Richard Thompson :"Acoustic Rarities"

Here's further proof (as if any is needed) that Richard Thompson sits somewhere towards the very top of the singer-songwriter pecking order. It's hard to figure what defines a Rarity in RT's view—presumably something that didn't fit in somewhere else or ended up on the back-burner, setlist-wise. 

In some cases (What If?), it's fairly obvious why, but skim through the rest.

These, remember, are, more or less, the castoffs.

Your average singer-songwriter would use something like They Tore the Hippodrome Down as the centrepiece of an album. Here, it's the start of a steady build through the classic Never Again, a long-time favourite (The Poor Ditching Boy), the bleak masterpiece that is End of the Rainbow and a couple of Fairport Convention classics in Sloth and Poor Will.

The rest of the material ain't too shabby either.

And remember, folks, these are, in effect, the also-rans. Outstanding.

Mike Heron "Smiling Men with Bad Reputations" (3.5*)

Looking back on the British music scene in the late sixties from the cold hard light of twenty-first century reality there are a couple of things that tend to leave a definite impression. One of them, in an era where some major acts struggle to produce an album every couple of years is the sheer volume of music bands were able to churn out back then.

Quantity, of course, doesn’t always equate to quality, but in the hot house scene that operated then anyone who wasn’t delivering quality product that could be moved tended to vanish into oblivion fairly quickly.

In terms of quantity most acts would have been pushing to match the volume of releases the Incredible String Band rolled out between 1966 (The Incredible String Band) and 1974’s Hard Rope and Silken Twine. There’s a full dozen titles, two of them double albums in that nine year span, and that’s without Mike Heron’s Smiling Men with Bad Reputations (released in 1971) and Robin Williamson’s Myrrh (1972).

Prolific seems rather close to understatement, and the quality was pretty good as well.

Unlike Williamson, who’d started the ISB with fellow folkie Clive Palmer, Heron had been a rocker, something that’s obvious from the beginning of the quite boppy Call Me Diamond, with squealing sax from South African avant-gardist Dudu Pukwana and decidedly rocky piano from Heron himself. Decidedly non-Stringy, but mighty fine fun. Flowers of the Forest sits in more familiar territory for ISB fans, though it’s somewhat rockier than his work in that setting with Richard Thompson’s electric guitar running through the ramble.

There’s something that sounds remarkably like a harpsichord in the introduction to Audrey, which is heading back towards ISB territory with a trace of A Very Cellular Song in the harmonium while he’s expressing a desire (or an intention) to take your clothes off.

Brindaban evokes Hindu mythology, in particular legends involving Krishna and the milkmaids in the town of Vrindavan over an evocative string arrangement, while Feast of Stephen works Cat Stevens territory quite magnificently. A great song that’s on a par with almost anything he managed with the ISB and finishes well ahead of most of the pack. Spirit Beautiful is much more obviously Indian in inspiration, with tabla tapping away and the veena and tambura droning away in the background, a swooping, swirling chorus that includes the members of Dr Strangely Strange and a Very Cellular jaw harp in the instrumental play-out.

By contrast, with instrumental accompaniment from Tommy and the Bijoux (Pete Townshend, Ronnie Lane and Keith Moon) Warm Heart Pastry heads straight towards full-blown heavy rock. In the end it mightn’t quite get there, but it winds up in a reasonably adjacent postcode as Moon flails away and Townshend’s guitar picks its way through an intricate little riff.

There’s a synthesiser lead into Beautiful Stranger, where a (presumably, it’s got that sort of tropical island vibe) native beauty looks after a wounded traveller, soldier or sailor coming out of a fever over an instrumental track that’s rather muddled and cluttered and the album proper ends with an intimate No Turning Back with sparse acoustic guitar and a mysterious lyric that might involve a premature departure from a loved one delivered in a hesitant manner.

The album reappeared in 2004, remastered with two bonus tracks, an uptempo Make No Mistake and the decidedly rocky Lady Wonder that combine to take the remastered version out with a bang rather than a low key semi-whimper and point towards the increasingly rock orientation to come on the later Incredible String Band albums.

All in all, a fairly eclectic collection of material that probably wouldn’t have fitted into the earlier incarnations of the ISB and breaks new ground, largely due to John Cale’s brass and vocal arrangements and the extra tonalities he delivers on viola, harmonium, piano, and bass. Maybe not essential, but definitely interesting.

Richard Thompson "Electric" (4.5*)

I have nothing left to say/But I'm going to say it anyway is the opening line in Randy Newman’s I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It), a song that heads into the final choruses with the observation that Everything I write, all sounds the same/Each record that I'm making is like a record that I made/Just not as good.

Neither statement is in any danger of applying to a Richard Thompson album, and particularly not to his latest Buddy Miller-produced folk-power trio effort with Thompson’s electric and acoustic guitar work firing on all cylinders as Taras Prodaniuk on bass and Michael Jerome on drums pound away in the rhythm section he’s used for the best part of a decade.

It’s difficult to avoid the impression that Thompson goes out of his way to come up with a different format to use when it’s time to record a new batch of songs. There’s his Cabaret of Souls: a Folk Oratorio, a piece originally commissioned by the International Society of Bassists who wanted something that featured the double bass and ran for around six minutes and ended up getting a song cycle. Cast your eye back a little further and there’s Dream Attic, recorded live on tour with the same rhythm section and additional instrumentation from the versatile Pete Zorn and electric violinist Joel Zifkin.

2007’s Sweet Warrior had a few different players, and followed 2005’s Front Parlour Ballads, recorded at home with RT playing everything apart from the percussion provided by 1000 Years of Popular Music colleague Debra Dobkin. Skip back past Live from Austin, TX and the cottage industry live releases for the merch table (The Chrono Show, Faithless, recorded as far back as 1985, Ducknapped, 1000 Years of Popular Music, More Guitar from Washington D.C. in 1988) and you’re back in 2003 with The Old Kit Bag.

Five studio albums, a song cycle along with half a dozen assorted live titles in various settings (I failed to mention Live Warrior in that run through, make that seven) represent a fair swag of product for a single decade and suggests a canny operator who takes care to vary what he’s going to place out there in the market place, with a couple of box sets in there for good measure.

So you’d figure heading off to Nashville to record in Buddy Miller’s living room was part of a deliberate policy of doing something a little different for each new release, something to talk about in the promotional interviews as much as a conscious pursuit of interesting sonic possibilities. Along with the aforementioned rhythm section, Electric features some unobtrusive rhythm guitar from Miller, fiddle from Stuart Duncan as well as vocal support from bluegrass sweetheart Alison Krauss and Anglo-Irish Siobhan Mayer Kennedy, wife of Miller's engineer.

Recorded on analogue tape rather than digital media over just four days after a brief rehearsal (it pays to have had some of the new material in the live set for a while) with most tracks only needing a couple of takes and minimal of overdubbing, Electric comes across warm and crisp from the flurry of handclaps and thumping percussion that launches Stoney Ground, a stomping romp through the obsessions of a toothless unashamedly lust-filled pensioner who falls for a widowed neighbour and her “honey pot”, gets beaten up by the widow’s sons for his trouble and ends up lying, dripping with blood, dripping with snot, but he’s still dreaming of her you-know-what.

“People over 55,” Thompson points out, “still have urges,” though one’s not sure how closely such things approximate the regulation searing guitar solo that comes with the track’s play-out.

Bawdy English folksong meets greasy, grimy rock ‘n’ roll, is followed by a turn into more sedate territory with Salford Sunday, an impressionist number set in the same dreary town and similar circumstances to those that inspired Ewan MacColl's Dirty Old Town where the narrator wakes up with a morning head, the Sunday papers and recollections of a Saturday night that could have been better. There’s a gentle lilt, a dash of regretful whimsy, but in the end it’s a dreary northern town he’ll be glad to be out of.

Apparently Thompson met the model for Sally B at a fundraising event, and it’s here that the power trio really comes into play, with definite lashings of Cream in the interplay between Jerome’s drums and bassist Taras Prodaniuk as Thompson delivers a scathing assessment of an attractive, ambitious and exploitative opportunist (Who needs books when you've got them looks, Sally B?).

The power trio thunder continues Stuck On The Treadmill, with the beefy riff merging heavy metal and Celtic elements as Jerome thumps away and Thompson addresses the frustrations of a working class existence in hard times.

After that pounding a change of pace arrives with a delicate My Enemy with ethereal harmonies from Siobhan Maher Kennedy as Thompson reflects on the symbiotic relationship a bloke has with his nominal nemesis. There’s something lurking in the distant past that has left two stubborn old men each waiting for the other to make the first move towards a reconciliation that would, at least in my reading of things, undermine the relentless rivalry that, ironically, is the thing that keeps both of them going.

While the title suggests Good Things Happen To Bad People Thompson goes to some length to assert that this is a temporary state of affairs and looks forward to the possibility of a serve of schadenfreude (that’s pleasure derived from another's misfortunes, just to save you reaching for the dictionary) when the Jezebel who cried the day I walked you down the aisle gets her eventual comeuppance.

After the bile and bitterness that has gone before, Where's Home? comes across all bright, breezy and bluegrassy with Appalachian fiddle, yearning harmonies and jaunty guitar work. Ultimately, however, it’s an intermission rather than an escape as Thompson returns to the territory he works best in Another Small Thing In Her Favour.

There’s a husband assessing the ticks and crosses, the algebra of a failing relationship as his wife leaves home (Still, she kissed me once more/ As she gently slammed the door) a gently painful study of a breakup, a portrait of the about to be abandoned partner watching her go in a complex tangle of emotions. Sure, she’s leaving, but she’s doing it with a degree of tact and diplomatic sensitivity. He might be devastated, but there’s a certain degree of well, it could have been worse.

Straight And Narrow heads towards sixties garage rock, though your average garage guitarist probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with something like Thompson’s quicksilver solo, and the average garage lyricist wouldn’t have been able to come up with the image of a woman whose conformity (she walks the straight and narrow) is matched by a grim determination to ensure everyone around her does the same (she’s got eyes in the back of her head).

Delicate fingerpicking and understated but still heart-wrenching ghostly harmonies from Alison Krauss give the dreamlike The Snow Goose a charm that launches the ballad into the same territory Thompson explored in Waltzing's for Dreamers, From Galway to Graceland and Woods of Darnay. Sparse, achingly tender, and a reminder of just how good Thompson is as a lyricist in a setting where there’s nothing to draw the listener’s attention away from the words and the atmosphere.

I’ve had wives and I’ve treated them badly/And maybe a lover or two is the admission early on in Saving The Good Stuff For You, the Celtic waltz that brings the album proper to a close with an aging bloke who’s been around (I’ve seen trouble from every direction / My old head is peppered with gray / I could never resist life’s temptations / Oh, they just seemed to fall in my way), is about to embark on a new relationship and wants the new partner to realise he still has something to offer.

That’s it for the album proper, but the Deluxe version comes with the regulation serve of bonus tracks, a rocking Will You Dance, Charlie Boy with a great fiddle solo from Stuart Duncan that probably didn’t fit with the overall sequence of the album, while I Found a Stray would probably have been one too many in the slow ones department. I might be wrong, but I’d assume The Rival and The Tic-Tac Man were considered for the album proper but didn’t make the cut because there were other contenders that fitted (or, I suspect, worked) better. There’s some flow over from other projects in Auldie Riggs and
Auldie Riggs Dance, both of which are part of the Cabaret of Souls song cycle and, again the 1000 Years of Popular Music So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo.

The consensus around the traps seems to rate Electric as Thompson’s best studio work since 1999‘s Mock Tudor, which may well be true, but I’m inclined towards the view that this particular what’ll I try this time has worked better than the previous couple.

It’s not as if, after forty-five years’ worth of writing that has produced a remarkably consistent body of very high quality work, you’re going to come across anything new or radically different on a new Richard Thompson album, and you’re not likely to mistake him for anyone else or anyone else for him either.

You can place a substantial tick beside Buddy Miller’s name in the production department, since Electric is a mighty fine sounding recording, but based on the assumption that we’ll be looking at something different for the next studio project you might not expect him to be occupying that chair next time.

Assuming you’ve been aboard for a while there’s nothing here you haven’t sort of heard before. The guitar solos spark and arc, with emotional intensity to go with the pyrotechnics, the lyrics are immaculately crafted expressions of recurring themes and cautionary tales, the melodies remain simple, concise and affecting, the arrangements and the backing from an impeccable rhythm section well, um, impeccable and the recording sounds clean, crisp and live.

You might be inclined to disregard something that would attract an overall comment like here’s another excellent Richard Thompson album, but consider underlining that another, switching the excellent into italics and ponder the following, which puts it better than I could hope to.

Richard Thompson, in the words of one rather perceptive reviewer, is what you hope all of your favourite young artists will age into, but rarely do.

Teddy Thompson "Bella" (4*)

1998’s going back a ways, but a listen to Celtschmerz, the live compilation from a Richard Thompson tour of the U.K. and you’ll notice a rather fine tenor hitting the harmonies on a couple of songs from the Richard & Linda era, not quite as high as the female range would go, but intertwining with Thompson’s voice the way you find genetically related singers often manage, and a glance at the sleeve notes would reveal the individual in question is one Teddy Thompson, son of Richard and Linda and no slouch in the vocal department.

On that recording he hit the spaces his mum used to fill in a manner that suggested a voice worth following and over the intervening decade plus Teddy Thompson has quietly gone about releasing five albums, four of ‘em original material, with a bracket of country covers (Upfront & Down Low) in the middle.

So, five albums into a career you’d expect things to be more or less set in place. Thompson writes with a quirky wit (it’s a very English sensibility on display here) and delivers jaunty melodies with an archly raised eyebrow here and there.

Take, for example, the album opener Looking for a Girl. Yes, your narrator is, in fact, out on the hunt for a partner and lists the qualities his ideal woman should possess (including the ability to recognise the signals when it’s time to knock the relationship on the head). It’s a want ad from the Personal column, but you can’t help thinking, given his expressed attitude, this bloke isn’t in for a whole lot of joy.

And from there it’s obvious that this dude does, in fact have his share of woman troubles. There are the ones he lusts after but are unattainable (The One I Can’t Have), the ones he can’t escape from (The Next One), the ones he’s lost along the way (Delilah), the ones he had but gave him the flick (Take Me Back Again), and the ones he can’t figure out (Tell Me What You Want, a romance gone wrong duet a la Mickey and Sylvia with Jenni Mulduar).

Produced by David Kahne (Tony Bennett, Paul Macartney, The Strokes, Regina Spektor, Wilco) who also contributed guitar and keyboard parts and string arrangements, and backed by Thompson's road band and a few guests (predictably including a certain Richard Thompson) Bella delivers a classy package that reflects a few obvious influences (with Roy Orbison being a prime factor in the blend). It’s the work of a craftsman who can blend his influences into a melancholy package delivered by a bloke who can definitely sing (given the genetics involved you’d be expecting that to be the case, wouldn’t you?)

We knew he could sing as far back as Persuasion on his Dad’s Action Packed: The Best Of The Capitol Years compilation and the aforementioned Celtschmerz but Bella indicated he’s not just a bloke with a rather good voice. Impressive, and I’ll be watching for the next one.

Fairport Convention "House Full: Live at the L.A. Troubadour" (4.5*)

Thank you. This is our last number and it's called Sir Patrick Spens isn't the first thing you'd expect to hear on an album, but presumably it’s the only track from the first of three-nights that were recorded to have made the cut for the disk, so there you go.

In any case, if you’re into musical archaeology, House Full, as the only currently available live Fairport Convention album with Richard Thompson in the band, is probably required listening. There’s the small matter of Fairport’s influence on a group of young Angelenos of Mexican origin who morphed into Los Lobos.

Having lost singer Sandy Denny almost directly after Liege & Lief appeared on the market, Fairport had reshaped the vocal department with guitarist Richard Thompson and folkie fiddler Dave Swarbrick sharing the leads with assistance in the background from new bass player Dave Pegg, who’d been slotted in to replace Ashley Hutchings, who was en route to more traditional territory with his new missus Shirley Collins.

The new line up had recorded and released Full House, and were on the road behind the album (as the saying goes) when they landed in L.A. for a week-long gig at the Troubadour (opening, believe it or not, for Rick Nelson) that was legendary for a couple of reasons. According to Dave Pegg the band were doing a week's residency, two spots each night and three on the weekend for which we were going to be paid five hundred dollars. But when we went to collect our wages, we'd drunk so much we owed them fifteen hundred bucks. Impressive, even taking into account the possibility that the drinks in question were overpriced and the band were generous tippers where leggy waitresses were concerned.

The finer details of alcoholic catering may have had something to do with the related fact that Led Zeppelin were performing at the Forum and Robert Plant, John Bonham and Fairport’s new bass player were old mates from Birmingham. Dave Pegg invited the foursome to the Troubadour after their Forum gig at the Forum and when they arrived a dressing room consultation resulted in Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones joining Fairport on stage for a set that included Hey Joe, Morning Dew, Banks of the Sweet Primroses, Mystery Train and That's Alright Mama. While the mobile eight-track machine was rolling throughout the tapes (existence confirmed by Joe Boyd) are buried deep in the Polygram vaults.

But it seems they exist. In White Bicycles Boyd reminisces: the tape reveals Plant’s vocal being louder than any of the amplifiers, Page trying to keep pace with Richard on jigs and reels and Zep manager Peter Grant at a front table cursing and abusing the waitresses.

He also recalls Linda Ronstadt being invited on stage (another night, another distinguished guest) after Fairport had run out of encores for another forty minutes covering songs she had forgotten she knew.

There’s nothing from either night here, however. So what’s on the disk?

Well, for a start, there’s nothing that predates Liege & Lief (predictable, the infamous car crash would still have been relatively fresh in the memory), and the Liege and Full House material is fleshed out with traditional material, a World War I bagpipe lament and, on a lighter note, Yellow Birds (or boids, up high in banana trees).

Even if you’re not familiar with Fairport, those of us who went through high school in the sixties will probably recall Sir Patrick Spens from the poetry anthologies (I had the impression it was regarded as somewhere in the same postcode as iconic as far as medieval ballads were concerned), but don’t let that put you off.

Actually, while Sir Patrick Spens and Banks of the Sweet Primroses get proceedings off on a nice roll, there’s nothing there to suggest you’re in the presence of anything other than a fairly good folk-rock band, things change with the jigs and reels in The Lark in the Morning Medley, which may not be the fastest of their kind in captivity (that honour quite possibly goes to Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron or Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzies) the version here romps along at a merry clip, and like the later variations, is played with stop on a sixpence precision by an outfit with considerable instrumental chops (Swarbrick’s fiddle work might not quite rate as virtuoso, but it’s in an adjacent postcode and Richard Thompson is, well, Richard Thompson, enough said) and a rock hard, hard rocking rhythm section.

Those chops come to the fore again in twelve and a bit minutes of Sloth, and yet again in the play-out to Matty Groves, with the traditional Staines Morris wedged between them. The vocal department on Matty Groves shows what they lost with the departure of Sandy Denny, but there’s a rough-hewn rustic note to the Thompson and Swarbrick take that has its own charm, from where I’m sitting.

Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron cart us back into jigs and reels territory, then there’s a stately take on Battle of the Somme, a piper’s lament that you might not expect to work in this setting but if you didn’t you weren’t aware of Thompson’s ongoing affinity with the skirl of the pipes.

Up to this point we’re revisiting the original House Full. The related release Live at the L.A. Troubadour gives us Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzie's Daughter's Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancer's Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie, which predictably gets abbreviated to Sir B. McKenzies. Non-Einsteins will no doubt be able to figure out why, and proceedings are concluded on a lighter note with the old Yellow Birds.

In their day, the five man Fairport were, by all accounts, an awesome experience in a live setting and as the only officially released live recording of the lineup House Full, with that extra material from the cousin-brother Live at the L.A. Troubadour tacked on the end is close to essential listening for anyone interested in investigating this little corner of the folk-rock genre.

In summary, a crack five-piece outfit at the height of their considerable powers. I was, back in the day, highly impressed by Angel Delight, the studio album that followed this live excursion, by which time Richard Thompson had gone. Classic, exuberant British folk-rock from the best all-male lineup of a band that has gone on to become an institution (they’re still going strong with a 45th anniversary coming up, and there’ll be those who’ll rate a configuration featuring Sandy Denny as slightly better).

They never, as someone or other pointed out, made an album like this again, but then again, no one else did either. For $10.99 at the iTunes Store it was a no-brainer...