Richard Thompson’s memoir is worth reading for the ‘Fairport years’ alone

One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I found myself arguing with Linda Thompson about the merits of Nick Drake’s music compared with her own and her ex-husband Richard Thompson’s. She suggested Nick’s had a quality that was missing in the work she and Richard created, which explained its posthumous popularity. I maintained that Drake’s music appealed largely to coeds and other hopeless romantics, lacking the lyrical depth and musical breadth of the six albums the star-crossed couple made between 1973 and 1981, from the timeless I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight to the equally acclaimed Shoot Out the Lights. The release by Universal last September of a complete(ish) eight-CD box set of the works of Richard and Linda Thompson (Hard Luck Stories) only served to confirm me in my view.

And now we have an account of these tumultuous times from Henry the Human Fly’s own mouth, something no one ever expected. When Nick Hornby asked Richard if he’d cooperate with a biopic charting the end of his marriage to Linda, he replied: ‘I don’t want to be seen as the Ike Turner of folk rock, thanks.’

Thompson himself has been among the fiercest critics of those early post-Fairport albums. Even here he damns them with the faintest of praise. Indeed, it’s a struggle at times to fathom why he has written this book. I know why I wrote my 2019 account of the same years (What We Did Instead of Holidays) — because he and his folk-rock cohorts produced some of the greatest English music of the rock era —whereas Thompson’s appraisal of his own 1975 platter, the masterful Hokey Pokey, is begrudging at best: ‘The end result was a record with two personalities… It was hard to invest emotionally in some songs that had been written just a few months earlier.’