apparently i interviewed richard thompson in march 2006

Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is on a level where he can pretty much do what he wants, within the bounds of logic. As an early, invaluable member of the folk rock legends Fairport Convention, who left after a few years for a thoroughly successful solo career (a bit of which was not really solo as in the 70s and 80s it was as part of a duo with Linda Thompson, who was his wife), and being a gentleman whose guitar prowess has always been admired and adored around the world, he has pretty much got it made. And – don’t you hate it when you read this kind of thing? If I’d achieved what he’d achieved I’d be a mean freak – he is still a very down-to-earth and amiable fellow.

The Thompson oeuvre is often nicely pommy and he has a social commentator nature that’s often quite Ray Davies-ish: have a listen to the great ‘Let it Blow’ on his current album Front Parlour Ballads to see what I’m on about. In fact Front Parlour Ballads is highly recommended a tremendous introduction to Richard Thompson and a reminder that he’s one sixties artist who still retains a swag of credibility and has all his wits about him, and can crank out a bunch of catchy tunes to boot.

‘I’m aware that you don’t write or play music in a vacuum,’ he says, when I ask him about how he introduces his audience to his new stuff. ‘The only way you can really find out if something works is to sit down and play it for an audience. If they get it, fine, if they don’t – back to the drawing board.’ But at the same time, ‘Audiences are by their nature a conservative body – you have to pull them along a bit, drag ‘em forward, play something new then something familiar. Sometimes you fail, but I think that should be part of the live performance – the element of failure, that you try something and you don’t always succeed.’

Like Bjorn and Benny from Abba used to be, he’s a nine-to-five songwriter. ‘I like to do office hours. The more you work at it the more spontaneous it becomes… you open your mind to great ideas on a regular basis, more possibilities flow through you. You just get more tuned in.’

He’s also stayed a catchy and relevant songwriter, surely, by examining the popular song in depth with his Thousand Years of Popular Song project. ‘It started with, I suppose, Playboy magazine. Playboy were asking musicians in 1999 to submit what they thought were the ten greatest songs of the millennium. I thought, ‘They’re being very pretentious about this – they don’t mean millennium, they mean the last twenty years’ so I thought, I’ll tease them a bit and I’ll start with 1000 AD. I don’t think they printed my list – a little bit too obscure. But then I was asked to do a show at the Getty museum in Los Angeles, so I thought this would be an interesting idea, if a little ambitious, so I put together a small group, three of us, to perform it… it’s become an occasional thing, we’ll do a few shows every year, it’s great fun. The music is really all over the place, every conceivable style of music, most in the English language, I suppose it’s Anglocentric more than anything else, but we do a song in Mediaeval Italian, there’s a song in 12^th century French, right up to Fats Waller, Abba, Britney Spears and whatever.’

So having examined the medium up close, and written a few greats himself, can Richard tell us the essential element of pop music, so we can put it in a bottle? ‘It’s hard to say what that is, I think it does vary. You can say that there are consistent things that run through popular music, three chords will get you a long way, that hasn’t really changed. Love is the big theme that runs through everything – love and a bit of politics. A drone was popular in dance music in the 1300s and was still popular in Tamla Motown in the 60s and 70s. There are consistent things that continually reappear... But then, there are always exceptions to the rules.’

Know the rules and break them – that’s the key. There is one rule Richard knows not to break – he’s emphatic about how much he loves Australia, which he’s been coming to for a couple of decades now and which he’s touring this week. ‘It’s always a fantastic country. Because I’m a wildlife fan, the wildlife is the first thing that really struck me. Just seeing rainbow lorikeets flying around and sulphur-crested cockatoos in the parks, galahs – that still amazes me! It’s a great country, the people, the cities…’

He’s a gentleman!