“They Weren’t Legends Yet”: Richard Thompson on The Who, Nick Drake and the Bridge to British Folk Traditions
photo credit: David Kapstein
“I’ve had a lot of interest from people about this time period, which does seem to be a pivotal moment in popular music,” Richard Thompson says of the era that prompted his new memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975. “It was a very ripe time, a real musical crossroads with lots of different influences coming into music. It was the beginnings of Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix, when you could still rub shoulders with those people backstage. They weren’t stars yet. They weren’t legends yet. That came later.”
The book shares some of his encounters with a number of rock pioneers, including the time he opened for Floyd, then looked on as Syd Barrett took too much acid, prompting David Gilmour—who was not yet in the band—to perform Barrett’s guitar parts from behind the stage. Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967- 1975 also relates Thompson’s perspective as a British folk-rock innovator in his own right, first with Fairport Convention and later with his then-wife Linda Thompson.
Early in the book, you describe a quandary you faced as a teenager seeing live music at the Marquee Club, when watching the second set meant you would miss the bus and you’d have to walk 10 miles home. What were some of the shows that prompted you to remain at the club?
It was intense to hear The Who in this club that only held 300- 400 people. They were doing all their arty stuff and you could experience the sheer anarchy and shock of seeing them smashing their instruments— not just pretending to. They were actually destroying a guitar per gig, an amp per gig. And seeing Keith Moon’s utter disregard for his drums—pretty much destroying them every night and having to rebuild them again—was incredibly exciting. But it all got very expensive so they dialed that down a bit after a while.
I also missed the bus and walked the long walk home to see an early version of the Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and the original Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood. They were all pretty incredible, so it was absolutely worth it.
In the period just after you left Fairport—but prior to your first solo album—you worked on a variety of studio sessions for other artists. Is there a record that fell through the cracks that you believe is ready to be rediscovered?
The best record I worked on during that time period was the Watersons album, Bright Phoebus, which is a tremendous album with these very dark, strange songs. The Watersons were a family of traditional singers, and this was the first time that they’d really done a record of their own songs that they’d written. I think that’s a tremendously powerful record that, for various reasons, wasn’t widely distributed at the time. Then, there was a whole argument over who actually owns tapes. So it took until just a few years ago for that record to have a proper release, 50 years later. The protagonists are already dead but people may finally realize what a great record that was. People are also finally turning on to Nick Drake and finding Sandy Denny after the same number of years.
The Nick Drake record that many people first turn to these days is Pink Moon, but you write that you feel it lacks the balance between dark and light that you found so appealing in his work.
I don’t think it shows the full artistry of Nick. To me, Nick sounds broken and a bit mentally ill. But I suppose it’s just who you prefer—the older heroin addict Billie Holiday or the younger, slightly purer[1]sounding Billie Holiday? It’s all a matter of how lived-in you like your music and your artists. To me, Nick’s kind of crying out for help on that record so it’s an uncomfortable record to listen to. I greatly prefer the first two records.
Is there a record of yours from this era that you felt was overlooked for one reason or another?
I think maybe the Bright Lights record [1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight with Linda Thompson]. It took two years to get it released because Island didn’t like it. Then, it got reviewed in a rather non-committal way. People didn’t really get it at the time, but I think people understand it much better now. Sometimes it takes a few decades for people to appreciate something that you did. I’m very proud of Bright Lights and I think it’s a good record.
You note that a lot of the material on Fairport’s Liege and Lief record was based on traditional music that students were required to learn in North London. Were you concerned that it might not connect or that it would seem quaint and outdated during a moment when psychedelic-blues rock was in fashion?
I don’t think we were concerned about connecting to the audience because we thought of it as our mission. We saw it as something that we had to do regardless of whether it was popular or not. We saw the absolute necessity of reviving these British folk traditions because we could see this gap between popular music and traditional music and how popular music had become increasingly imported. It wasn’t very homegrown at all. The whole style was really American.
Traditional music was something that was sung in the folk clubs to some extent but the original traditional singers—who learned it when it was passed down through their families—were just about gone. There weren’t many of them left and the folk revivalists were frantically trying to record these people before they went away.
So Fairport saw this gulf between popular and traditional and thought, “We have to construct a bridge and bring traditional music into the world of electric instruments and drums and basses.” We were looking to create a kind of hybrid music that should have been there in the first place. We were creating music that should have already existed. But it had been allowed to die away because it drifted so far from the popular realm.
At the end of the book, you talk about the ubiquity of music these days and your concern is not necessarily that it is being devalued, but that it is becoming intrusive.
Yes, my concern is that if people choose to listen to their Spotify playlist all day, then they won’t hear the music all around them—the music of nature, the music of the birds singing, the wind blowing, all that kind of stuff. I’m also concerned that people will stop dreaming. It was so important when I was a kid to be bored and to look out the window and dream, especially on a bus or a train or something—just to gaze out the window, get lost and go to dreamland. There are just too many things that pull you back from that in order to entertain you these days. People do not spend enough time just doing nothing. I think it’s very important to do nothing.
