tradition; traditional models are very good, because it’s such distilled music,” and in the liner notes for Walking On A Wire he’s quoted as saying, “You get into that whole folk thing and it’s all kind of miserable — everybody’s getting murdered. I really like all the sad stuff. Not because I’m miserable; I just think it makes great music.”

All this is deep and true and fair enough, but the fact is not all songwriters go to such dark places. When Thompson is asked why he does, his response is, well, inarticulate: “Erm eh I don’t know.” It’s for pub psychologists to speculate whether he has more loose wires and dark places inside of him than most, and whether writing songs offers him a safety valve to express and balance these parts. The man himself clearly is not telling, and from all accounts leads an exemplary life, being a good dad to his kids, having a stable long-term marriage, avoiding drugs, delighting music lovers around the world with his songs and his playing, and occasionally taking on the evils in this world with protest songs. In person he comes across as sanguine and easy-going, even as he’s obviously shy, and his stutter still sometimes comes to the fore.

Digging into Thompson’s history rather than his soul, the other recognisable influence in his songwriting, in addition to that of British folk, is English literature. The seeds of his interest were most likely watered by his father’s home library. Writer David Smith, in his 450-page e-tome about Thompson’s lyrics, The Great Valerio (available on Thompson’s site), notes that the Bible, the Qur’an, and “Shakespeare, Blake, the Romantics, Tennyson and the honorary Brits, Yeats and T.S. Eliot, have exerted a far greater influence on the body of Thompson’s work than Dylan ever has.” And so a precocious 18-year-old Thompson came up with the menacing ‘Meet On The Ledge’ (on Fairport’s second album, What We Did On Our Holidays, 1969), which alluded to mortality and other heavy themes: “The way is up along the road / The air is growing thin / Too many friends who tried / Blown off this mountain with the wind / Meet on the ledge / We’re going to meet on the ledge / When my time is up I’m going to see all my friends.”

The 60-year-old Thompson apparently feels rather uncomfortable about this song. “It’s one of those songs that I didn’t think much of, but it has become one of the anthems that are connected to Fairport and it gets sung at festivals, so I have to pay attention to it. The song is fine as it is, but it’s immature. Your world view changes as you get older. I’m OK with the song being immature, as long as I don’t have to sing it. But I do get called up to sing it sometimes, and I then have to kind of forgive myself and remind myself how young I was when I wrote it. In general, I feel that a songwriter always has the right to change his songs, but some songs that are very popular have become public property, and then it’s very tricky to change it. The song has become too embedded in the public consciousness and you may have missed the opportunity. But certainly, with less well-known songs you can change anything and everything.”

Another good example of a Richard Thompson song with obscure meanings that eludes its writer is ‘Calvary Cross’ from I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974). ‘Calvary Cross’ has long played a central role in Thompson’s live performances as one of the songs during which he used to spin off in long guitar improvisations. He may also have played it so frequently in an attempt to grasp its underlying message, which seems to touch on the essence of his life and work as an artist. A selection of verse lines state: “A pale-faced lady said to me / I’ll hurt you ‘til you need me / Now you can make believe on your tin whistle / You can be my broom-boy/ Scrub me ‘til I shine in the dark / I’ll be your light ‘til doomsday.” The chorus goes simply: “Everything you do / Everything you do / You do it for me.” In various analyses the pale-faced lady has been interpreted as Thompson’s muse, the tin whistle as identifying the prose writer as a musician, the broom-boy as referring to the act of polishing songs, while the title itself can be seen to infer that the songwriter has a cross to bear, if, of course, he’s not nailed to it.

“I think those are all valid interpretations of the song,” comments Thompson. “The pale-faced lady could absolutely be the muse, and the scrubbing certainly could be seen as developing a skill. I would interpret it like that as well, but it was not what I thought when I wrote it. The references are obscure and the song is a mystery to me as well. But I like it, even as I don’t fully understand it. Sometimes when I sing it, I discover new things about it. It’s the only song I have written that is completely blank in terms of rhyme. I don’t know why I did that, but it was the right thing to do. Some songs come from the subconscious, so you’re working on it without really understanding what’s going on. You just go on your instincts, and because of your experience as a writer, you trust that you’re on the right track. But it’s impossible to describe exactly what happens. Other people have tried and failed, and I can’t do it either. At a certain point when you’re writing, something else takes over and you become a creative person. But I don’t really understand that process.”

“If you did not have the logical, critical part, you would be kind of rambling. At the same time, you don’t censor yourself because things don’t make sense. When Picasso was painting, he didn’t understand what he was doing all the time. He used to say, ‘I never censor myself. People may say that my work is brutal or sexist, but that’s not my business. My business is to create, and it’s other people’s business to interpret and criticise.’ Often, the best stuff you write is the stuff you don’t understand. The time for analysis is later. If you work at the craft of songwriting long enough, you have filters that allow certain things to happen and that stop other things from happening. In a sense, you are the first critic. But it’s a very broad filter. I think you let almost everything go through and then later you might go back over it again.”

Two other important, yet abstruse Thompson songs included on Walking On A Wire are the titles songs of the Shoot Out The Lights (1982) and Hand Of Kindness (1983) albums. Both are again epic in the scale of their darkness, with the latter suggesting a man on the verge of suicide, desperate for a hand of kindness: “Well I wove the rope and I picked the spot / Well I struck out my neck and I tightened the knot / O maybe just the hand of kindness / Maybe just a hand, stranger will you reach me in time.” Smith interprets Qur’anic imagery (Thompson converted to Sufism in the ‘70s) and sees it as a song to the Prophet, but Thompson is not so clear. He simply says, “I don’t remember what the inspiration of that song was. It’s on the verge of something. But I’m really not sure what I think of that song at the moment.”

Conversely, Thompson’s inspiration for ‘Shoot Out The Lights’ was very conscious. “In the darkness the shadows move / In the darkness the game is real / Real as a gun / As he watches the lights of the city / And he moves through the night / Shoot out the lights.” It’s not hard to guess that this is a comment on a war situation, and Thompson has explained that it was inspired by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. From a wider perspective it can be read as a protest song against war in general.

Thompson comments, “I think that politicians are playing with people’s lives. They make decisions about people’s lives thousands of miles away. It’s a cold, ruthless process and something you take on when you become the political leader of a large country with a big army. It’s always in the name of something — freedom or defence of your country — but there’s a moral point where you cross the line, and that’s what I was trying to get across.”

‘Dad’s Gonna Kill Me’, one of Thompson’s more recent protests, appears on his last album, Sweet Warrior (2007), which has an anti-war slant as a whole. “I’d been trying to write a song about the Iraq war for years, but I wrote ones that I wasn’t happy with. Then I came across a website that had GI slang and GI rap lyrics, and I was fascinated by the language. ‘Dad’s gonna kill me’ is an actual phrase that they use, and this became a springboard for the song, and it allowed me to tell the story of the soldiers and express my own feelings about the war.”

One of the verses of the song states: “Dad’s in a bad mood, Dad’s got the blues / It’s someone else’s mess that I didn’t choose / At least we’re winning on the Fox Evening News / Nobody loves me here / Dad’s Gonna Kill Me.” And with references to a HUMV Frankenstein, a roadblock and a booby trap, it’s one of Thompson’s most explicit songs. He admits that he pumped a lot of feelings into the song, not least because the situation in the US itself became very uncomfortable. “It was scary; it nearly became a fascist country,” he says. He remains nonetheless content to live in the US, where he moved in 1985.

The observation has often been made that there are, in essence, two Richard Thompson songs: the third-person stories, and songs that are written from a more personal point of view. And some people have opined that the third-person songs have become more prominent since his move to the US. Thompson, however, denies this. “That’s a generalisation. Maybe the emphasis has changed since I went to the US, but I have written personal songs and written through a character since I’ve come here.”

Examples of these two types of songs are ‘I Misunderstood’ (Rumour And Sigh, 1991) and ‘Beeswing’ (Mirror Blue, 1994). The former, says Thompson, “is a relationship song from personal experience. I am a very confused person, and that’s one of the things I’ve had to fight, especially in interpreting people’s social signals. ‘Beeswing’ is a song about the spirit of the ‘60s. A lot of people I went to school with dropped out of society and became hippies or travellers. It was extraordinary. I was trying to get that spirit.”

Thompson has called his own production company Beeswing Music, perhaps in an acknowledgement that the story he recounts in the song is also to some degree his own. Pivotal lines appear to concern “the price you pay for the chains you refuse,” and “As long as there’s no price on love, I’ll stay.” The songwriter comments, “Yes, there’s a price for freedom. But it’s worth it. In the song it’s worth it.” The qualification ‘in the song’ is notable. When asked whether the song also refers to the freedom in his own life, he responds, “Most people wouldn’t want my lifestyle, with travelling 150 days a year and so on. Yes, I’m free of working in an office nine to five, but they prefer to have job security and a pension.” Whatever Thompson feels about his lifestyle, for the rest of us, and most likely also for him, the resulting songs are worth it.  0