For your pleasure
Sylvie Simmons delights in Thompson’s new release.
Linda Thompson ★★★★★
Linda Thompson: her songs, her rules.
Proxy Music
STORYSOUND. CD/DL/LP
IT SEEMS more accident than design that Linda Thompson’s first new solo album in over a decade should arrive 50 years almost to the day since her first album as half of a duo with her then-husband Richard Thompson was released. But they have something in common: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974) was a brilliant record, and so in its own way is Linda’s Proxy Music.
The title refers to the fact that though Linda wrote or co-wrote the songs on this album, she handed them over to others to sing. Had to. Dysphonia, the rare condition that’s bugged her on and off for years, appears to have finally silenced one of the most revered female voices in British folk and rock. Tough as that must be to take, it doesn’t seem to have dented her sense of humour. Taking the title’s pun a step further, the photo on the sleeve has the recumbent 76-year-old posing in the identical froufrou outfit as the model on the cover of Roxy Music’s first album, complete with identical hair and make-up.