Once Richard Thompson steps onto the stage at Zankel Hall, there’s no
telling what might happen from that point onward. Ever unpredictable,
the legendary British singer-songwriter-guitarist keeps things fresh by
surprising even himself. “I try to strike a balance between what I think
the audience would like to hear and what I would like to play,” he
says. “And amazingly, there is an overlap.”
Fortunately for this versatile artist, Thompson’s loyal followers are
unusually accepting and open-minded. Part of the reason Thompson can
get away with what he does is because he’s always been
something of a cult artist, albeit one with a rather sizable
following—even if he’s never sold mass quantities of his records.
“It’s given me a lot of freedom,” he says, “and less expectation than
you’d have with very successful recordings. I’ve built the audience
slowly over many years, and nearly all through live shows and word of
mouth, so they tend to be loyal. Of course, we’d all like to be more
popular!”
At any given performance, Thompson is likely to draw from his
extensive solo catalogue, which he’s been amassing for some four
decades. Or he might break out a 13th-century folk song or an ABBA
cover. Or songs from his recently finished oratorio, Cabaret of
Souls, which he describes as “a sequence of songs and instrumental
pieces, performed with five singers and a string orchestra, and set in
the Underworld.”
He also might—or might not—dig in to the songs he penned for the
groundbreaking folk-rock group Fairport Convention between 1967 and
1971. “Fairport was a band that sold about 13 records,” Thompson says,
exaggerating a wee bit, “but its reputation spread a long way, for
reasons I don’t understand. A lot of people have heard the name, but not
the music. It was a fantastic band, very original and influential, and
I’m never ashamed to be mentioned in that context.”
Thompson’s Zankel Hall appearance comes on the heels of his most
recent album, Dream Attic, released last summer on the Shout!
Factory label. Inverting the usual recording process, Thompson recorded
demos of his new material, then rehearsed the musicians and cut the
album in concert. “Often the feedback I get from the audience is that
they prefer live versions of songs to studio versions,” he says, “so I
was interested to see what would happen if we cut out the studio
process. It means more work for the musicians—instead of being able to
focus on one song at a time, the band had to learn 75 minutes of music
and play it flawlessly.”
And they did. Reviewing the album, PopMatters said that the
quality was so high that the album “could easily be someone else’s
greatest hits,” while All Music Guide wrote, “Thompson’s vocals
and guitar work are superb throughout, with his soloing near the top of
his game, and his band is tight and intuitive.”
All of which is to say that whatever he pulls out of his gigantic bag
of songs, it’s pretty much a given that Richard Thompson’s performance
this evening will be uniformly excellent and utterly unique.