Richard Thompson interview: 'For Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, it isn’t really about the music – it’s about promoting the brand'

The former Fairport Convention singer sits down with Martin Chilton to discuss his discontent with present-day politics, his mixed feelings towards hip hop – and why his approach to songwriting has not changed

The legendary songwriter and guitarist celebrates his 70th birthday this year

(Rex)

It’s weird to be in a country where you walk down the streets and it seems the same as it was five years ago, but there is this strangeness and this potential for extremism,” says Richard Thompson. The English singer-songwriter, a sardonic observer of human behaviour who founded the folk-rock band Fairport Convention, recently moved from California to Montclair, New Jersey. For the wry Londoner, he must have found living in the land of Donald Trump eye-opening.

“Some of it is insane,” he continues. “I think extremist fringe in America are now daring to raise their heads. It’s weird in the UK as well. A different kind of weird, because the whole Brexit thing has been strange, and has also been driven by right-wing opinions. The world has flipped a bit and I am not sure how the cards are going to fall in the next few years.”

This summer, Thompson will be touring the UK and Ireland, playing some of his recent album 13 Rivers. Before that, he will be celebrating his 70th birthday. The word “celebrating” may be stretching it, though. “If it was up to me, I would really just crawl under a stone. There will be birthday show at London's Royal Albert Hall on 30 September, with special guests. It's a celebration which I will be reluctantly dragged to.”

Thompson remains “proud to be associated with Fairport Convention”, and will be playing songs from the folk-rock band’s seminal 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays during his summer tour, to mark 50 years since its release. But he is not keen to wallow in the past. “I don’t care about legacy and all that sort of stuff,” he insists. “I really try not to look backwards. I think I have done some good guitar solos and written some good songs but it is all about the next project, the next song, the next show, the next album. You focus on what moves you and what gets you emotionally. Some of the stuff from when I was growing up moves me, some of the music from the 1920s and my parents’ generation still excites me – and some brand new art forms do the same thing.”

Although he has a loyal, worldwide fan base, he is happy not to stray too near the spotlight of fame. “It’s not like I am Elvis,” he says with a laugh. “I get spotted from time to time. Sometimes people recognise me and say “hello”. I am glad I am not a star or anything, because it must be absolute hell when you can’t go to the supermarket or walk down the street. I like being fairly anonymous. Modern celebrity culture is just odd. You look at artists like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift and they really are brands. It isn’t really about the music; it’s about promoting the brand. I find it very hard to take that music seriously, because it is so calculated and so engineered to public acceptance. For me, it is hard to find the emotional core of the music, it just eludes me. It comes down to what you want. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be a brand and have your own clothing line? Live behind a gated wall? Have your whole life become a reality show? Or do you want a smaller audience and do something more interesting?”

Thompson recently toured with country musician Jason Isbell, a songwriter of the highest calibre. “Jason Isbell is an example of someone who is a fantastic artist and he is creating some furious music, but it is real,” he says. “He plays in front of an audience in a very real way. There are no dancers, there is no light show. There is him singing great songs and that is big enough. He is a really great songwriter and singer. I am always impressed when someone can be in the country-Americana area and come up with good, fresh ideas – ones that are not hackneyed.”

‘I try not to look backwards ... it is all about the next project, the next song, the next show, the next album’

Thompson has enjoyed lots of interesting collaborations down the years, with jazz great Danny Thompson, with his former wife Linda Thompson – and even with former folk musician Billy Connolly. “I shared a stage with Billy from time to time,” says Thompson. “I knew him from the early 1970s. He is still a good friend. I don’t see him that often, because he lives in strange places, but he is a wonderful guy, a great human being.”

One gap in musical partnerships is with Van Morrison, who also started out in the 1960s and lived in America for long spells. “I have never worked with Van Morrison,” says Thompson. “I am a huge admirer of Van. He is one of the great soul singers. I have done shows with him and opened for him but I have never played with him.” You can hear the cogs in Thompson’s mind turning as he adds slowly, “Playing with Van would be interesting…”

Thompson is happy that a lot of young listeners are going back to the 1950s and 1960s to seek out “such a rich era of music”. He has mixed feelings about rap and hip hop. “Listening to rap, I am quite discriminating,” Thompson replies. “There’s lots of it I don’t like, because I think it is derivative and it can be doggerel, basically. There is good stuff. Someone like Tupac is exceptional, very interesting. But a lot of rap doesn’t really excite me and I don’t particularly like music that is built on samples, music built on electronic sounds. I miss real drummers. I like to hear music that has been recorded in a room where you can hear the spill on all the mics, that kind of thing. Some modern rap, some hip-hop, some R&B is not that interesting sonically and not interesting in what is being said.”

He enjoyed producing 13 Rivers, especially the process of working up the songs in the studio to get definitive versions and then taking the album on the road, with looser versions that evolve during a tour. “I love playing live. It is always great to get feedback. It is not really until you play a song in front of an audience that you really know that you have communicated something.”

Thompson is an avid reader and has also been composing and recording the soundtrack for an HBO history documentary called The Cold Blue, which will air in June. The film, directed by Erik Nelson and featuring newly restored footage shot by Oscar-winning director William Wyler, is about the exploits of the American airforce during the Second World War.

“I do like military history. I wasn’t boned up on the US Eighth Air Force, but it is a fascinating, moving story, and that’s what attracted me to it,” explains Thompson. “There is footage shot by William Wyler, for a documentary he did on the Memphis Belle. He had about 22 hours of leftover footage and that is what this film is constructed from. A friend of mine is the producer and The Cold Blue was an enjoyable project. They found 80 survivors and they narrate the film, telling heartfelt stories about the sacrifice they and fallen comrades made to fight fascism. It is a terrific story.”

Nearing his eighth decade, Thompson keeps in shape to maintain his busy work schedule. “I still play tennis and go to the gym three times a week. Being on the road, you have to keep fit. If you let yourself atrophy sitting on planes and on a tour bus you start to feel out of condition very quickly. I try to keep everything functioning. In theory, I still play cricket, and am still on the team for the annual Cropredy match, although I haven’t played for a couple of years. I play tennis with friends. I wouldn’t say it is of a high standard but it is a lot of fun. My son Teddy thrashes me. He’s too good – and I paid for his lessons, which is really frustrating.”

He says that his approach to songwriting has not changed over the years, although he believes he has become more efficient at getting to the point where the “words flow”. “I am a bit more streamlined these days, in that I can get to a semi-conscious writing state more quickly,” Thompson says. “I don’t waste so much time trying to get to creativity, I can jump there quicker and therefore I can write more and perhaps better. The songs you write when you are 20 are different from the songs you write when you are 70, because your world view changes. Some things become less important and some things become more important. That is just life and inevitably gets reflected in what you write.”

He will be playing solo gigs at the Cambridge Folk Festival and FolkEast in August and making his usual appearance at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. Modern festivals are a world away from the ones he played as a 21-year-old. “The circumstances were really difficult at some,” he says. “There was the Krumlin Festival, in Barkisland Grounds in Halifax, in August 1970. It was in middle of the Yorkshire Moors. A terrible storm with gales came through, the rain was almost horizontal. The audience were being carted away in ambulances, suffering from exposure. I don’t think anybody got paid. The only highlight was the artists’ bar, where everybody got absolutely plastered. Fairport played a terrible, drunken set. The rain was literally coming in sideways and half the stage was missing because it had been blown away. That was a good one.”

Thompson, who has been teetotal since he converted to Sufi Islam at the age of 23, is relishing life in his seventies. As well as the tours, he says he is writing songs for two different projects. “One sounds like an acoustic album and one sounds like an electric album, so we’ll see which pile of songs I get finished first. But I think an acoustic album will probably be a nice thing to have up next.”

Although his music and lyrics have evolved in fascinating ways in the past five decades, one thing that hasn’t changed much is his fashion: black clothing and black beret. What’s the reason for the very European headgear? “Not having any hair left,” he says with a laugh. “I was playing a lot with Danny Thompson in the 1970s and he is also challenged in the hair department. I thought it was bizarre having two shiny heads out there on stage, so I thought ‘I am going to stick something on my head’. I had a beret handy and I just wore it. With a lack of imagination, I am still wearing it.”

Lack of imagination is not something you would ever ascribe to this droll, highly original songwriter, who remains one of the greatest guitarists in the world. And don’t tell Beyoncé, but a line of Richard Thompson berets might do rather well.