Covering nearly 40 years of radio sessions and live broadcasts for the BBC, it’s clear that Richard Thompson has never been short of a champion or two in Broadcasting House. Add the sizeable Fairport Convention sessions Thompson took part in before the boundaries of this set commence and that’s a significant avenue of an artists’ career covered by the BBC. This is entirely correct, he is after all the UKs most credible answer to Bob Dylan or Neil Young and yet notoriously undervalued by a wider audience on native soil. Fortunately, amongst the hardcore clued up, an enviable spread of top name DJs have maintained their faith. Wisely so for Thompsons’ solo interpreting of any work, whether his own or otherwise, is always so much more than a lack-lustre strum-a-long masquerading as rootsy. His guitar work is so far ahead of the acoustic pack that only the long time initiated would believe it to be the playing of no more than one pair of hands. Richard Thompsons’ one-man sessions are master classes of song craft, guitar playing, feel, soul, restraint and ability. When captured live in concert with a band he’ll regularly ignite that elusive nirvana rock flame sought nightly by every master of the arena; Costello, Morrison, Wilco...you name them, Thompson can source that moment they strive for at will, simply by excelling at what he does.
Playing live on air, in recent years it’s been Radio 2 and 6Music mostly inviting Richard in and there’s some essential 2008 Bob Harris session tracks included here promoting the ‘1000 Years Of Popular Music’ project. Tom Robinson continued to spread the word when long time fan Andy Kershaw was forced off the airwaves a few years back. Kershaw had treated these sessions as an annual cornerstone from his shows’ Radio 1 days but nothing changed when Radio 3 picked up on the specialist World Music potpourri, the Thompson live work kept returning. Clearly there’s more Kershaw stuff in the archives than could fit this set but the mid-eighties period focused on here is illuminating, breathing fresh life into material not always best captured on the studio albums. How many national DJs would give an artist a nine-song solo platform as Kershaw did in 1985? Naturally Thompson repays in full, not just airing new LP tracks but also trying out a then-unreleased ‘Turning Of The Tide’ before dipping into the Richard & Linda back catalogue three times. Then right back at the start of the Richard & Linda duo years there’s John Peel, maintaining a loyalty long since established with Fairport Convention. It might appear from this release that Peels’ love of Thompson waned later on but that’s simply not the case. There were further Peel Sessions not on this set and even in 2004 he played the re-issue of ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’ on Radio 1 and urged “anyone with an interest in music” to buy it. Some of those 1973 tracks sound like they’re sourced direct from a cassette recording of the actual radio broadcast. That’s not such a bad thing, Peel always liked a bit of distortion or surface noise and besides it gives the tracks an authentic ‘on air’ sort of vibe.
Richard Thompsons’ work has already been heavily anthologised and the archive actively plundered. Career retrospectives were generously doused with live tracks and rarities while the 5 disc box set ‘Life & Music Of Richard Thompson’ consisted entirely of previously unavailable recordings. Despite this, ‘Live At The BBC’ is a welcome addition to the catalogue, uncovering a multitude of lost gems from his post-Fairport years. Amongst these, ‘A Heart Needs A Home’ shines anew; punctuated with some warm-soul piano chords that wrap themselves exquisitely around Linda Thompson’s aching vocal. Richard Thompson writing about love as Linda sang it was as fine a musical marriage as Simon & Garfunkel. Captured in concert at The Paris Theatre on the wireless in 1982, the time of their actual separation, it’s not so much the tension between the couple that you feel (although Linda does seem to enunciate “my dreams have withered and died” with a touch more force) but the push and pull of Richards’ rock and folk sensibilities. He’s clearly scratching some burning desire to crank it up and slam his foot on the odd gizmo during obscure instrumental ‘New Fangled Flogging Reel / Kerry Reel’ and, from the same gig, ‘A Man In Need’ is loose as a goose! You may miss the electric rumble on ‘Shoot Out The Lights’ in session for Kershaw in 1985, but Richard was surely having fun picking and bending those solo acoustic notes in the lingering instrumental section. Any gripes are minor and the domain of the Thompson aficionado; perhaps some may have hoped that the wealth of eighties sessions could turn up a solo take on ‘Al Bowly’s In Heaven’ and there’s the odd debatable omission; for instance a Peel set around 1988 that included ‘The Killerman Gold Posse’ from the French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson album. There’s little sense in nit-picking a collection like this though, it’s compiled with care and sequenced to great effect. ‘Dimming Of The Day’ as the penultimate disc one track suitably announces the closing of the Richard & Linda years and the final track of all, a 2009 version of Richard’s first Fairport classic ‘Meet On The Ledge’, neatly completes the circle on a remarkable alternative career overview. Please use the link below to listen to the whole 3-disc set.
Essex Boy Rating: 9/10
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