Richard Thompson, Royal Albert Hall, review: Fairport guitarist turns 75 with heartfelt family affair
It was a family affair at British singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s 75th birthday concert, as his current wife, one notable ex-wife, and a host of children, grandchildren and unrelated star friends flooded the stage for an increasingly unpredictable three-hour bonanza.
Midway through, Kami, the daughter of Fairport Convention’s founding guitarist, arrived to sing I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, a rip-roaring classic from his mid-1970s period alongside his first wife, Linda, who sidled on in the background to sing harmony with several other daughters and grandkids. Before Linda left the stage, the divorced couple embraced. “We don’t often get you two onstage, not at the same time,” quipped Kami. “You’re telling me, kid!” Thompson Sr cheerily replied.
The evening started in the same low-key, unflashy mood which has seen this fabulously gifted songsmith/guitarist remain a cult hero throughout his half-century-plus career.
With a band including Fairport drummer Dave Mattacks and third wife Zara Phillips on backing vocals, he opened with What’s Left to Lose, a downbeat selection from his 19th solo album, the recent Ship to Shore, which characteristically broods on a long-since broken relationship, and one wondered if this was to be a show haunted by the ghosts of the estranged and the fallen.
The first set concluded, indeed, with John the Gun, a coruscating warmonger’s portrait penned by Fairport’s Sandy Denny, icon of British folk-rock voicing, who died at just 31, and Thompson spoke movingly about how “it does my heart good to keep singing her songs”.
After a brief interval, however, the good times rolled during a sprightly tilt at Fats Waller’s swing-era Honeysuckle Rose, with Thompson displaying a youngster’s six-string dexterity. After UK folkie Ralph McTell took the mic for a couple, Thompson forgot the words to Waltzing’s for Dreamers – but what’s a septuagenarian’s birthday bash without a little senior moment?
Then that three-generation stab at Bright Lights, with Kami razor-sharp in her mother’s shoes, took proceedings into top gear. Suddenly, for reasons not clarified, Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford were up there doing their post-punk hit, Take Me I’m Yours. “Shall we do Up the Wotsit?” wondered their host, clearly enjoying their knockabout company, and as grandstanding hits Up the Junction and Tempted ensued, you perhaps understood why Thompson’s own music, inherently more sober and subtle, has often gone under the radar.
That feeling intensified when New Zealand’s Crowded House, with whom he toured during their 1980s ascent, arrived to deliver three unplugged stadium anthems, with a thatch-haired Neil Finn tirelessly working the crowd to join in on world-beater Weather With You.
Thereafter, a crowded stage: four electric guitarists, including Soft Machine’s John Etheridge and The Pretenders’ James Walbourne (Kami’s husband), blazed off solos with Thompson on the Zydeco-tinged Tear-Stained Letter, and, for the finale, there were some 15 performers baying Meet on the Ledge – the first song Thompson ever wrote as Fairport’s 19-year-old guitar-slinger. It cluelessly, Thompson has often admitted, muses on mortality.
On this illustrious occasion, it was a poignant yet wholly uplifting elegy for absent friends and relatives, and a tribute to the lasting power of song, from one of the classic-rock era’s less heralded masters.
