ROCK’N’ROLL CONFIDENTIAL
The folk rocker nonpareil talks crime, booze and the bigger picture.
EARPHONES HALOING a head which, from his first photos as a founder member of British folk-rock titans Fairport Convention, seemed bor rowed from a mediaeval saint, Richard Thompson speaks to MOJO from his basement. It’s close to the infamous New Jersey Turnpike as celebrated in song by Chuck and Br uce and on screen in The Sopranos, which tickles the singer-songwriter/ guitar wizard enormously.
“When they filmed it, they used locations all over New Jersey except for the town of Bloomfield, and that’s because that’s where the Mafia actually live,” he chuckles. “It’s just two miles down the road from me; you go to these great mom and pop Italian restaurants and sitting at the bar are these really beefy guys. Oookaaaaay, haha!”
From your terrific new album Ship To Shore, The Fear Never Leaves is bleak even by the standards of asongbook suffused with dread. Do you, like your old friend Nick Drake, wrestle with the black dog?
I’m fairly optimistic but Iknow what darkness is. I wrote this song after watching adocumentary about the Falklands and the special units. These guys are tough but suffer from serious PTSD after a brief skirmish, so God knows what they suffer in Ukraine, what my parents suffered after World War Two, my grandfather after World War One.
I try to express what those people go through in order to understand the bigger picture – mental health, where we are in the modern world.
Your dad was a Scotland Yard detective who played in a police band. Did you also inherit a sense of our capacity for badness?
On the bookshelves at home were lots of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Border ballads and criminology. I read some of them so I’ve always been interested in police procedure. I’d be out with my father and he’d say, “Describe the guy who just walked past,” so the next time Iwas ready. Twenty years ago there was a breakin next door, and I could say exactly what the two guys looked like, their height, what they were wearing.
In 1988 you deplored The Pogues, in particular Shane MacGowan’s image of “fall-down drunk Irishman representing the new wave of Irish traditional music.” Have you a puritan streak that can’t appreciate the cavalier?
Iwas concerned with the image of Irish music and Ireland generally. People see a land of drinkers and Irish musicians as absolutely legless. We did the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road, back in the ’80s and thought it would be great to introduce some young punk-folk bands like The Pogues to an older audience. It was a disaster. Pogues fans came in large numbers and were really disruptive, abus
