Is Richard Thompson Britain’s Bob Dylan?

There are artists you go to see expecting to be challenged, surprised, even let down. And there are artists you can rely on to deliver more or less the same experience every time. Each approach has its merits. Richard Thompson is a ‘death and taxes’ kind of guy. The fact that his excellence feels inevitable can make it seem less excellent somehow, which doesn’t entirely seem fair.

A founding member of folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, Thompson has been described as the British Bob Dylan. This makes sense in some ways. Both men mine the centuries-deep tradition of their respective countries to create music that feels ancient and new; both carry a certain amount of generational clout, though Thompson’s cachet is certainly more cult-level than Dylan’s; and both know how to craft a couplet which shades into poetry.

In other ways the comparison makes no sense at all. For one, Thompson is a consummately gifted guitar player, and Dylan isn’t, while songs such as ‘Woods of Darney’ and ‘Words Unspoken, Sight Unseen’ – two highlights of this show – are musically far more knotty and complex than anything Dylan has ever written.

Thompson is also, as we have established, a less mercurial performer than Dylan. Every couple of years or so he’s rolled around with a new album and some live dates, either playing alone or with a small band, and is reliably superb. In the five years since his last record, 13 Rivers, little has changed. We even know exactly how he’s going to look before he steps into view. In trademark black beret and black denim, neatly trimmed beard turned white, Thompson’s visual mood-board is Papa Smurf leading a 1970s military coup.

His playing in Edinburgh was sublime, ranging from impossibly dexterous folk picking to abstract Arabic and African scales, Celtic drones to roughhouse rockabilly. (A sidenote for those guitarists who line up on stage a phalanx of instruments: Thompson used only one, an acoustic which between songs he bent in and out of standard tuning.) His voice, at one time the weak link in his armoury, has grown strong and supple.

The song choices divided between march-time zingers such as ‘Walking the Long Miles Home’ and ‘I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight’ and a series of bleakly beautiful gut-punches. He performed a bawdy modern sea shanty, prefacing it with the news that he has a new niche playing cruises. ‘Valerie’ was broad comedy set to chugging rock and roll. He explained that the ‘really stupid’ novelty rocker ‘My Daddy is a Mummy’ was written while his youngest son was attending a hippy elementary school in California, where parents were expected to pitch in with teaching duties. The song was intended to introduce seven-year-olds to the ways of ancient Egypt.

I could live without these lurches into quasi-novelty material. At the same venue a few days earlier, Texan troubadour Steve Earle played a similarly fascinating career-spanning set. His most powerful songs – ‘Someday’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘My Old Friend the Blues’, ‘South Nashville Blues’ – shared space with a Pogues cover, a tribute to his musician son, Justin, who died in 2020, and nods to mentors Jerry Jeff Walker and Townes Van Zandt. ‘There are only two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah,’ said Earle. ‘And this ain’t zip-a-dee-doo-dah.’

Thompson, conversely, doesn’t mind a bit of the old zip-a-dee-doo-dah. His slapstick diversions are part of the deal, and they do at least serve to increase the impact of his greatest songs, which drink deeply of the dark stuff. ‘Walking on a Wire’ was rough and ragged, all attack. ‘Down Where the Drunkards Roll’ and ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’, two bittersweet romances of lives lived on the margins, were captivating. Best of all was a show-stopping rendering of one of his most perfect and tender songs, ‘Beeswing’.

Halfway through, Thompson brought on his partner, the singer-songwriter Zara Phillips, to add vocal accompaniment to several songs. It would be unfair to compare their blend with Thompson’s outstanding work with his first wife, Linda Thompson – few singing couples have ever reached such heights. On ‘Wall of Death’ and ‘Keep Your Distance’ the additional vocals were pleasant if a little perfunctory. ‘Words Unspoken, Sight Unseen’ offered a greater sense of the potential possibilities of the pairing.

Thompson played three songs from a forthcoming new album, due later this year. ‘Tinker’s Rhapsody’ had a twinkling bucolic charm, though ‘Trust’ was less persuasive on first hearing. Yet we know it will be a good record, because reliable Rich doesn’t really make bad ones.