Richard Thompson is past 60 years old, and he does not seem to slowing down. Promoting the release of his last album ‘Dream Attic’, a complete live album which contains all new songs, he was playing an acoustic and quite early show at Amoeba this last Sunday afternoon.
He is obviously some kind of legend, Britain’s best guitarist as they said when announcing him, and belongs to the pantheon of authentic songwriters who have managed to stay connected with an audience over all these years. Some rare species.
Although I don’t know him very well, he does not strike me as someone with cryptic lyrics or obscure texts, but rather someone who knows how to paint a vivid and realistic representation of life with sometimes direct attacks on social or political situations, in the true folk English tradition.
I said this because he started his set with ‘The Money Shuffle’, a commentary about the last wall-street melt down, with lyrics walking with a contained anger on the ironic edge and just plain disdain for all these wonderful financial people:
‘Come on and do the Money Shuffle/I’ve got you right there where I want you/Come on and do the Money Shuffle/Can’t find your money if you want to/Stock market going through the roof now/So rich I’ll never add it up now/I’ve got your savings here somewhere’.
There is something a little bit ancient, even celtic in the riffs of the guitar, and this was even more perceptible in the next song he played ‘Stumble On’, a peaceful and powerful ballad about reflection on love or may be the end of it, that people listened to in an almost religious state of mind.
He continued with the catchy ‘Big Sun Falling In The River’, another reflection on what it seems to a doomed relationship with some very annoying girl: ‘She’s always bugging me, hugging me/Faking me, shaking me/Haunting me, taunting me’, told you she seems a pain!
He introduced ‘Demons In Her Dancing Shoes’ as a recollection of the old London of the 60’s, adding, jokingly, it may be about princess Margaret, and the whole song suddenly sounded very British to me:
‘Well, she’s the kind of squeeze/That you can’t refuse/Bedroom eyes and demons/In her dancing shoes’
Actually Richard is kind of a joker, throwing humor between songs like a stand-up comedian, which makes it hard to take any of his songs very seriously, even though the lyrics content would tend to be just this, grave and reflective.
‘You’ll find me in the folklore dinosaur section’, he said when encouraging people to buy his album. ‘There’s something ordered about this that reminds me of a bingo hall’, he exclaimed at one point looking at the people parked in the store CDs and vinyl rows.
The set was very short, too short, but people laughed quite a lot.
And I thought he was still joking when he said with a smile on his face ‘That’s almost enough for a free show’… What? He had only sung four songs, it could not be the case!
He joked even more about what he could eventually cover, ‘Barry Manilow, no problem, Pink Floyd, I can do!’ but sang his last song, the pounding and slightly bluesy ‘Bad again’
Mr. Thompson it was kind of bad indeed to let us hungry for more, just when we started to enjoy ourselves the most, but I suppose I should not complain when you gave all this intense and energetic execution, and this witty songwriting. Definitively not slowing down.