For those who know his work, the reality of a Richard Thompson lyric is as close to the truth as it's possible to get. The 51-year-old British singer, songwriter and guitarist has, however, been shunted into a corner of the music industry that is forever marked "cult artist". In effect, this means selling out medium-sized venues, sales of hundreds of thousands for each record release and a living standard that, while not on the Madonna or Celine Dion level, isn't bad for a folk singer. As he scrapes his fingernails in mockPsycho fashion along the striped wallpaper in his backstage dressing room at Croydon's Fairfield Halls, Richard Thompson remarks that he has survived for over 33 years by being flexible.
"I play a folk club with a guitar if that's all there is for me," he says. "If there's more money, then I'd take a band on the road with me. The music industry expands and contracts and goes through cycles. You keep your head down and survive. I mostly avoid fashion because it's not that interesting. Whatever the definition of my musical style is, my approach is more as a folk musician or as a troubadour, or whatever you want to call it. In relation to my so-called commercial success, the records I sell make barely a blip. Most record labels really try to have diversity in their catalogue. They don't just want to have boy bands, the Shanias and Mariahs. They like to have a few of everything. They want to have the angst-ridden singer/songwriter like myself, the country act, the young 18-yearold whizzkid.
"The exercise for me is in finding my audience and they finding me. I try to insulate myself against the cycles of the music business, and because my audience is fairly loyal and steady, I don't notice that much change. I try to do my best as a musician, to be as honest as I can, to experiment and explore. I have a lot of fun exploring, and I hope the audience come with me. That's always been my way, from the very beginning."
Hailed as an influence by such eclectic rock artists as The Smiths and REM, and looked upon as a crucial father-figure by UK genre-crossing acts as diverse as Elvis Costello and Beth Orton, Richard Thompson first came to prominence as one of the founder members of Fairport Convention, the seminal UK folk rock act. Since his departure from that band in 1971, he forged a professional and romantic partnership with Linda Peters, recording a series of superb albums, notably I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974) and Hokey Pokey (1975) - the latter described as the closest thing the UK has come to approximating the panoramic rural sensibilities of The Band. Session work for the likes of Nick Drake, John Martyn and Fairport Convention's Sandy Denny ("don't knock session playing - it worked for Toto!") has been followed by a body of work that stands head and shoulders above the majority of what the UK singer/songwriter fraternity has to offer.
As he sits on a two-seater sofa, sipping from a cup of Earl Grey tea made for him by his impeccably polite tour manager, self-effacement never far from the surface, Thompson looks an unlikely candidate for hero-worship. Wearing a baseball cap with the words "ride the wild surf" on it, he alternates between furtive glances and sharply focused direct eye contact. He has a slight stammer and a fondness for weak puns. Halfway through the interview an assistant comes into the room with a cooling fan (there is no air conditioning in the building and the room is fast turning into a moderately-heated oven). "Ah," says Thompson, with a glint in his eye. "That'll be the only fan I'll see tonight, then."
Thompson grew up listening to and playing numerous music styles: jazz, classical, rock'n'roll. His father used to play the guitar ("not great, but he had good records - Django Reinhardt, Les Paul"). Thompson's sister, meanwhile, had the good rock'n'roll stuff: Elvis, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis. When he was 12 years of age, his sister started buying blues records - Lightning Hopkins, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - and the first few Bob Dylan albums. In the family there was a lot of Scottish music, but, he says, "one didn't pay attention to that, because it was kilty stuff, more the Foster & Allen, drawing room version of wild Celtic music."
Throughout his career, Thompson has straddled quite a number of diverse musical categories. He says he doesn't see any problem with this, as he's quite secure with the respective musical roots. "There was a point in Fairport Convention where we took a very conscious decision to play the music of the British Isles, that we'd make it contemporary and make that the style of the group. I stayed with that in terms of the root of the music. Once the root is strong and you've got an established style you can then bring in other influences; harmonic things and so on."
He sees a problem with transplanted roots: the notion that a musician from, say, Laois, would be intent on playing Mississippi blues. Arguing that the musician is probably never going to be as good as someone from the Mississippi Delta, he says, "If you can express something from your own culture, it's got to be that much stronger, more resonant, and something at which you can excel, instead of being a third-rate Muddy Waters."
While he has long since given up on mainstream commercial success (or, for that matter, the likes of Tina Turner or Rod Stewart covering one of his songs, thereby allowing him the luxury of a condo in Malibu), Thompson nevertheless self-deprecatingly basks in his reputation as one of the best songwriters of the past 30 years: "Sometimes I'm lucky". Yet there are, he says, quite a lot of songs he doesn't keep. Calling himself his "harshest first critic", over the years Thompson has not only developed an instinct for quality, but also trust for his instinct - something, he says, which is stronger than other people's opinions.
"The first line of defence against the bad stuff is yourself. Yet the bad stuff still comes out. Humans are emotional rather than analytical people, especially when dealing with things as elusive as lyrics and music. You think you've got a great song until a year goes by and you change your mind - a great song on an album suddenly turns out to be a filler. You might wonder how you let a bad song get out there, but it's simply a case of doing the best you can at the time of its release."
Many of his songs have been earmarked as classic examples of painfully honest and emotionally direct acoustic rock. The songs are as direct and honest as they can be, says Thompson: "You hold up a mirror and ask yourself, how honest are you? Are you as honest as Rembrandt when you paint that self-portrait? Are you as ruthless? If it's a good song, if people enjoy it, if they feel something from it - if it communicates - then it's usually a good song. There are no areas off limit - except stating the obvious."
Which is, according to the singer/songwriter, the type of blatant, cliched and simplistic aspects of love perpetrated by the likes of Celine Dion and her death-defying ilk. "I have never thought love was that simple," says Thompson quietly, his voice a tone or two higher than the soft whirr of the fan. "It's a fairly complicated issue and I have always wanted to do justice to it, to go a bit deeper. Often the most successful songs are the ones just bubbling under the surface of the audience's consciousness - the things you don't necessarily want to deal with or talk about every day.
"As a society we don't acknowledge issues such as pain and difficulty and loneliness every day. In the context of entertainment you can talk about these things. The intention is not to be cathartic - although that may happen - but to make music. The thing is to touch people. That's the big reward for me as an artist - to feel that connection. You can tell when an audience is moved by something. In America, where the audiences are over-demonstrative, they gasp or sigh. Okay, so they're over-acting, but I get the point. That's good. If they go quiet that's usually a good sign, too!"
Richard Thompson plays Gal- way's Black Box theatre on July 29th as part of the Galway Arts Festival. He also plays Dublin's Olympia Theatre on July 30th. His latest album is Mock Tudor (Capitol)
