At his first ever concert in Bradford-on-Avon (at the Wiltshire Music Centre) last Sunday, Richard Thompson drew an enthusiastic full house: they cheered and joined in vigorously: you could feel the way in which their warm-hearted appreciation nourished the veteran folk rocker - co-founder of Fairport Convention, trenchant songwriter and uncontested guitar wizard.
Opening for him, Holly Carter, a much younger artist, steeped in the same sources as Thompson, charmed the audience with no-nonsense intimacy, a directness that makes performance feel both charismatic and natural. She is a very fine guitarist, as she demonstrates on the bewitching instrumental “Morewen”, shades as she writes on her website of two very different guitar-heroes, John Fahey and Chet Atkins. Accompanied by Joe Wilkins, a subtle wizard with the slide. she has a line in songs that celebrate people of note, who are not as well-known as they should be: the activist Stetson Kennedy, who risked his life infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, Trish Murtha, the documentary photographer of the Northeast. She is one of those English artists drawn to America’s radical past, and not surprisingly she gives a very moving rendition of Bob Dylan’s elegiac “Song to Woody”, a loving hymn to the great bard of the American left.
It’s Bob Dylan who comes to mind when Richard Thompson takes to the stage, every bit as passionate in his own highly idiosyncratic way as Holly Carter. His pièce de résistance, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, was once covered live by Dylan, and you can see why. The song - placed midway through his set - is a modern evocation of the Celtic ballad, a tale of love and death, focusing on a magical object, a British motorbike of great speed and rarity, a vehicle for transcendence. No wonder that Time Magazine selected it as one of the top 100 songs written since 1923. The idea of black lightning suggests a kind of sorcery, a life lived on the edge of death, no- holds-barred. One of the songs in the set, “Wall of Death” expresses this immersion in risk: a reflection, perhaps of the Sufi mysticism Thompson has been touched by: a death of the ego to embrace the essence of life.
Thompson draws from a deep and wide-ranging traditions, the myriad elements that fuelled the creation of folk-rock, as well as a solo career that has produced a string of memorable songs. What is most striking about his performance – every bit as engaged as when I last saw him do an acoustic set, with the help of the late Danny Thompson, who provided grounding for the songwriter’s flights of fancy – is the fierceness of it, even when he invites us to “dance in the bright lights tonight”. The playing is almost beyond belief. You gasp repeatedly at the sparkling combination of technique and the (once again) death-defying invention, the notes that cascade and interact in the most surprising way. This is not just a virtuoso – it is that indeed – but an expression of fabulous musicality. The only equivalent might be Ry Cooder – both guitarists favour ghostly tremolo – but Thompson is in a class of his own, the harsh beauty of his guitar-playing a mirror of his troubled soul, that darkness which he sings about so powerfully in “The Rattle Within”
The cliff-hanging nature of Thompson’s performance is an expression, no doubt, of the man’s fiery soul. There is no sugary romance here, but a unique combination of fury and brio, leavened in the gaps between the songs, when, from the ever-present cliff-edge and to free himself from the sense of urgency that drives him relentlessly, he cracks jokes – teases the audience, the seniors for whom sex, as he jests, is a thing lost to memory; as well as nudging himself merrily off the pedestal that the audience has erected for him. This is very British self-deprecation, even though so much of Thompson’s folky Englishness is tainted with the earthiness of American boogie and rock’n’roll.
The solo journey has been central to Thompson’s progress, and he has resolutely stayed faithful to a kind of authenticity which his audience can relate to, and yet continue to be inspired by his ability to transform everyday feelings – not least about the uncertainty and sorrow that accompany love: sentiments expressed with such rawness in the opener to his set, the vocal and guitar mantra-driven “I Misunderstood”, a song which acts not just as an introduction but as a way of establishing the unpredictability of all things emotional, the impermanence at the heart of an authentic life.
When he is joined for the second half of the set by his wife Zara Phillips (pictured above), filling in for some of the classics with Linda Thompson, with whom they were written, something was - paradoxically – lost. Might there something quintessentially solo about Richard Thompson, not a display of ego, but the solitary path of the hermit, or - dare I say it - the Sufi tradition’s holy fool. The harmonies from Phillips work some of the time: they are appropriately discrete, but on a song like “She Twists the Knife Again” - as angry and brutal as it gets - it feels as if these were sentiments she finds it harder to communicate as straight from the heart as Thompson does. Phillips seems ill at ease, surrendering to a slightly embarrassed smile, after one of the song's savage choruses.
Thompson returns alone for the first encore: a brave man in the front row shouts out for “Don’t Sit on My Jimmy Shand”. It feels better to have him on his own again, as he most charmingly stumbles through the lyrics and placing of the capo when he finds he’s pitched the key too high. He even manages a touch of deft fingerstyle guitar to evoke the polkas which the Scots accordionist had made his own. And yet, when Zara Phillips returns to do the backing vocals on “Wall of Death” she packs just the right punch for this rocking bit of folk, helping leave the audience as exhilarated as could be.
