RICHARD THOMPSON | LIVE REVIEW
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Tue 15 Sept
With his black beret and grey beard, as Richard Thompson launches into another guitar solo it’s as though fellow 66-year-old Jeremy Corbyn has paused from delivering one of his rousing talks about grain production in western Siberia to entertain the apparatchiks with a dose of folk-rock’n’roll. “Good evening Cardiff! This one’s called Joyful Are The Tractor Operators in Kaliningrad!”
In the late 1960s, Thompson did something remarkable. Playing with Fairport Convention, and barely out of his teens, he invented a new way of playing the electric guitar – in place of the blues clichés of his contemporaries were the arcing modal motifs and bagpipe-like drones of British folk music. And as the title of his most recent, 40th album, Still – recorded with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy – alludes, he’s pretty much been doing that ever since.
After an acoustic opening track – an unapologetically after-the-fact tribute to the Occupy movement – sees him duetting with his daughter and exchanging solos with her husband, he’s joined by a drummer and a bassist for the trio that plays the bulk of the set. Their first song, All Buttoned-Up, sets the tone for the rest of the evening: dubious gender politics (he’s narked that his girlfriend isn’t putting out) and scintillating guitar playing.
The comparisons that spring most readily to mind are with the power trios of the 60s: bands like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, where sparse arrangements gave free reign to a virtuoso lead-guitarist whose songs were primarily a springboard for extended guitar soloing. Whereas with Hendrix drama came from the feeling of a man teetering on the brink of chaos, Thompson exudes a sort of steely, resolute competence. In its own way this is an awesome spectacle, but it’s hard not to shrug the idea that if he hadn’t been a revolutionary guitar prodigy he could have pursued another baby-boomer career and headed up an IT company or similar.
His final song is a second encore, She Never Could Resist A Winding-Road (Thompson goes for the sort of conservative lyrics that mean that his protagonists are invariably following winding-roads to the crossroads, where they either play a woman like a guitar or a guitar like a woman, depending on their degree of heartbreak). The party faithful are reluctant to let him leave, more than happy that he’s Richard Thompson, Still.
words ROBIN WILKINSON photos GARETH GRIFFITHS