Richard Thompson |
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Mon. May 12.2003 12:44 PM EDT |
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Richard Thompson: Smile Smile SmileMaster songwriter assures us he's not a gloomy Gus, distills a millennium's-worth of music, and explains why weather is responsible for the growth of the British Empire. by C. Bottomley & Jim Macnie |
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Richard Thompson (Linda Zacks) |
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Over the last few years, the veteran songwriter/guitarist Richard Thompson has created a show called "1000 Years of Popular Music." He packs up his own considerable catalog of bittersweet pop songs - heartily hailed by critics for two decades now -
His effort to save music’s forgotten bounty is a telling act of generosity from one of rock’s own overlooked treasures. Thompson is frank about his lack of hits, but the former sparkplug of the British folk rock ensemble Fairport Convention is consistently tipped as one of the greats. John Mellencamp has noted “Thompson could say more in one line than I could in a whole song,” and Rolling Stone dubbed 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights - his last album with partner Linda Thompson - one of the 10 best albums of the 1980s. Over the years he’s zeroed in on matters of the heart. "I Misunderstood," "A Heart Needs a Home," "Why Must I Plead," "Keep Your Distance," and "Dimming of the Day" can all shake you to your bones - surely one of the reasons discerning artists from Bonnie Raitt to Dinosaur Jr. have covered RT tunes. His new album The Old Kit Bag has its share of seedy characters (“I’ll Tag Along,” “Pearly Jim”) and ominous love (“Words Unspoken, Sight Unseen”), but its true intent is found in the sincerity of the lyrics of “Happy Days and Auld Lang Syne”: “Music is indeed what gets us through tough times.” See three VH1 exclusive live performances, "She Said It Was Destiny", "Gethesemene" and "Word Unspoken/Sight Unseen". With chugging pop like “She Said It Was Destiny” and a barebones trio leaving plenty of space for his lyrical guitar soloing, the Kit Bag is a fine introduction to a man who has accepted that he’s more likely to remain a troubadour than sit next to the Christinas and Justins of this world. He spoke and joked to VH1 about his reputation as a musical gloomy Gus, why London's still in his soul even though he keeps an L. A. zip code, and where he sees himself a millennium from now. VH1: The phrase "the old kit bag" is all about rolling up your troubles, but Rolling Stone insists on describing you as a “purveyor of despair.” Richard Thompson: Yeah, but these people are not my friends. [Laughs] What have they ever done for me? If the person who wrote that was a fan, I’m going to go around his house and break his legs, because that’s terrible. It’s that journalistic thing where one journalist says something and then a lot of lazy journalists follow that lead and say the same thing. Maybe they don’t listen to the records! No, they wouldn’t do that! Would they? VH1: I’ve listened to it and there’s a lot of humor, like when you take a Taliban’s eye-view of the world on “Outside of the Inside.” What’s the last song that made you laugh out loud? RT: I heard a very funny song from Harry Shearer called “Hanging Chad,” which was very amusing. A lot of Loudon Wainwright songs make me laugh out loud. He’s one of the funniest - and best - songwriters left on the planet. VH1: “I’ll Tag Along” is about a wallflower in mod London. Are you starting to look back in nostalgia at your own ‘60s youth? RT: I think I’ve always looked back. You think “Why did this happen?” and you wonder about things you could’ve done differently. You also think, “Where did I come from?” Then you start thinking about your parents and their world, and maybe you want to write a song from that era. Then you start thinking of your grandparents and their world, and maybe you want to write a song about that. You start to decode your own past. VH1: The Kinks’ Ray Davies says he uses people as templates, and then down the line starts seeing himself in what he’s written. RT: As the writer, you’re always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you’re writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you’ve also nailed yourself. VH1: Were you a fan of The Kinks, right from the start? RT: They were kind of a local band for us. Fairport Convention was based in Muswell Hill. The Kinks played in the local youth club in the early days. Ray Davies was one of the first to celebrate British things in popular music. British popular music was still a fairly pale imitation of American musical forms [back then]. It wasn’t until The Kinks and The Beatles wrote songs like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields” that you got more of a British identity in the music. VH1: You’re so identified with London and Englishness, but you live part of the time in Los Angeles. Is that strictly Randy Newman’s territory? RT: I’ll give Randy a break. He deserves it. He can have Sunset Boulevard. I think a landscape is something you carry along with you no matter where you are. Robert Louis Stevenson traveled the world, but he wrote about Edinburgh in a very specific way. James Joyce lived in Paris, but he wrote very sharp stuff about Dublin. You don’t have to be there. [Writing] tends to be sharper the further away you go. [Watch Clip] VH1: What’s the appeal of L.A. for you? RT: They speak English - that’s very useful. Where I live has a good climate, and I like being outdoors. The British have been trying for generations to escape the weather. That’s the reason we had an empire, to live someplace else where there’s less rain. Plus, the west side of Los Angeles has something like 50,000 Brits. There are pubs and tearooms everywhere. It’s very Anglo. VH1: Has your work on “1000 Years of Popular Song” filtered into The Old Kit Bag at all? RT: I’ve always enjoyed medieval music. It has interesting structures that are very close to popular music. It has very immediate, melodic appeal. In that show, we tried some very ambitious stuff. There’s opera in there, which I’m not equipped to sing, but I do it anyway. It’s part of the fun, if I can’t quite do it. There’s jazz and songs from Shakespeare as well. VH1: How do you decide what makes it in the show and what doesn't? RT: The songs are supposed to be the stars. You look back and you think, “Here’s a great song or musical style that got left high and dry.” It’s about going back and finding those forgotten classics and reviving them. Some of them are really good; you play them for the audience and the audience just loves them. VH1: On stage you have a running joke about your lack of success, but do you perceive your own music as “popular”? RT: I do, but it also involves a folk troubadour process. Playing live is probably more important to my audience and my work than the records are. Records are more markers and indicators of what’s available live rather than the other way around. In some ways, that’s why I’m still here, because it hasn’t been because of record sales. VH1: Was there a time with Fairport Convention, where you thought you could enter the mainstream? RT: We wanted to be popular in the chart sense, especially when we started to play rocked-up traditional music. We thought we could give back to the British people their own culture in a form that they could really dance to and appreciate. We would’ve liked the music to have been more popular, not for ourselves, but for the music to be better known. There were all these great murder ballads with people getting chopped up; it was fantastic stuff that was very visual and very immediate. It was very “today” somehow, but it never quite happened. At the end of the day we were a cult band, which was fine. [Watch Clip] VH1: A thousand years from now, when Richard Thompson XXV is doing his "millennium of popular music" show, what songs of yours do you think he might consider? RT: I like him already, that kid, whoever he is! I don’t know if I’d be included. It’s very subjective when you play a thousand years of music in an hour and a half. I suppose songwriters hope their songs live on, and if you get one, you’re lucky. Three’s good. Cole Porter’s got 20, which is phenomenal. But then again, he wrote 800 songs. Six hundred of them were really bad, but we remember the 200 really great ones. [Watch Clip] |
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