Mirror Blue.
(Apologies for having to call in sick last week)
All Richard Thompson fans start their tribute reviews with a variation of this line: "I can't understand why this guy isn't more popular." The praises have been sung: great songwriter, great singer and great guitar player, insanely prolific and always of high quality. He's been at work since the late 60s and so there must be an album for every mood (I don't even own a tenth of his output, shame on me). If you're new to his work, drop everything and buy Action Packed: Best of the Capitol Years, as fine an introduction as you'll get.
So why isn't he more popular? I'll attempt an answer.
1. Bad timing. Richard started at a time when great guitar players were making their reputations, and he was on the wrong side of the fence. Folk just doesn't have that big an audience compared to rock, and so he always got the level of notice accorded to folkies - in the grand scheme of things, not a lot.
2. Richard's always had a black sense of humour, cropping up at odd moments, frequently blunt, off-colour and off-putting. If you don't have a cynical bone in your body, you probably won't like this guy.
3. Emotional cynicism. I got my first Thompson CD while witnessing a marriage break apart and ever since I've considered him the bard of divorce. His steady theme is love and he examines it from every conceivable angle, most of them pessimistic. When love is real (which isn't often), it costs. When love is not real (more often), it still costs. And you thought Leonard Cohen was depressing....
4. There was some damn fine music being released in 1994, debuts from Katell Keineg and Jeff Buckley among other stuff. Mirror Blue should have been released a year earlier, but there were reshuffles at Capitol and releasing and promoting Richard Thompson became a backburner priority. When the album came out even the critics didn't like it, claiming Mitchell Froom's production got in the way of the songs. I don't see it myself. But what does annoy me about Mirror Blue (that title's a quote from Tennyson, by the way) is Richard's cagey distrust of his audience. He can't trust them to handle a good, heartbreaking ballad, so he throws joke songs out to ruin the feeling. This happens twice. His earlier release, Rumour and Sigh, has the same problem.
Things start out in restrained manner; For the Sake of Mary is driven as much by percussion as guitar and takes a rather unexpected tack - there aren't that many devotional love songs in the Thompson canon, but this is one of them, focused on the nitty-gritty changes that have to be made to look after someone else, and the emotional trip-ups that can get in the way of the best intentions. "For the sake of Mary/I keep the flame/I don't want to be the villain again/she's had her bad times and it's shook her about/I don't want to take the easy way out." There's some great guitar here, as a sample of what's to come.
That's a distorted washboard you hear at the opening of I Can't Wake Up to Save My Life, a delightful rocker that best shows off his weird sense of humour. It's about a man who's done (unspecified) things that "make [his] dreams go bad/like Borstal boys coming home to Dad..." The imagery is choice; funny and dramatic, whilst the ridiculous situation heightens the inherent truth of the song.
MGB-GT tackles the car song with easygoing charm and some fabulous middle eastern flourishes. The happiest fellow you'll meet on this record spends all his time tinkering with his automobile. The man responsible for all the percussion is called Pete Thomas and he's brilliant - the messy drumroll tossed in at the end fits the song perfectly. Delightful stuff.
The Way That It Shows features the stormiest guitar playing herein as Richard contemplates the moment when an adulterous woman finally fives the game away. The passion-wracked guitar coda stands in direct contrast to the clinically observant verses.
Easy There, Steady Now is toward the top of my list standouts here. That's Danny Thompson's double-bass backing the manic, flurried guitar; the verses are hazy, lost in the visions of wandering at night in an empty town. There's more to it than just booze and a femme fatale...the music is too silvery bright, the narrative too impressionistic, the narrator too unconcerned....
King of Bohemia is Richard and an acoustic guitar. Lyrically he contemplates the case of a "refugee from the Seraphim," a girl who's been broken by the world. "Let me rock you in my arms/ I'll hold you safe and small," is how the song starts, and he sings it so gently you're liable to pause and draw breath, but in the end there's no conclusive evidence that he can help this wounded creature. The song is so spare that it sits uncomfortably in the midst of Mirror Blue.
Shane and Dixie is a rock and roll pastiche about a pair of bank robbers. It's a rather crass and obvious story as Shane decides to secure their fame by a suicide pact - the only hitch is that Dixie thinks he's nuts. It's funny, it's in bad taste, it's a throwaway and there is no reason it has to follow King of Bohemia in the running order. For shame.
Mingus Eyes is something of a mantra, slow, soothing and unsettling. There's a darkness at the heart of this song - it's thin on content but thick on atmosphere.
I Ride in Your Slipstream shares the pace of Easy There and does away with verse-chorus procedures. It's somehow even more disconcerting, as this narrator is a married man saying some rather odd, inscrutable things....
All the stops are pulled out for Beeswing - a delicate, expertly written ballad featuring a gorgeous melody, fiddle, flute, concertina, Northumbrian pipes, mandolin and the acoustic guitar. It's a tale of lost love, tackling the irrevocable conflict between love and freedom, and justly considered one of his best songs. Richard lets the poet out for the descriptions. "Brown hair zig-zagged around her face/ a look of half-surprise/like a fox caught in the headlight/there was animal in her eyes."
And then he does it again! Fast Food is a blunt satire directed against a target that's never deserved it more: "Water down the ketchup, easier to pour on/pictures on the register in case you're a moron/.../sugar, grease, fats and starches/fine when you dine at the golden arches." It's actually funnier to read than listen to, but there's some cheeky strands of folk music threading through it. The question is why did it have to follow Beeswing?
Mascara Tears is an attempt at heavy metal, angst-ridden and out of place. Yet there's a certain fascination in it just because Richard doesn't usually indulge in those sort of emotions, and also since it's about a self-destructive couple savaging each other...
After that burns itself out there's the beautifully theatrical coda: Taking My Business Elsewhere. A soft, echoing, darkly amusing song. There's something of the lullaby in its melody. You know the scene: the lovelorn sap bores the waiter with his woes after his girl fails to show. And yet it manages to captivate once more. It's the icing on the cake.
Stats: of the 13 tracks, only three could count as love songs, and only one had genuinely happy people as subjects. That's about the average ratio. Thompson's World is broadly pessimistic, featuring a cast of cruel and adulterous women, with men as losers, nerds and borderline nutcases. Every now and then comes a tender portrait of a damaged woman, or decent men surface to alleviate the gloom - these characters shine the brighter in their surroundings. All of it is oddly true to life.
Musically, this guy is a treat. Richard Thompson never gets old, he's always creative and expressive, finding new stories to tell, new angles to take. For some reason most of his catalogue is out of print. Did you know his debut album is reputedly the worst selling record Warner Bros. ever released? So if you've never heard him before, check him out. I most highly recommend it.
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