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 12th 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!
No comments:
Post a Comment