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Wednesday 24 February 2010

It's Thommo Time!!

The Southbank Centre announced yesterday that Richard Thompson is going to curate this year's Meltdown in June. If you don't know it, Meltdown is a two week festival of music and other arts selected by a guest curator, usually a musician. Previous curators include the likes of Robert Wyatt, Scott Walker and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Mostly it is a series of stand-alone concerts but usually the curator makes a guest appearance at a few of them. Richard Thompson is a particular favourite of mine, so I am really looking forward to seeing who will be in the line-up and who he will be playing with.

I first saw Richard in concert (with Linda) at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1980, so this Summer I will clock up thirty years of Thompson watching. There have been many memorable moments during that time - a storming rendition of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" backed by Fairport Convention and the Roy Wood Big Band at Cropredy in 1995 springs immediately to mind - and a fair amount of guitar heroics. But many of the best gigs were those that featured just him and his acoustic guitar.

He is a great songwriter and a great guitarist, so obviously you are getting three cover versions, two of them "live and unplugged". All three are Scottish traditional songs, and he does a great job on them.

"Bogie's Bonnie Belle (live)" - Richard Thompson

"Bonnie St. Johnstone (live)" - Richard Thompson

"Mingulay Boat Song" - Richard Thompson

And especially for my mate Buxton, here he is doing "1952 Vincent Black Lightning":

2 comments:

  1. Always great to see Richard Thompson songs - thanks for posting! He's coming to Atlanta with Loudon Wainwright in April. I was a Fairport fan from their first Sandy Denny album, and saw him and Linda at a Folk Festival in Spring 1972, so I appreciate your sense of history.

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  2. Curt - thanks for your kind words. I am obviously a bit of an amateur Thompson fan compared to you. The double bill with Loudon Wainwright should be a great show. Ernie

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