I nearly missed this tour, in which Thompson and his latest band presented songs from the 2010 album “Dream Attic” in the first half of each concert before launching into some old Thompson favorites after the interval. When the European leg of the tour was announced, concerts began in England the night before I was due to head off to Asia for 3 weeks and finished, still in England, just before I got back. As a fan since 1967, when I first saw Thompson with the newly formed Fairport Convention, I was horrified to think that I would miss this tour: after all, I had only seen the guy four times in the last nine months. Obviously somebody up there likes me, because in answer to my prayers, addressed to any deities who might be sympathetic, a concert was belatedly scheduled for the finest popular music venue in my own hometown for 48 hours after my return.
Instead of standing in the mosh pit, I dragged my jetlagged body into the seated part of the packed hall and sat down next to the sounddesk, figuring that if it sounded good enough to Thompson’s sound engineer, the highly accomplished Simon Tassano, from that position, it ought to sound good to me – and indeed it did. The AB, as it is known, was renovated a few years ago and has a state-of-the-art sound set-up, which Tassano exploited to the best of his considerable ability to produce an evening of very well-balanced, beautifully amplified music in which each instrument came across perfectly and one could make out Thompson’s words. I have seen Tassano in action many times but I had not realized until now that he actually sings along quietly to all the songs: well, I guess if there is anyone who knows the songs as well as Thompson and the band-members, it has to be the sound engineer.
The latest album marks a departure from Thompson’s previous recordings. In the past, new songs appeared first on studio recordings, while live recordings featured known songs. However, many fans claim that live Thompson is better every time and that the best studio albums are those that sound closest to a live performance. “Dream Attic” consists of 13 wholly new songs recorded by the band live in concert, with no studio tweaking, over a series of evenings in California. The best versions of the songs were issued as a CD, while a bonus disc gives no-frills versions of the same songs sung solo by Thompson accompanied by his acoustic guitar. The subsequent concert tour, with the same 5 musicians, replicated the recorded concerts, with a first half devoted to the new songs while the second part of the evening showcased some of Thompson’s vast back catalogue.
The Brussels concert followed this pattern. Thompson duly worked his way through the songs on the record in order, although he omitted three, the rather eerie “Burning Man” (possibly about the festival of the same name but also referencing global warming – a surprise omission for me), “Here Comes Geordie” (a rather pointless cheap shot targeting Sting) and “Bad Again”, undoubtedly one of the weaker songs on the album. All the musicians were in stupendous form: Thompson himself demonstrated why many people consider him such a giant of the electric guitar, pulling out long and soaring solos on “Crimescene” and “Sidney Wells:” both songs are true to Thompson’s reputation for jovial “doom and gloom”, the former treading an ambiguous line between a description of an actual murder scene and a metaphorical place where love has been brutally killed, while the latter is a song about a serial killer in the improbably jolly form of a slipjig (announced to us as such in case we didn’t realize). Thompson saved his most stratospheric solo outing for the final song of the CD (and of the first half), the deeply regretful “If Love Whispers Your Name.”
Folkdance is never far away in Thompson’s music and he specifically pointed out that the song “Diamonds In Her Dancing Shoes”, a story of lowlife mobsters in the East End of London, is a polka. Despite their background in rock music, regular Thompson drummer Michael Jerome and the recently recruited bassist, Taras Prodaniuk seem to have had no trouble in adapting to the Celtic-influenced cadences of Thompson’s music. The other two members of the band, long-time Thompson sidekick and multi-instrumentalist Pete Zorn (who most recently toured in Britain with Steeleye Span) and violinist Joel Zifkin, a Montreal-based associate of the McGarrigle Sisters, are naturally more accustomed to folk-tinged music. Zorn, who also provides backing vocals, demonstrated why Thompson continues to exploit his musical skills, switching effortlessly between acoustic guitar, sopranino, alto and baritone saxes, mandolin and flute, thereby adding a whole range of different textures to the songs. Zifkin also played mandolin on the Thames-inspired “Big Sun Falling In The River.” (The thought occurred to me: how many 5-piece bands outside Eastern Europe have two members whose names begin with Z?)
As usual, Thompson began the evening with a fast, rocking and danceable song, in this case the one that opens the CD, “The Money Shuffle,” an amusing though hardly subtle comment on the recent financial crisis in which bankers are described in extremely unflattering terms. Immediately after this, Thompson launched into the pair of segued songs “Among The Gorse, Among The Grey” and “Haul Me Up,” the first slow, sad and haunting, the second, its sequel, despairing and rocking. It is hard to single out other particular songs in this first set for special mention, but I would highlight the touching “A Brother Slips Away” in which Thompson pays homage to three recently deceased musical figures from his own world, thought to be John Martyn, Davey Graham and Beryl Marriott (“… a sister slips away…”). I have already noted the amazing solo on “If Love Whispers Your Name” and this long and poignant song brought the first half to a resonating conclusion.
Thompson is often self-deprecating about his lack of acknowledged hits, but he has enough fans familiar with his compositions from four decades to raise cheers of recognition. Many of the songs from earlier recordings played in the second set in Brussels are heard regularly, for example “Can’t Win,” “Wall Of Death” and “Al Bowlly’s In Heaven.” On the last-named, Thompson switched for the only time that evening to acoustic guitar for the intimate, nineteen-forties, Django-ish sound the song needs and each band member soloed. This is a song that Thompson regularly airs when he has the right band in tow, and this is also true of another old favorite, “Tear-Stained Letter,” which equally gives the musicians a chance to display their brilliance, this time on a number that plays Thompson’s usual trick of contrasting the woefulness of the lyrics with a noisy and upbeat backing. A more recent composition that now seems to find a place in every Thompson concert is the modal “One Door Opens” from “The Old Kit Bag” (2003), which I last saw him perform in January of this year while playing renaissance quitar with Professor Philip Picket’s Musicians of the Globe, specialists in Shakespearean music. He’s nothing if not versatile, our Mr Thompson.
This evening will remain in my memory for two songs in particular. Thompson opened the second half with a song beloved of many fans but seldom played: “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away” appeared on Thompson’s first solo album, “Henry The Human Fly” in 1972, and Thompson persists in reminding audiences, as he did here, that it was Warner Brothers’ worst-selling album of all time (a claim that is, however, contested by some well-informed nerds). Anyway, it’s a wonderful quirky song and scored another first for me when Bobby Eichhorn, the roadie who looks after Thompson’s guitars, appeared from the wings and joined in on acoustic guitar. Most memorably of all, the penultimate song, before the inevitable final encore of “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight”, probably the nearest that Thompson and his then wife Linda ever came to a hit record, was the throbbing “Calvary Cross,” with its unmistakeable, repeated three-chord riff, on which Thompson has played some of the greatest galaxy-crossing, consciousness-bending solos of his career. Experts assure me that this song has not been played live since the mid-1990s, and this was its only outing on the tour, with a solo worthy of the song’s track-record. As I said, somebody up there must like me!
Was there anything that I didn’t like about this concert? Well, just occasionally Pete Zorn’s constant switching between instruments begins to irritate. It’s a distraction from the main business of concentrating on the music to find oneself asking, “what will he play next?” As with all concerts by a musician whom one has listened to for a number of years, the choice of songs always appears a little arbitrary, even eccentric at times, and the absence of personal favorites can disappoint (no “Dimming Of The Day,” no “A Heart Needs A Home,” no “When The Spell Is Broken,” no “Beeswing,”) but of course the choice depends first on what this particular band sounds good on and second on what these musicians know from the Thompson archives. These minor quibbles do not detract from the fact that this was an evening of powerful music, played to a hyperenthusiastic audience by a group of accomplished musicians led by a man still at the height of his creative and instrumental powers at 62 years of age.
(Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, on February 7 2011)
Comments