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.