RICHARD THOMPSON
Still On The Ledge
Reassuringly, RICHARD THOMPSON is showing no signs of slowing down. With a brilliant new album almost upon us, he reveals all about the magic of Big Pink, adventures in the Sahara, imaginary conversations with Sandy Denny… and how he feels about his approaching 75th birthday. “I’ve still got the same mindset as I always had,” he tells Tom Pinnock. “I’m always trying to write a good song or play a good solo. That hasn’t changed since I was 18.”
INCONSPICUOUS in a black leather coat and cap, Richard Thompson remains undisturbed as he windowshops on London’s Denmark Street. For one of Britain’s most revered guitarists and songwriters, though, this particular road holds temptations and regrets at every turn.
“Roger McGuinn left his Rickenbacker behind in the UK, because the neck was broken,” he says, eyeing a 12-string in one shop window. “Somebody fixed it and Ibought it. I’m divorced from it now, but it was good while it lasted. Now I’ve got aTelecaster 12-string, which is great –Jeff Tweedy has three!”
Further along the street, past adisplay fortuitously presenting two models from his past –aGibson ES-175 and avintage sunburst Stratocaster –he pauses to peer into the industrial interior of achic steak restaurant.
Thompson used to come here in the ’60s, back when this was La Giaconda coffee bar and he was just 12 or 13 years old. “You used to see all kinds of people in there,” he recalls. “The Shadows, the Small Faces, anybody. My friends and I used to come down Saturday morning, ogle the guitars and have acup of tea.”
Only afew years later, Thompson and his pals formed Fairport Convention, and soon went to pioneer an electrifying strand of British folk. By 1971, he’d left the band to go solo and, barring adecade-long partnership with his first wife Linda, that’s where he’s been ever since. While consistency is Thompson’s forte, his last few albums have been some of his strongest: 2013’s Electric and 2015’s Still were excellent, but 2018’s 13 Rivers and his upcoming new album, Ship To Shore, are even better.
“As abatsman I’d like to not be the guy who’s out for aduck or scores a hundred,” he says. “I’d like to be the guy who scores 33 every time, just reliable. It could be afantastic, elegant, inspirational, artistic 33…”
Guitar man: Richard Thompson, October 2023
Photo by DAVID K APTEIN
He turns 75 in April, but to many Thompson remains the gangly teenager of Fairport fame, a prodigy whose first song was, quite bafflingly, the immortal “Meet On The Ledge”. For his part, he seems happy to be forever associated with the group he left over 50 years ago: next year he’ll quite literally be unable to escape his past when he co-headlines aweek-long Adriatic cruise with the current lineup of Fairport [see panel].
Strolling down Charing Cross Road, we stop by Watkins of Cecil Court, long-time purveyors of arcane and antiquarian books. It was here that Thompson started the spiritual journey that led him to embrace the mystical form of Islam known as Sufism. “I was working my way through the bookshelf from Afor anthroposophy and Bfor Blavatsky, all the way to Zfor zen,” he says inside the hushed shop, placing abook of English folktales back on the shelf. “But Istopped at the Sufis. I thought they were my sort of thing, a philosophical, spiritual path –they seemed to be people who had the knowledge, now. As Iformed that thought they arrived on my doorstep, there was ameeting afew hundred yards from my house in Belsize Park. I’ve been there ever since.”