Guitar (Anti) Hero Richard Thompson Tries to Keep Up with the Kids By Andrew Clayman Published in The Knoxville Metro Pulse, March 2009 PREVIOUS RICHARD THOMPSON FEATURES: Cleveland 2008 | Knoxville 2008
Asking Richard Thompson about the video game Guitar Hero is kind of like talking Wii Baseball with Hank Aaron or getting Jane Goodall’s take on Donkey Kong. It might be beneath them, but then again, looking down on something from above tends to help one’s overall perspective.
“Yeah, Guitar Hero… well, I don’t really know what to make of it,” says Thompson, the man ranked #19 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the Greatest Guitarists of All-Time. “I suppose if it’s a stepping stone to people picking up a real instrument, then I think it’s a great idea. If it’s just a game and you get your digital applause for a few minutes, then I’m thinking, ‘are these really the rewards we’re after in life?’ Even if you’re a good musician, you’re in music for other reasons—usually—than just to show off on stage and get the accolades. Most musicians who have a longer career just love music and creating music, and they perform relatively modestly on the whole. So, you know, Guitar Hero might be teaching the wrong values, I suppose. If you’re a good guitar player, the point isn’t to become a guitar hero, you know? I mean, that’s never the point.”
Clearly, Thompson has never asked Lil’ Wayne about his guitar “playing” motivations. But don’t let the man’s Baby Boomer viewpoint fool you. Unlike most of his contemporaries from the late ‘60s folk-rock explosion, Thompson, 59, remains as productive and creatively energized as at any point during his career, and he hasn’t lost touch with the younger generation, either. Two of his favorite collaborators, in fact, are half his age. They also happen to be his children— son Teddy, who has four solo albums to his credit, and daughter Kamila, who just released her debut effort. Both talented kiddos are the product of Thompson’s past marriage to singer Linda Thompson, with whom he recorded a slew of incredible albums in the 1970s.
“If you have kids, it kind of trains you to at least be listening out for new things and new ideas,” Thompson says. “I think it’s impossible to keep on top of popular music for your whole life—to be that involved. But at least I’m open to new things.”
He’s also been open to playing guitar on his kids’ albums, and perhaps more fortunately, his children have gladly welcomed him. It’s an all too uncommon occurrence of cross-generational family bonding in modern pop music.
“Yeah, I think that’s rare in popular music because popular music is much more concerned with fashion,” Thompson asserts. “It would seem to be uncool to play with your parents. You know, because every five years there’s sort of a new zeitgeist in pop music. Whereas in folk music, where I really come from, it’s actually quite common to have music passed down through families. There are a lot of singing families that have been performing for generations and generations. So, in that sense, I’m very comfortable doing that, and I think it can work really well. But you know, I don’t mastermind Teddy and Kami’s careers. They really are their own people, and I’m just happy to chip in wherever possible. Whatever I can do to help these kids, you know?” He chuckles sarcastically. “These crazy kids.”
It certainly wouldn’t hurt Teddy and Kamila to use their father as an artistic role model. While many folks might know Thompson best for his guitar chops (Rolling Stone further referred to him as “the greatest guitarist in British folk rock”), true fans and fellow musicians also recognize him as a prolific and wildly imaginative singer/songwriter. In many circles, his more recent solo material is as revered as his groundbreaking early work with Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Linda Thompson, and his devoted admirers include everyone from David Gilmour and Emmylou Harris to R.E.M. and Elvis Costello. Unfortunately, though, when it comes to the public consciousness, RT has always been a radio hit shy of major stardom. It’s something he’s come to terms with these days, especially now that he’s free from his old label Capitol and adapting to yet another generational shift—the online music revolution.
“I’m actually a lot happier now,” Thompson says. “I just have more control over what goes on a record and how it sounds. …But I think, traditionally, record companies played an important role in developing artists. If that goes away, and it’s pretty much gone away, it’d be nice to think there will be something there to replace it. You know, it could be a return to patronage in some form, where you have your wealthy patrons who basically sponsor you—or maybe the fanbase becomes the sponsor of the music and puts up the money to make the record. You know, these things are possibilities. But I think the record companies will keep doing the really popular stuff; the dance music and such—the stuff where they can do the tie-ins with Burger King and Disneyland.” And lest we forget, the video games.
Belle & Sebastian The BBC Sessions Matador As the cute and cuddly Scots of their first incarnation, Belle & Sebastian seemed to exist in the same sort of pleasantly maudlin time capsule as an old pair of mittens or a Wes Anderson movie. The seamless beauty and consistency of their first few albums made them instant old pros, sliding their lazy afternoon tunes alongside the twinkly ballads of early Stones, Velvets, and Nick Drake.
Of course, as with those artists, B&S eventually got bored with the formula, thus bringing about their surprisingly exuberant rebirth on 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress and its almost funky follow-up, 2006’s The Life Pursuit. Most fans were understanding of the new direction, but some pined for the old days, before Isobel Campbell went off to make dust bowl records with the dude from Screaming Trees. And so, for these fans in particular, Matador is offering up Belle & Sebastian’s BBC Sessions, a collection of raw cuts from 1996-2001.
Far from a beginner’s compilation, these alternate takes are mainly for the obsessive completists who find charm in the inferior performance of a familiar arrangement. Classics like “The State I Am In” and “Slow Graffiti” sound lovely enough, but their similarity to the originals makes the shabbier production seem like a highly unnecessary new experience. The real draws here are the four lost gems from the band’s 2001 sessions, including Campbell’s spooky swan song “Nothing In the Silence” and a quirky fanboy tribute to The Go-Betweens (“Shoot the Sexual Athlete”) that’s not so much a great song as a it is an awesome excuse to hear one of my favorite bands give props to another one of my other favorite bands. So sue me.
Drifting Through the Days Folk Icon Richard Thompson Takes On "1,000 Years of Popular Music" By Andrew Clayman Published (with edits) in The Scene (Cleveland), January 2008
Richard Thompson is far too amiable to play the role of the unsung hero, but if a myth ever were ascribed to him, it might tell of a man who, when offered the choice between the life of a brilliant singer/songwriter and a guitar god, sacrificed stardom to become both.
Of course, in fairness, Thompson’s four decades of impossibly stellar folk-rock have hardly gone unnoticed. Critics have lauded almost every lick and lyric he’s crafted along the way (Rolling Stone ranked him #19 on their 2003 list of the greatest guitarists of all-time), and his fellow musicians, from David Gilmour to Elvis Costello, R.E.M., and Emmylou Harris, have covered his work with reverence. Still, the man known affectionately as “RT” has remained almost inexplicably anonymous to the masses, often reduced to little more than a quirky High Fidelity reference. Out of this injustice, however, has grown a freewheeling spirit that’s helped Thompson remain as vital, distinctive, and exciting as at any other point in his career. At 58, he sounds better than he ever has, a great example of an artist refusing to rest on his laurels.
“Well, I don’t actually have any laurels,” says Thompson, showcasing his trademark wit with a sarcastic clearing of the throat. He then pauses a moment before attempting a more serious explanation for his prolific creative output. “I don’t know. I’m always very dissatisfied with what I do. I always think that there are other places to go, that I can do better, and that the work can reach a higher standard. I suppose it’s good to be a little restless. You know, I haven’t achieved very much at all, and I’d like to achieve something. So I’m always driving myself forward. I’m always thinking, ‘well there’s the next project, but how about after that? Let’s have another project and another project.’ I’m always thinking in terms of projects. And it’s just one step in front of the other. It keeps me going down the road.”
One of Thompson’s on-going and particularly popular projects goes by the somewhat self-explanatory title, “1,000 Years of Popular Music.” It began innocently enough, in 1999, when Playboy Magazine started asking musicians to submit their lists of the “Greatest Songs of the Millennium.” Of course, what they were really looking for was a list of the best songs from the past 50 years or so (bias of the living), and most contributors played along accordingly. Thompson, however, chose to be the chap who takes things literally, and provided Playboy with a carefully researched list of songs dating back to the Dark Ages. His list, predictably, was never published, but Thompson was inspired, and in the following years, he developed the “1,000 Years” concept into a live show, as well as a CD and accompanying DVD, released in 2003. The show is revamped and back on the road this year, with Thompson again accompanied by his 1,000 Years cohorts, vocalist Judith Owen and percussionist/vocalist Debra Dobkin.
“Well, this show, it’s kind of a revue of popular music, from about 1,000 AD on,” Thompson explains. “I must say that we did cheat a bit, and that it really is songs that we like playing, rather than songs that were really popular, in some cases. But, you know, it’s impossible to truly say, ‘well, here’s what popular music was like,’ so it is rather skewed and prejudiced. But we do take on a really wide range of music— an absurdly wide range of music-- starting with various forms of early music up through Elizabethan, madrigals, carols from the 18th century—and there’s probably more of a concentration on music from 1900 onward, just because that’s more what we and the audience are familiar with. So, you know, we cover Gilbert and Sullivan, and jazz, gospel, country, and, well, everything!”
It should be noted that “everything” has also included covers of songs by the Kinks, Squeeze, Prince, and even Britney Spears (an impressively unironic version of “Oops, I Did It Again”). As extensive as Thompson’s personal reference library of the millennium canon may be, however, he still needed to do some digging for many of the show’s extreme oldies.
“The research is really enjoyable,” he says. “It’s very interesting to find all these things that are kind of forgotten really. And I think one of the joys of the show is to present unfamiliar music to the audience, and say, ‘look, here’s this kind of music from 1400 or 1800 or 1900-- isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this great popular music?’ And perhaps the audience will be inspired to go and find more of the same.”
Often, this is the same sort of process that unfolds when people discover Richard Thompson’s own music for the first time. For some, it starts by hearing his guitar playing as a shy teenage prodigy with the seminal English folk-rock band Fairport Convention, or his studio work with the legendary Nick Drake. For others, it’s the landmark albums he recorded with his ex-wife Linda, including I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974) and Shoot Out the Lights (1982). And over the past 25 years, a whole new generation of admirers has gravitated to Thompson’s remarkably versatile solo material. These fans can talk to you about different “species” of RT songs, from the up-tempo electric rockers (“I Feel So Good,” “Razor Dance”) to the tear-jerking folk ballads (“Beeswing,” “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” “Drifting Through the Days”), to the epic, curtain call anthems (“Shoot Out the Lights,” “Wall of Death”).
On his latest album, last year’s Sweet Warrior, Thompson even displayed his prowess for the protest song, delivering the hard-edged, anti-war epic “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me,” which is written from the perspective of an American soldier in Baghdad (hence, “Dad”). Thompson believes that protest music is still capable of being a vital element in today’s society, just as it was when his career was first beginning.
“I think, right now, with a fairly unpopular government and a very unpopular war, people respond to a song like (“Dad’s Gonna Kill Me”) very well. There’s a time and a place for political music, and, depending on the times, you can vary the immediacy of a political song. You know, sometimes, you want a veil pulled over it—something a bit more metaphorical and subtle. But other times, you just have to stand up and say, ‘well, this is the way it is, folks,’ and be quite naked about the intent of the song.”
Such honesty doesn’t always pay immediate dividends, but here’s hoping that the new millennium comes to appreciate Richard Thompson as much as he appreciated the last one.
