S/D: Richard Thompson

Good to hear love for 'The Old Kit Bag', which I'm still enjoying. The power trio really suits him, and it's nice to hear a Christine Collister-surrogate again. I'll Tag Along, Gethsemane, Pearly Jim, and Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen stand out the most. Mock Tudor, on the other hand, is, well, almost without redemption. It's his only album since Sunnyvista that I'd delete wholesale.

If possible, track down the live versions of When the Spell Has Broken and Aint Gonna Drag My Feet No More from the Watching The Dark collection(which should be on your x-mas list anyway).

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/catch_of_the_day.asp?id=90

That version of "Calvary Cross" must be the same one on the boxed set. "Devonside" is an amazingly sad song. "Great Valerio" is another favorite of mine.

Sean; his 'Kiss', by Prince is incredible. find it.

post Linda output hit or miss, definitely mostly miss after rumor and sigh.

Basically, if he's wearing a beret on the cover art, buyer beware!!

Unhalbricking
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
Pour Down Like Silver
Shoot Out the Lights
Henry the Human Fly
"Calvery Cross" (live)
"Sloth"

All Good

Fairport Convention (aka What We Did on our Holidays)
Hand of Kindness
Amnesia
Industry
The French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson Albums

Half Good

Liege and Lief
Rumour and Sigh
1000 Years of Popular Music

No Good

First Light
Sunnyvista

For Fans

Pretty much everything else

Waltzing's for Dreamers
Happy Days and Auld Lang Syne
Turning of the Tide
Tempted cover

RT songs that are pretty well regarded but that I still think are good:

Gethsemane
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
Kiss cover

RT songs that I have a soft spot in my heart for but which I think may very well be overrated by now:

52 Vincent Black Lightning
Beeswing

WTF???!!! It's only the pinnacle of English folk rock (Along with No Roses natch)

Well, that's what they all tell us

Anyone have anything to say about the new album Sweet Warrior yet?

The Grizzly Man OST is awesome. My favorite record of 2006.

Also search the DVD of Grizzly Man for the hourlong documentary about the making of the soundtrack.

Sweet Warrior's very uneven - some great, tense stuff and some goofy awkward old-man bullshit too. I think I liked his last album, the acoustic Front Parlour Ballads, better.

So similar hit/miss ratio to Old Kit Bag?

It's on Shout Factory instead of Cooking Vinyl, so I can't cherry pick the good tracks off eMusic this time :(

Don't think anyone's mentioned 'How Will I ever be Simple Again?' - nearly up there with Beeswing as a late gem

i can't get enuf of this man's voice

Anyone have that huge 5 disc set of odds and ends that came out in the last year or two? I've heard mixed reviews, it seems like you've got to be insanely into RT to want it. I haven't been into his last 10 years, though the 1000 Years Of Popular Music shows were fun.

hey! sweet warrior is good. not very good, just good. the (locally owned and operated) classic rock station in my town plays "'dad's gonna kill me" constantly, which is ballsy and awesome, seeing as it's an explicitly anti-war song.

xmas present for my uncle, who's into dylan of all ages and early cohen. well he's also into late leonard cohen but i'm just not ready to provoke that.

i love "i want to see the bright lights," but i also think some more solo male rock stuff would be more up his alley -- suggestions?

Finally got IWTSTBLT, and I love it. Am most drawn to the first half, which is a bit more pop-oriented in songwriting. I like the second half, but am not so into the folk tropes. Where do I go next? Where can I find more songs like the first four songs on this record?

When I Get to the Border, Calvary Cross, Withered and Died, and title track, btw.

check out the albm R&L put out next, "Pour Down Like Silver."
Those are my favorite songs on Bright Lights too, and I like Pour Down Like SIlver even more.

Awesome, thanks. That would have been my natural thought, save for all the Shoot Out the Lights love above.

Pour Down Like Silver is my favorite Richard (with or without Linda) Thompson album. (Although Hokey Pokey was actually the followup to Bright Lights.) Based on the songs you like, you might prefer Hokey Pokey or Shoot Out the Lights to Pour Down, though.

oops, my bad. hokey pokey is okay too, though. i almost never listen to it for some reason. i picked it up long after i got bright lights & pour down like silver.

The arrangement+production of Calvary Cross is just killing me right now.

(not a big fan of Shoot Out The Lights, for some reason.)

xp.

You should check out the nearly side-long live version on RT's "(guitar, vocal)" LP of odds n ends. It's some heavy shit.

Search: see him in concert.

But genteel folkie vox drove some older rockheads I know in the opposite direction.

Um, I am not certain that's a fair reading of "Beeswing," either the song or the book.

Every bit of criticism in the song is self-criticism. ("You foolish man"
/ "Like a fool I let her run" / "and I miss her more than ever words can say.")

The book is almost as wistful, and I would not classify it as self-exculpatory. He seems at least as critical of himself as most of us would be in his shoes.

Also his most famous song is a highwayman ballad, I am not certain you can extrapolate a politics from using what is among the oldest lyrical tropes in English songcraft.

I am sure that there is more cultural context about "Al Bowlly's in Heaven" than I can grasp but the lyrics seem clear that Thompson is speaking from a persona.

Here's what he said about "Geordie" in an interview I found:

I think generally speaking, when you're writing a song in the first person, you are trying to get into the head of somebody else. Sometimes (it's) a fictional character. Sometimes fictional characters are based on other people. You know, "Here Comes Geordie" is based on a real human being so it just becomes easy to satirize that person's shortcomings (ED NOTE: The Guardian claims that Sting is the subject of that song). But every time you're using the first person in a song, so you sing through their eyes, I think you really have to get as full a characterization as you can in two and a half minutes.

I saw Jeff Tweedy play Friday night, an all request benefit show. He joked that he was dismayed how none of the 60 songs he'd released in the four years since he last did this got requested, then doubly dismayed at the number of cover songs requested. "Well, I'm not going to play any of them," he half in jest sneered. Later in the night he noted that someone has requested "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and that even if he was doing covers he would skip that one, because there were far too many words. He then told a story of when the band and Richard Thompson were opening for Dylan, and when the tour hit Duluth (which is on Lake Superior), they brought out Alan and Mimi from Low, in addition to Thompson, to play "Wreck." They apparently had rehearsed it, and it sounded good, but when the time came to actually play, the lyrics were taped to the stage only at the top, and kept blowing over and obscuring all the words. The musicians did the best they could, but apparently no one on stage was happy with how things turned out.

Yeah. It was bad. https://t.co/aEgPLZfNAh

— LOW (@lowtheband) July 13, 2021

I found a recording of them doing the best they can, though, with all those words that not everyone knew. At least Thompson's guitar sounds good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOfN6-tziMs

xxxp

Um, I am not certain that's a fair reading of "Beeswing," either the song or the book.

Every bit of criticism in the song is self-criticism. ("You foolish man"
/ "Like a fool I let her run" / "and I miss her more than ever words can say.")

The book is almost as wistful, and I would not classify it as self-exculpatory. He seems at least as critical of himself as most of us would be in his shoes.

Is being a cop's son a privileged position in terms of class for the boomer generation? Didn't Pasolini get angry at the student protests because he felt they were middle class kids opposing working class cops?

Thompson's dad was no ordinary PC Plod.

I dunno, I'm speculating about why he chooses "Geordie" as the ultimate punchline put-down playground taunt of this smirky song, rather than "tree-hugging pop star" etc.---seems to be some social discrimination, with regional chauvinism, jobism (cops smarter cooler than milkmen, unto the sons 'tis given?) easily figured in.

I mean, since he wants to take it in that direction, I'll take it a little further.

(ED NOTE: The Guardian claims that Sting is the subject of that song)

LOL "claimed", it could hardly be more obvious who it's about!

My ex-brother-in-law, my sister's ex-husband, had this thing where he would shout out for "Louie Louie" at every gig he went to - I used to go to lots of gigs with him. Then they got divorced and he became persona non grata and I haven't seen him in years. However he still knows people I know and, at the weekend, I was told a story by someone who'd met him at a Richard Thompson gig. As usual, he had shouted out for "Louie Louie" but then, because of his notoriously weak bladder, he'd had to go to the bathroom - and while he was in the bathroom Richard Thompson played "Louie Louie", the first time anyone had ever played "Louie Louie" at a gig he was at and he missed it. Thank you, Richard.

Amazing.

lol, I’d love to hear what RT could do with ‘Louie Louie’.

It looks like Thompson has played it at least one other time way back on Nov. 29, 2006 in Saratoga, CA, around the time the DVD version of 1000 Years of Popular Music was released. (The CD for it has already been out for several years.)

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/richard-thompson/2006/carriage-house-theatre-saratoga-ca-23f6b82b.html

Amazing selection of covers, it may have been one of his all-request shows where you write a selection on a piece of paper.