ND: You’ve been on small, medium-sized and very large labels along the way. As places to make music, which do you prefer?
RT: I’m very happy where I am now — which is with a small label, Cooking Vinyl, which sees and releases more records that we make as viable. It’s the ideal-sized label for us, a label that might employ only six people — but they’re six people who will be working their socks off for you.
ND: Front Parlour Ballads is actually the first album’s worth of new songs that you’ve ever brought out in basically solo acoustic style. Why not before now?
RT: It was an oversight. Really! We’ve made live acoustic shows available over the years, and that filled the gap to some extent, though those were not exclusively new material.
ND: Were these songs written recently, or saved up and brought forward because they fit this approach?
RT: They’re from within the last couple of years, but written specifically for this project. I write in piles — a pile of songs for the next band album, a pile for that acoustic project, a pile of weird songs in case I do a weird project for a limited audience. At some point, when a pile gets to twelve or fifteen songs, then I’ll say it’s time to do something about it.
ND: In calling these songs “front parlour ballads,” what are you suggesting that they having in common?
RT: They’re small, intimate songs, nothing bombastic or grandiose — and in some cases, quite short. They’re almost one-on-one songs, as if you were singing to just one other person, face to face, in a small room. You know, at least 60 percent of the houses in Britain were built in the Victorian era, with a front parlour for visitors and a back parlour for family.
ND: Some of the songs tie the words closely to very un-folk, intricate note runs, in a way that seems almost classical or out of the “art song” mode. “How Does Your Garden Grow?” and “Precious One” could sound good with a string quartet or a chorale.
RT: Classical music is also something I’ve listened to, and I’ve been particularly interested, in the last couple of years, in the way early 20th-century composers like Debussy and Ravel or a Kurt Weill tackled the idea of a song — the structure, the way the music relates to the words. I wanted to see if I could build a bridge between the styles I play, based on traditional music, and that particular classical area.
ND: The results sound like they’re fun to sing!
RT: Well, those songs are fun to sing; yes. But then, they had all better be. Because if it’s not fun, I say — don’t sing it!
ND senior editor Barry Mazor first became aware of Richard Thompson’s music playing the early Fairport Convention LPs as they were released in the late ’60s on his Washington, D.C., college radio show “Heartbreak Hotel” — a show otherwise dedicated to country music old and new, rockabilly, and that new-fangled American country rock.
pull quotes [note: I’ll use some of these, instead of the section heds of our previous format, but how many will depend on the vagaries of space and design]:
If we did a true portrayal of “A Thousand Years Of Popular Music”, it would be heavy on Julie Andrews numbers sung by the Archies.
I am a longtime fan of people like Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart — stuff that I both grew up with and which was part of the general mix. And obviously, I listened to some Paul McCartney then, and he knows that music very well. It’s just in there, part of the family music diet on the old gramophone.
The thing is not to be satisfied with the style of the folksinger sort of singer-songwriter; to come out and push the limits of what you can do to accompany yourself as a singer, on the guitar.
I decided to be loud onstage, tell jokes between numbers, so if the songs were kind of quiet and introverted, there’d be some contrast. I could put the audience a little off-balance; they wouldn’t know what to expect. There’s probably more mileage in being the silent tortured genius, though; maybe I should have stuck with that.
If anything, I’ve worked at trying to be an individual, and having true roots in my music, and a root that’s true to the country I come from, and the heritage that I have. So I play a little different.
We were a bunch of suburban, white intellectual schoolboys, and we used to think about what it was we were playing. At some point we said, “We’re never going to play the blues as well as Muddy Waters, we’ll never play country as well as Hank Williams, and we’re never going to play soul as well as Otis Redding.”
It’s a shame, really, that the classic lineup of Fairport with Sandy Denny never took the stage here [in the States]. I do think that if we’d toured the U.S. with that band, there would have been some interesting results.
