Richard Thompson
It's Just Fun
by Tom Nelligan

Light and darkness move through music and through life, sometimes in balance and sometimes not. Few have examined that fundamental equation as carefully, as persistently, and as perceptively as English singer/songwriter/guitarist Richard Thompson. In the course of a career that began in the late 1960s and is still going strong, he has looked deep into the darkest corners of human nature and done a better job of illuminating and explaining them than anyone since Bob Dylan or John Lennon.

For more than 30 years now, Thompson has been a formidable musical presence, first with the groundbreaking English folk-rock band Fairport Convention, then for 10 years in a memorable duo with singer and then-wife Linda Thompson, and for nearly 20 years now as a solo performer. A soft-spoken, gracious man with a ready sense of humor, he is also private, contemplative, and elusive — happy to discuss subjects like the history of rock music or the sport of cricket, but often reticent to comment on the significance of his own work.

His songs sometimes seem to evoke dim medieval times, full of mysteries, fears, and fates beyond control, and yet they're as contemporary and real as the challenges of daily life. They're full of insight and irony, pain and regret, and dark characters that can remind listeners of aspects of their own hidden selves. His guitar playing can be a searing assault of string bending and preternatural picking, impossibly fast and complex in acoustic mode, menacing and powerful in electric mode. His performances are uniformly riveting, journeys through shifting shadows and grim back alleys of emotion that many of his listeners might not otherwise come to explore. And in the end, there's catharsis and release, too, because not all of his songs are grim. There's a bit of rock 'n' roll for fun, maybe a quiet love song, always a wink and a nod and a reassurance that he knows the road he's taken.

Thompson was born in North London in 1949. His mother was English; his father, a Scot, a policeman on the London force. He heard touches of Scottish traditional music in his early years thanks to his father's roots, as well as the big band jazz that the senior Thompson favored, but like most English schoolboys in the 1960s he was drawn to rock 'n' roll. When he was about 10 years old, his father gave him a secondhand acoustic guitar, and Thompson took to it immediately. A year or two later, he graduated to an electric instrument. He played at home in his bedroom, he played with friends in after-school bands, and he even took a year of classical guitar lessons. As the Beatles revitalized the English pop music scene, Thompson listened to and learned to play a steadily broadening spectrum of rock, pop, R&B, and blues, and in his mid-teens he began writing songs of his own. By 1966, he had hooked up with two other young Londoners, bassist Ashley Hutchings and guitarist Simon Nicol, playing with them in assorted neighborhood rock bands, most of them short-lived. One of them made its stage debut on June 1, 1967 under the name Fairport Convention.

In the beginning, Thompson had no expectation of making a career in music. "At the time, I don't think that's what you're thinking about," he reminisced last October in a phone conversation from his California home. (He also maintains a residence in London.) "I think at the time you're thinking, 'This is fun. This might work for three months, this might work for six months, then I'll go back to school or get a real job.' As long as it's happening, who cares? I don't think you're thinking about the future at all. I suppose there was a point where it occurred to me that I was doing it as a job, and it seemed to be something that it was possible to continue doing. But again, you're thinking, 'Three years, five years, and then it will all disintegrate, and I'll have to do something else.' I suppose I still think that, really! It still seems slightly unreal that you can get paid for doing this!" he laughed. "Because it's just fun!"

This is an excerpt from issue #93.