Biography and Career

Early life and career (1949 to 1972)

Joe Boyd: "He can imitate almost any style, and often does, but is instantly identifiable. In his playing you can hear the evocation of the Scottish piper's drone and the melody of the chanter as well as echoes of Barney Kessell's and James Burton's guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis's piano. But no blues clichés."

"I remember saying to Ashley after a gig, that I was kind of embarrassed about doing the material we were doing, because it seemed that we should have outgrown doing covers — even though it was only 1967 — it somehow wasn’t good enough and other bands were writing their own stuff and we should too. I remember being angry and saying to Ashley this isn’t good enough, we’ve got to get some original material... and stuff started to trickle through."
   The Thompsons recorded two more albums — Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver, both released in 1975 — before Richard Thompson decided to leave the music business and the couple moved to a Sufi commune in East Anglia.
   It wasn't apparent from their records at first, but the Thompsons had embraced the esoteric sufi strand of Islam in early 1974.
   Thompson started to re-engage with the world of professional music in 1977. He guested on an album by Sandy Denny, and had undertaken a short tour and started recording with a group of musicians who were also Sufis. Thompson asked Joe Boyd to produce these sessions, and two days were spent on the initial recordings. Boyd recalls that the sessions were not a success: "It was really, I felt, very poor. I didn't have much confidence in the musicians that he was working with. The atmosphere was very strange and it just didn't seem to work."
   The Thompsons, now a couple for professional purposes only, toured the U.S. to support the album and then went their separate ways. Both the album and their live shows were well received by the American media. Unfortunately, a boardroom shake-up at Capitol saw Thompson fan and champion Hale Milgrim replaced by Garry Gersh; Thompson's next album Mirror Blue was held back for almost a year before being released; and Rumor And Sigh's success wasn't capitalised on. Mirror Blue was released in 1994, and Thompson took a band on the road to promote the album. This band was the smallest that Thompson had put together so far. He was joined by Dave Mattacks on drums, Danny Thompson on double bass, and Pete Zorn on acoustic guitar, backing vocals, mandolin and various wind instruments. This lineup toured with Thompson the following two years, and all subsequent Richard Thompson Band lineups have been built around Zorn and Danny Thompson. Thompson continued recording for Capitol until 1999, when Mock Tudor was recorded and released. In addition Thompson modified his deal with Capitol so that he could release and directly market live, limited-quantity, not-for-retail albums. The first of these was Live At Crawley, released in 1995. These "authorised bootlegs" are well-regarded by Thompson fans.
   In 2001 it was Thompson who refused the option to renew a contract, and he parted ways with Capitol. Hereafter Thompson would fund the recording of his own albums and have them distributed and marketed by smaller independent labels.
   The move away from big labels and big budgets brought a bigger marketing push and healthier sales. Thompson's first two self-funded releases, 2003's The Old Kit Bag and 2005’s Front Parlour Ballads, did well in the indie charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
   In May 2007 Thompson released Sweet Warrior. The album was licensed to different labels in different territories: Shout Factory! in the USA, P-Vine in Japan, Planet Records in Australia, and Proper Records in the UK and Europe). In August of the same year Island Records released a live Richard and Linda Thompson album compiled from recordings made during the November 1975 tour to promote the Pour Down Like Silver album.
   Thompson's Spring 2008 tour was interrupted when he was stung by a scorpion while vacationing in Mexico, forcing the cancellation of several concerts scheduled for April in the northeast United States. .

Side projects and collaborations

Over the years Thompson has participated in many projects with other musicians. Often these projects allow him to participate in music and experiments that wouldn't fit well on his own albums.
   In between leaving Fairport Convention in early 1971 and releasing his debut solo album in 1972 he undertook a large amount of session work, most notably on albums by John Martyn, Al Stewart, Matthews Southern Comfort, Sandy Denny and Nick Drake.
   During the same period he also worked on two collaborative projects. Morris On was recorded with Ashley Hutchings, John Kirkpatrick, Dave Mattacks and Barry Dransfield, and was a collection of English traditional tunes arranged for electric instruments. “The Bunch” were almost the reverse conceptually – a grouping of English folk rock musicians (including Sandy Denny, Linda Peters and members of Fairport Convention) recording a selection of classic rock and roll tunes.
   Thompson has continued to guest on albums by an array of artists, from Crowded House, Bonnie Raitt and Vivian Stanshall, to Norma Waterson and Beausoleil and folk artists like Cathal McConnell and Bob Davenport. Since the early 1980s Thompson has appeared at Fairport Convention's annual Cropredy Festival, both in his own right and as a participant in sets with current and previous Fairport members (He once joked that Fairport Convention are a bit like the Hotel California: "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"). These sets are seldom confined to performances of songs out of the Thompson or Fairport Convention canons, and in recent years some surprise offerings have included the soul classic "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" (with Thompson backed by the Roy Wood Big Band), The Beatles's "I'm Down" and even "The Lady Is a Tramp".
   Thompson has displayed a penchant for the avant garde as well, working with former Pere Ubu singer David Thomas's grouping The Pedestrians on two albums in 1981 and 1982, respectively. In the 1980s, he was associated with a loose-fitting group called The Golden Palominos, who were led by drummer Anton Fier and included at times on stage and on record Jack Bruce, Michael Stipe, Carla Bley, John Lydon, Bill Laswell and others. He has worked with experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser, most notably as part of the ad hoc aggregation French Frith Kaiser Thompson with whom he recorded two albums. In 1997 he worked with long-time friend and band member Danny Thompson to record a concept album Industry that dealt with the decline of British industry. A year later he worked with early music expert Philip Pickett on the acclaimed Bones of All Men which fused renaissance tunes with contemporary music.
   In recent years Thompson has devised and toured his show 1000 Years of Popular Music. The inspiration for this came when Playboy magazine asked Thompson (and many other music industry figures) in 1999 for their suggestions for the "top ten songs of the millennium". Guessing that Playboy expected most people's lists to start at around 1950, Thompson took them at their word and presented a list of songs from the 11th century to the present day. Perhaps not surprisingly, Playboy didn't use his list, but the exercise gave him the idea for a show which takes a chronological trip through popular music across the ages. Thompson acknowledges that this is an ambitious undertaking, partly because he reckons that he's technically unqualified to sing ninety eight per cent of the material.
   , and partly because of the spare musical setting he restricts himself to: besides his acoustic guitar, he's backed by singer/pianist Judith Owen and a percussionist. A typical performance would start with a medieval round, progress via a Purcell aria, Victorian music-hall and Hoagy Carmichael and climax with Thompson's unique take on the Britney Spears hit "Oops!... I Did It Again."
   In 2004 Thompson was asked to create the soundtrack music for the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man. The score, which was recorded over a two-day period in December, 2004, brought Thompson together with a group of improvisational musicians, mostly from the San Francisco Bay area; video footage from the sessions was edited into a mini-documentary, In the Edges, which was included with the DVD release of Grizzly Man.

Retrospectives and tributes

Thompson has been well-served by compilers of retrospective collections. These are partly aimed at curious new listeners who are interested in hearing more of him, but are also essential purchases for more committed fans, since they contain material which is unavailable elsewhere. 1976's (guitar, vocal) was a collection of unreleased material from the previous eight years of Thompson's appearances on the Island label. The 3-CD set Watching The Dark is a generous combination of his better-known songs and previously unreleased live and studio tracks. Action Packed is a compilation of tracks from his Capitol releases, plus three hard-to-find songs. Finally, in 2006, the independent label Free Reed released RT - The Life and Music of Richard Thompson, a 5-CD box set consisting almost entirely of previously unreleased performances of songs from throughout Thompson's long career.
   Thompson's songs have been extensively covered; for example, "Dimming Of The Day" has been performed by artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, David Gilmour, The Five Blind Boys From Alabama, and The Corrs. There have been several tribute compilations of other artists' interpretations of his work, including: Capitol's and Green Linnet's, both released in 1994.

Thompson's playing style

Thompson makes use of the "pick and fingers" technique (sometimes referred to as "hybrid picking") where he plays bass notes and rhythm with a pick between his first finger and thumb, and adds melody and punctuation by plucking the treble strings with his fingers. He also makes use of different guitar tunings, such as (low to high) CGDGBE, DADGBE, DADGAD, and more. This enables him to adapt traditional songs, as in Strict Tempo and 1000 Years of Popular Music. Thompson occasionally makes use of a thumb-pick, playing in fingerstyle, the most notable example being on the motorcycle ballad "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."

Thompson's guitars

Electric guitars

Thompson is often associated with the Fender Stratocaster guitar, having been seen using such a guitar in concert since his days with Fairport Convention. More generally he's long been a user of guitars with single coil pickups, preferring the sound of such guitars to those equipped with humbucker pickups.
   When Fairport Convention signed their first recording contract in 1967 Thompson was playing a Gibson ES-175. He soon changed this guitar for another Gibson, a gold top Les Paul with P-90 pickups - a move to the thinner, more biting single-coil sound. This guitar later passed into the ownership of John Martyn.
   By the time of his exit from Fairport Thompson was playing a late 1960s Stratocaster. This was soon changed for an earlier 1950s model. He was closely associated with this guitar for many years. This particular Stratocaster isn't currently serviceable. , in concert and in the studio, but is most often seen with a light-blue solid-body guitar custom built by luthier Danny Ferrington. This has a Gibson P-90 pickup in the neck position, a Stratocaster Alnico pickup in the middle position, and a Fender Broadcaster pickup in the bridge position. This guitar has three volume controls (one for each pickup), no tone controls and strat-style 5-way pickup selector switch. .

Fender Telecaster. Some early photos of Richard and Linda Thompson show a Telecaster in use. There are photos of Thompson playing a Telecaster at the Cropredy Festival in the mid-80s.

A Kellycaster Blackguard. This is A Telecaster copy made by Kelly Guitars, with a third pickup added by Thompson's Guitar technician Bobby Eichorn. This guitar has been used in concert since 2003 and was used for the photo for the front cover of the Front Parlour Ballads album.

An Eastman Uptown AR805-CE. This is a semi-acoustic, arch-top guitar with a single pickup. This guitar was used for some photos for the Front Parlour Ballads album. Thompson has made intermittent use of Roland's GK-1 pickup and GL-2 synthesizer over the years. He made use of these devices on 1979's Sunnyvista album and has occasionally used them in concert.

Acoustic guitars

Since the early 1990s Thompson has made extensive use of Lowden acoustic guitars for both live and studio work. For live work these guitars are fitted with Sunrise pickups. The signal from the pickup is fed through a pre-amplifier and some effects pedals (typically a delay pedal and a UniVibe) before being passed into the mixing desk. Lowden released a Richard Thompson signature model in 2007.
   During the time he worked with then-wife Linda, and for some years thereafter, Thompson used a Martin 000-18. Thompson still owns this guitar, but says that it isn't serviceable and needs repair. Thompson also owns a few unusual acoustic guitars made by Danny Ferrington. An example of these guitars can be seen on the cover of the Small Town Romance and Hand Of Kindness albums. In the 2003 BBC documentary he can be seen playing an acoustic Ferrington baritone guitar in his office whilst working on a new composition. In November of 2007 Thompson auctioned a Ferrington acoustic to raise funds for charity. This guitar had a serial number 13, was acquired 2nd hand by Thompson and had been used during the recording of his 1988 album Amnesia.
   In 2006 Thompson auctioned a Rick Turner RS6 acoustic guitar. He had occasionally used this guitar in concert. The proceeds from this sale were donated to charity.

See also

The "gear and tunings" FAQ on Thompson's web site.

Discography

With Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention (1968)

What We Did On Our Holidays (titled 'Fairport Convention' in original USA LP release) (1969)

Unhalfbricking (1969)

Liege & Lief (1969)

Full House (1970)

Live At The LA Troubadour (Recorded 1970, released 1977.)

House Full (CD re-issue of Live at the LA Troubadour'. Released by Hannibal Records in 1986. Track list differs considerably from original.

(1987)

The History of Fairport Convention

Live at the BBC (2007)

Solo or with Linda Thompson

Henry the Human Fly (1972)

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974) *

Hokey Pokey (1975) *

Pour Down Like Silver (1975) *

(guitar, vocal) (1976)

Live! (more or less) (1976)

First Light (1978) *

Sunnyvista (1979) *

Strict Tempo! (1981)

Shoot Out the Lights (1982) *

Hand Of Kindness (1983)

Small Town Romance (1984)

Across A Crowded Room (1985)

Daring Adventures (1986)

Amnesia (1988)

Rumor And Sigh (1991)

Watching The Dark (1993) | 3-CD retrospective

Mirror Blue (1994)

you? me? us? (1996)

Mock Tudor (1999)

(2000) *

Action Packed (2001)

The Old Kit Bag (2003)

Live from Austin, TX (2005)

Front Parlour Ballads (2005)

RT - The Life and Music of Richard Thompson (2006) | 5-CD retrospective box set

Sweet Warrior (2007)

Richard & Linda Thompson ...In Concert, November 1975 (released 2007) * = Credited to Richard and Linda Thompson

Richard Thompson & Danny Thompson

Industry (1997)

The GPs

Saturday Rolling Around (1991)

French Frith Kaiser Thompson

Live, Love, Larf & Loaf (1987)

Invisible Means (1990)

Philip Pickett and Richard Thompson

The Bones of All Men (1998)

The Golden Palominos

Visions of Excess (1985)

Drunk with Passion (1991)

The Bunch

Rock On (1972)

Soundtracks

The Marksman (Music From The BBC TV Series) (1987)

Hard Cash (1989)

Sweet Talker (1991)

Grizzly Man (Music From the Werner Herzog documentary (2005)

Compilations

(2006)

Fan club and boutique label releases

(these are not available in retail outlets but can be purchased via Thompson's web site or at concerts)

Doom And Gloom From The Tomb, volume 1 (1985)

Doom & Gloom II (Over My Dead Body) (1991)

Live At Crawley (with Danny Thompson) (1995)

two letter words: live 1994 (1996)

Celtschmerz: Live in the UK ‘98 (1998)

Semi-Detached Mock Tudor (2002)

More Guitar (2003)

1000 Years Of Popular Music (2003)

Ducknapped! (2003)

Faithless (2004)

The Chrono Show (2004)

DVDs and videos

Across A Crowded Room (video - 1985)

Live in Providence (DVD - 2004)

Live From Austin, TX (DVD - 2005)

1,000 Years of Popular Music (DVD+2CD - 2006)Further Information

Get more info on 'Richard Thompson Musician'.

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