Richard Thompson Hippies, Thugs and Heroes
There’s something about Richard Thompson that reminds me of LeBron James. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Both have been so good for so long that we’ve almost stopped noticing just how good they remain. Every new season brings another round of stories about LeBron’s remarkable longevity, as though the real achievement is that he’s still on the court rather than what he’s doing there.
So, too, Richard Thompson.
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is Thompson’s 20th solo studio album. Twenty studio albums, and not a dud among them. And that doesn’t count his groundbreaking work with Fairport Convention, his extraordinary recordings with Linda Thompson, or a collection of live albums that may be even better than his studio work.
Sometimes, longevity becomes its own kind of distraction. We risk celebrating the fact that Thompson is still making records when we ought to be celebrating the records he’s making.
And Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is worth celebrating.
It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Shoot Out the Lights, Rumor and Sigh, or Mock Tudor. But it sits at the very top of Thompson’s second tier, which is still a pretty extraordinary place to be.
The dozen songs here explore familiar Thompson territory: love, betrayal, human vanity, and bad decisions. They’re filled with people who have fallen on hard times, and others who deserve whatever hard times are coming their way. Some are funny, some heartbreaking, and a few manage to be both.
Take “Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking,” with its wonderfully disreputable characters stumbling through life. Near the end, Thompson offers a portrait of a man who remains rather pleased with himself:
And you smile at the mirror
Just like you always do
Give a wink, tilt the head
To that saucy old you
Four lines, and we know the guy. Or perhaps Thompson is just looking in the mirror himself.
For a curmudgeon, Thompson certainly has a rich sense of humor.
His amused benevolence comes through especially clearly in his live performances, where his dry, self-deprecating between-song banter can be every bit as entertaining as the music. He’ll break your heart with a song and have you laughing a minute later. For all the darkness in his music, Thompson seems like someone you’d very much enjoy raising a pint with.
You hear that same humor in “Everybody’s Stealing,” in which Thompson catalogs the many people trying to separate him from his money, including but not limited to burglars, landlords, tax collectors, and even the police. Finally, he identifies the one creature he can trust:
My dog’s the only one I can trust – or is he?
It’s a perfectly delivered punch line from a songwriter who has never confused taking his music seriously with taking himself too seriously.
Thompson breaks your heart just as easily as he makes you laugh.
In the quietly devastating “Make Believe You Don’t Know Me,” a run-in with a former lover brings back all the pain the narrator thought he’d left behind.
I thought I’d learned to lose the pain
Seeing you again I’ve found it
Tell me what you want me to do
Bury it deep, or dance around it?
There’s a novel in those four lines. Neither burying the pain nor dancing around it offers much prospect of relief.
Then there’s “The Soul in Me,” which might be the saddest song Thompson has written since “Shoot Out the Lights.”
There’s nothing clever about the heartbreak here, no protective layer of irony. Abandoned for another man, the devastated narrator withdraws from love entirely, retreating to a lonely cottage with a good lock on the door. It’s a simple, almost old-fashioned lament, and all the more powerful for it.
Thompson’s guitar playing remains a marvel, but increasingly it’s his singing that draws me in, particularly on the quieter songs. His voice was never conventionally beautiful, but it has acquired a richness and depth that suit his songwriting perfectly. He sounds like someone who has lived through the heartbreak and disappointment he sings about.
We tend to talk about what singers lose as they age. Thompson is a reminder of what they can gain.
“Stringer” is an old-fashioned folk saga, the sort of tale that might have been sung in pubs for centuries. Its central character is a murderer, thief, and con man whose exploits have made him something of a folk hero. The poor shelter him and celebrate his adventures, but Thompson makes clear that Stringer is no Robin Hood. He’s a thoroughly selfish bastard, and an entertaining one at that.
Thompson tells the story with the economy and relish of a traditional balladeer. He isn’t a musical tourist, borrowing different styles for an album or two. From traditional ballads to folk rock, these are forms he has spent a lifetime inhabiting. They’re his music, not borrowed costumes.
Thompson co-produced the album with veteran engineer James Frazee, who has previously worked with Patti Smith, Ian Hunter, and Thompson’s former wife Linda and son Teddy. The core band includes longtime collaborators Taras Prodaniuk on bass and Michael Jerome on drums, along with David Mansfield on guitar and fiddle and Thompson’s wife, Zara Phillips, on harmony vocals.
Thompson arrived with unusually detailed demos, having worked out the arrangements at home, even buying himself a drum kit in the process. The recordings themselves were largely made live, often in just a few takes. You can hear both the preparation and the spontaneity. The band sounds thoroughly engaged without ever sounding rehearsed.
Nobody sounds quite like Thompson on guitar, whether he’s working through a delicate acoustic passage or unleashing an electric solo that seems to combine centuries of British folk music with something considerably more dangerous.
At 77, Thompson still has characters to introduce us to, stories worth telling, and the musical imagination to bring them to life.
Which brings us back to LeBron.
There comes a point in a great artist’s career when consistency becomes so familiar that we mistake it for predictability. Another season, another excellent performance. Another Richard Thompson album, another dozen beautifully crafted songs. We nod appreciatively and move on, forgetting how rare such sustained excellence really is.
And Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is excellent indeed.
Twenty studio albums in, Thompson is still writing songs that can break your heart, make you laugh, and leave you marveling at his musicianship.
That’s worth raising a pint to.
Find more details here on his website: https://www.richardthompson-music.com
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Show Review: Richard Thompson at Ram’s Head on Stage
Mark Pelavin, a failed retiree, is a writer, consultant and music critic in St. Michaels, MD. His newsletter, A Feather in the Wind, is at https://markpelavin.substack.com/.