Richard Thompson: Live at the BBC

Serious lovers of Richard Thompson’s music probably already possess 3 or 4 retrospective compilations of his work spread over several discs – one of those available runs to no less than 6 CDS. Inevitably, there is overlap between some of the contents of these anthologies and other Thompson recordings in their possession, which would normally include most or all of his studio albums, official releases of concert recordings and, whisper it not, a number of widely circulated unofficial recordings of high quality that have often been mined by compilers of the retrospectives. There is even one box of CDs that contains not a single track previously unreleased on official albums.

Thus an invitation to buy yet another Richard Thompson boxed set would need to be particularly enticing to persuade fans to part with yet more money in these straitened times. Well, dear reader, if you really like Thompson’s music, this treasure chest is a MUST, containing 3 CDs and a DVD filled almost entirely with previously unavailable versions of his and, occasionally, other people’s songs – and a few instrumentals. Thompson’s erstwhile colleague in the early Fairport Convention, the incomparable Sandy Denny, had been dead for 29 years before the UK public broadcaster got around to releasing a similar collection of her recordings for the BBC, so Thompson is honored to receive this accolade during his still productive years.

This is therefore a survey of a not yet finished career. It does not represent every period of his forty-plus years in popular music, nor is there anything in the box apart from recordings bearing Thompson’s own name (unless one counts a few that are attributed to “Richard and Linda Thompson” dating from the years of his marriage to Linda Pettifer/Peters, with whom he made 7 remarkable albums in the 1970s and early 1980s). There’s nothing by Fairport Convention, nothing by French, Frith, Kaiser and Thompson, nothing from his occasional collaborations with other musicians, none of his work as session or guest musician with other artists or as composer of film music. I don’t know how much of these diverse musical digressions can be found in the BBC’s archives: certainly there must be enough Fairport Convention for a future boxed set devoted to them, but none of it appears here. So you get Thompson either as solo singer/guitarist or as leader of a series of bands, although it’s perhaps a reflection of the BBC’s present financial state that all of the more recent material is strictly solo. Televised Thompson band performances have become very rare.

There are some real rarities: the dark-humored “Dragging The River,” about a nerd who gloats about murdering his unfaithful girlfriend, previously available only on a bootleg, is on the first disc. It’s hardly Thompson’s greatest song, more of a novelty number, but it’s good to have a “legit” version at last. The first CD also has a couple of instrumentals, one of which was totally new to me, Thompson completist though I am. He almost never plays instrumentals in concert nowadays -– the most recent example in this boxed set dates from 1981! There are version’s of Buddy Holly’s “Wishing” with Richard and Linda dueting prettily and of Merle Haggard’s “I’m Turning Off A Memory,” the only clue here to the Thompson couple’s recurring interest in country and western music. (Their son Teddy claims that country music was almost the only genre played at home!) Joining these numbers on Disc 1 are superb versions of some of Thompson’s finest songs: “The Great Valerio,” “A Heart Needs A Home,” “Shoot Out The Lights,” “Night Comes In,” “Dimming Of The Day” -– most of them featuring Linda’s outstanding vocals. There is even a version of “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” that is arguably better than the title track of the album of the same name, which some fans still regard as Richard and Linda Thompson’s finest recording, although others reserve that honor for Shoot Out The Lights.

Not very long after the Thompsons’ marriage collapsed in 1983, Linda stopped performing in public because her voice, usually so beautifully right for Thompson’s songs, even though her repertoire went much wider, increasingly refused to function when she needed it to, a condition known as hysterical dysphonia. CD1 does Linda a disservice by including one track on which her fraught, fractured voice displays evident signs of the strain that was eventually to silence her as a performer except on rare studio recordings: I am puzzled why this distressing version of the beautiful song “Withered And Died” was included here, as the BBC archives must possess more flattering recordings of Linda’s singing in addition to those on this disc.

The second CD presents a series of recordings that Thompson made in the 1980s with the outstanding band that included Christine Collister and Clive Gregson on backing vocals (and Gregson on second guitar). Several songs from this era are still in Thompson’s contemporary repertoire and when I hear them I always miss Collister’s and Gregson’s voices: they sounded so right on the original recordings by which I came to know and love these songs. It is invidious to praise individual items in the live band recordings from 1985 and 1986 on CD 2, for they all show Thompson and his collaborators at their best, but among the outstanding tracks is “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away,” recorded by Thompson on his first solo album, Henry The Human Fly. This is the only relic from Henry in the whole BBC collection and will delight the many fans who consider this one of Thompson’s outstanding quirky songs; he has recently started including it again in band concerts, so he is clearly fond of it himself. There are also brilliant band versions of such perennial Thompson favorites as “When The Spell Is Broken,” “Valerie,” “Jennie,” “Wall Of Death,” “Nearly In Love,” “She Twists The Knife Again,” as well two different recordings of a song that works only with the more-than-just-backing vocals of Collister and Gregson and has consequently dropped out of the playlist since those days, the unusually arranged “You Don’t Say.”

The 10 tracks with band on CD2 are followed by a further 10 solo tracks with Thompson on acoustic guitar recorded in the same period. Cleverly, the selection includes solo acoustic recordings of several songs already heard in band versions, with Thompson on electric guitar, on CDs 1 and 2 on, thus providing a perfect opportunity to explore how this gifted player of both varieties of the instrument adapts his acoustic playing to do as much as possible of what a full band can do with the same song. These one-man versions are mostly songs that one might expect to hear at a contemporary Thompson solo concert, although to my relief the BBC has not included his party-piece, the brilliant but over-performed motor cycle ballad, “Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” and also omits his probably most requested song, “Beeswing.”

CD 3, which has recordings made between 2001 and 2009, contains mostly songs that have appeared in the last decade, some of them powerful and unforgettable (“Gethsemane,” “The Outside Of The Inside,” “One Door Opens,” “Old Thamesside,” “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me…”) although there are backward glances: a solo “Wall Of Death,” “The End Of The Rainbow” (also featured on CD 2), which is often alleged to be the bleakest song in Thompson’s extensive catalogue of downers, solo versions of “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” and “Down Where The Drunkards Roll,” both from the first Richard and Linda album, and a song co-written with Linda, “Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed?” first heard on Shoot Out The Lights. This disc also contains some previously unissued recordings, including Thompson’s (to my ears) fairly unsubtle plea to adults to avoid indoctrinating children (or is it an incitement for kids to rebel?) entitled “Kiddz,” a pair of traditional songs, “Hunting The Wren” (which I know as “The Cutty Wren”) and “William Brown,” as well as two items from Thompson’s show 1000 Years Of Popular Music, namely the Renaissance Italian song “So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo” and Ray Davies’s “See My Friends.” This final CD ends with “Meet On The Ledge,” which Thompson composed while still in his teens: it has since become an anthem and ritually ends every concert played by Thompson’s old and still occasional bandmates in Fairport Convention.

The DVD is frankly stupendous. It begins with the already occasionally available 1975 recording of Richard and Linda in Muslim garb singing a heart-rending “A Heart Needs A Home” to Thompson’s acoustic guitar backing, together with the surrealistic “Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair” from the same broadcast. This is followed by a seven-song session from a 1981 band of Thompson regulars (if you want names, I recognized Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick, Pete Zorn, as well as Linda, who turns in a stunning version of her friend Sandy Denny’s song “I’m A Dreamer”), then two tracks from Richard and Linda with just erstwhile Fairport Convention sidekick Simon Nicol on second guitar. Following this, there are seven numbers from the Collister/Gregson era band before the DVD ends with one Thompson solo song, “She Twists The Knife Again,” capturing one of his rare performances using electric rather than acoustic guitar.

Of course there are weaknesses in this collection. For a start there is no information about who plays in the various bands. Some details may be gleaned from the booklet that accompanies the discs, for it reproduces some BBC documentation that mentions names, but the listener is left to work out who appears on the CDs either by recognition (as with the backing vocals) or by comparing other recordings from adjacent dates whose personnel is known. The DVD offers opportunities to recognize band members visually, although in places the camera work focuses so obsessively on Thompson (and Linda), or else shows instruments while tantalizingly failing to show the faces of those playing them, that identification is often difficult. It should be forbidden to publish collections of this kind without detailed information about who was playing, who recorded what, when and where they did so, etc..

The other obvious area of potential dissent is the selection of material. Probably every Thompson fan has personal favorites and unfavorites, so no collection will please everyone. Nevertheless, I would question the decision to include lightweight songs such as “Georgie On A Spree,” “Modern Woman,” “Two Left Feet,” “Kiddz,” “Let It Blow,” “Needle And Thread,” when the BBC archives must contain versions of songs much more worthy of inclusion in a tribute of this kind. Anyone who has seen Thompson solo in concert over the last decade would surely question whether we need yet another solo acoustic version of “Valerie,” “The Turning Of The Tide” or even “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight.” Moreover, it seems superfluous to follow a 2001 solo acoustic performance of Thompson’s post 9/11 anti-fundamentalist song, “The Outside Of The Inside,” just a few tracks later, with an almost identical 2004 solo acoustic version of the same song.

Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms and do not justify ignoring this box of marvels. There is enough good stuff – more than enough – to outweigh the minor weaknesses and errors of judgment. If you are a diehard Thompson fan you probably pre-ordered this set of discs as soon as its publication was announced and you have been playing it regularly ever since. If you have only recently come to know and enjoy Thompson’s music, this is an opportunity to acquire some of the greatest highlights from a career of almost 45 years.

(BBC, 2011)