While Rafferty was shopping the tapes to every major label in London without success, Richard did a short solo tour of America, where he met Nancy Covey, the booking agent for McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. Meanwhile, Joe Boyd was launching his new label, Hannibal Records, and invited Richard & Linda to be his first act. He offered to re-record the songs from the Rafferty sessions in quick, audio-verite versions.
The Boyd sessions were released in 1982 as Shoot Out The Lights, almost universally hailed as the peak of the duo’s career. As plans were gearing up for their first-ever American tour, Richard broke the news to Linda that he had fallen in love with Nancy.
“It was incredibly dense of me that I didn’t get the gist of those songs,” Linda now says. “I thought they were good songs, but I didn’t think about the subtext. Maybe I subliminally I knew what was going on, but I didn’t think about it. I was seven months pregnant, so my mind and heart were in my womb.”
Linda gave birth to Kamila, but the couple had separated. “My manager said, ‘You can’t do this tour.’ I said, ‘I’m going to fucking do this tour.’ My doctor said, ‘The only way you can do this tour is with these anti-depressants, but you can only take three a day and you can’t drink.’ So I took six a day and washed them down with vodka.
“I was very mad; I had just been dumped with three little kids. I got drunk and ran off with people. One of the joys of madness is that lack of inhibition. It felt great, because the ten years I spent with Richard I had felt very inhibited. I had been this little Muslim wife for so long that I just let it rip. The manager at one hotel in New Jersey told me, ‘We had the Sex Pistols here, and they didn’t do half the terrible things you did.’
“And yet the music was great, even though I was kicking Richard between songs. I was singing as well as I ever have in my life. All my problems with dysphonia disappeared, maybe because of the old theory that when someone drops an anvil on your toe, you forget your little finger is hurting. When the tour was over, I left Richard behind with his then-girlfriend, threw the anti-depressants away and said, ‘Well, I have to make a life now.'”
In 1985, Richard married Nancy and Linda married Steve Kenis, a London-based American agent for the William Morris Agency who handled actors such as Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. In the meantime, she contemplated how she might continue her music career now that she had lost her songwriter. She found a new partner in Betsy Cook, an American-born keyboardist who was married to Hugh Murphy, Rafferty’s co-producer.
“She was the kind of woman Richard didn’t like because she was forthright and opinionated, so I didn’t like her either at first,” Linda says. “But when Richard and I split up, I realized Betsy was exactly the kind of woman I wanted to be. I’d written the words out to a few songs and showed them to Betsy, and she said she really liked them. When someone says something like that, it encourages you.”
Linda’s debut solo album, 1985’s One Clear Moment, featured six songs co-written by the two women, one by Linda alone, two by Betsy alone, and two covers. Released by Warner Bros., it had a bouncy, poppy sound built on layered synthesizers that today sound very mid-’80s.
Nonetheless, the album had a handful of terrific songs. The opening track, “Can’t Stop The Girl” (which Reba McEntire sang at the CMA Awards that year), was an infectious pop anthem worthy of Cyndi Lauper or Annie Lennox. “Telling Me Lies”, with its seductive ballad melody and scathing lyrics about an unfaithful husband, is the disc’s best-known track, thanks to its appearance on the first Trio album by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris. The final track, “Only A Boy”, recorded with just voice and piano, is a trad-sounding ballad that, not surprisingly, yielded Linda’s best vocal.
“That album was overproduced,” Linda acknowledges. “I wasn’t used to being in the studio alone; Warner Bros. wanted me to go more in a pop direction, and I gave in to that. The vocals weren’t bad, because I wasn’t having many problems then, but I wasn’t being true to myself. Betsy has more of a pop sensibility than I do; I love her dearly, but we have different musical tastes. She just wrote something for Cher, whereas if left to my own devices, I’ll do something like ‘Nine Stone Rig’ or ‘On The Banks Of The Clyde’.”
Released at the same time as Across A Crowded Room, Richard’s third post-divorce album, One Clear Moment held its own in the inevitable contrast-and-compare reviews. But neither record sold very well, and after Linda’s aborted try at a country album, she retired from the music business. And that seemed to be that.
Ed Haber, a New York disc jockey and a longtime fan, featured Linda prominently when he assembled Hannibal’s 1993 box set, Watching The Dark: The History Of Richard Thompson. Haber included not only a generous sampling of the duo’s six albums, but also three unreleased tracks from the Rafferty sessions and one unreleased live performance.
Haber followed that up with Hannibal’s 1996 compilation, Dreams Fly Away: A History Of Linda Thompson. In addition to seven tracks from the duo’s official albums and two tracks from One Clear Moment, the set included eleven unreleased or rare tracks. That was followed by the 2001 U.K. anthology Give Me A Sad Song on Fledgling Records, which collected seventeen more rarities from Linda’s recording history (including a cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Abandoned”).
