Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975

Richard Thompson on the flowering of Fairport Convention

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

Richard Thompson book

“There was a musical explosion – you could play almost anything and be accepted”

The current issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here, with free P&P for the UK – features an exclusive extract from Richard Thompson’s forthcoming memoir Beeswing in which he recalls how, in 1967, the newly formed Fairport Convention took their first tentative steps into London’s burgeoning underground scene. In addition, Thompson talks candidly to Uncut about the process of writing the book and how he feels now looking back at those naive and exciting early days…

RICHARD THOMPSON: “The ’60 and ’70s continue to be musically of great interest to people. Although we thought it was very ordinary at the time, it does turn out to have been an exceptional period – a great musical crossroads. I thought I’d just chuck down some reminiscences before I popped my clogs, as they say. Not that I intend to any time soon!

“You think that you remember everything, but when you actually sit down and start to write, stuff comes out that you’d forgotten. I think it helped me, actually. There was a kind of catharsis in writing about that time, which was part joyous – as it is when you’re a teenager – and part painful. You forget about the painful stuff, but that mix is in there, and it was quite extraordinary to go back and really think about it.

“I suppose I was fortunate in the people I gravitated towards. Meeting Simon [Nicol] and Ashley [Hutchings], who became the core of Fairport, was a wonderful thing, and a crucial thing. Very early on, about 1967, I could tell we had some kind of musical future, even if it only lasted a year. That was good enough for me, and I could put off thinking about getting a real job until I was at least 22. Then when Sandy [Denny] joined, that made us a really good band – we felt this was actually something quite transcendental. All we wanted to do was play music to an audience, and it just happened to be that time when the floodgates were opened and so many bands could pass through. We felt that circumstances dragged us along. There was a musical explosion in London – so many different styles were emerging that you could play almost anything and be accepted. You could play folk-rock and be accepted by an audience that also listened to The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and Pink Floyd. It was all just part of the hippie culture, this underground musical revolution.

“The scene was a real community – people would help each other out, lend each other gear, tow each other back down the M1. Now people say, ‘My God, you played with Hendrix?’ But at the time it didn’t seem that exceptional because he would jam with a lot of people. Musicians weren’t really celebrities back in those days; that came later.

“I had to be cajoled into starting the book, but once I started I really enjoyed the writing process. You can write a song in 10 minutes – I’m not saying it’s always that quick, but it’s a much swifter and less detailed process. You can be a lot more abstract and poetic in songwriting, you don’t have to fill in the gaps. Writing prose, you have to be more linear. It takes structure, more discipline. I tried to write for at least a few hours a day. And as much as I enjoyed the writing process, I hated the editorial process – handing it over to other people. Having not been edited ever as a songwriter, that came as a bit of a shock. Suddenly you have to justify yourself to other people!

“There are a couple of songs I’ve written since finishing the book that seem to be reflective of that time period. I often refer back to earlier times because songwriting is almost a decoding of your own life. So I’ve done a couple of things that have been, I suppose, brought up by the process. I don’t know about laid to rest, that sounds a bit too final – or pretentious! But it’s helped me to put some events from the ’60s and ’70s into perspective.”

You can read the full extract from Richard Thompson’s Beeswing in the May 2021 issue of Uncut, out now with The Velvet Underground on the cover!

Source: Richard Thompson on the flowering of Fairport Convention | UNCUT

Richard Thompson on the Fairport Convention years: ‘I probably never went on stage sober’

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

The ex-Fairport Convention songwriter on booze, Irish folk and ‘volatile’ Sandy Denny

Veteran folk-rock guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson is the quintessential journeyman musician. Now 72, his achievements can be best summed up not by Grammy nominations or OBEs (though he has both), but his setlist, a back catalogue that includes classics such as Persuasion, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Wall of Death, Shoot Out the Lights and – perhaps his finest composition – Beeswing, a masterclass in melody, narrative and guitar artistry.

Beeswing is also the title of Thompson’s new memoir, subtitled Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75, which is published this month.

“I think it reflected some of what I felt about the ’60s and ’70s,” Thompson says on a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles. “There was a rejection of the traditional paths of life: you have to go to university; you have to get a job in a bank; you have to become this straight citizen. There were kids dropping out, saying, ‘I’m not gonna do that, I’m gonna go live in a commune in Denmark.’ You saw people like Vashti Bunyan, who’d get her gypsy caravan and her horses and go off wandering. The chapter called Beeswing is a summation of that spirit, and it seemed a logical title for the whole book.”

The song itself bears such a feeling of authenticity, of lived experience, this reader felt sure it must have had autobiographical origins. Not so, says the author.

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‘I’m Afraid She Didn’t Make It’: Richard Thompson Recounts Harrowing Accident in New Memoir

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British singer-songwriter Richard Thompson recounts the 1969 van accident that almost destroyed Fairport Convention in excerpt from new book

By David Browne

In the spring of 1969, Fairport Convention had every reason to be hopeful. Dubbed the British version of Jefferson Airplane, Fairport boasted a lineup that included a brilliant, husky-voiced lead singer, Sandy Denny, and a guitarist, Richard Thompson, who was beginning to blossom into one of his country’s finest and often gloomiest songwriters. The band, which also included guitarist Simon Nichol, drummer Martin Lamble and bassist Ashley Hutchings, had just completed its third album, Unhalfbricking; among its tracks were Denny’s soon-to-be standard “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”, several Bob Dylan covers from his Basement Tapes era, and Thompson originals like “Autopsy” and “Genesis Hall.” The music fused rock and roll with age-old British traditional music, sounding like nothing that had come before. 

All that forward momentum halted, as least temporarily, one night in northern England. The band had just performed a show and were on their way home, with Thompson’s American girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn joining them. In this excerpt from Thompson’s Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 (Algonquin Books, April 6th), Thompson writes about that harrowing ride — the worst nightmare for any touring band, including Fairport Convention in 1969.

Life seemed good, and things were going well with Fairport. Our new album was due out soon, and the word was that we would tour America for the first time later that year. On May 11th, Jeannie came with the band to one of our regular haunts, Mothers in Birmingham, a club we played every couple of months. We shared the bill that night with Eclection, another folk rock band with a female singer, Kerrilee Male. Sandy’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas was also in Eclection. Like Kerry, he had come to the UK from Australia. He stood out in a crowd, being tall with a mass of red hair, and he was a fine singer of traditional British and Australian songs. The show went well, with both bands getting a good reception. Sandy rode back to London with Trevor, while the rest of us piled into the Transit van and headed south down the A6 to the M1. Continue reading →

Richard Thompson: ‘I had to put the pen down, take a deep breath, have a little cry’

~ Michael Stevenson ~ Leave a comment

The folk-rock pioneer has finally written his memoir, covering a life-changing crash and his fiery romance with Linda Thompson

Richard and Linda Thompson

It’s nearly 55 years since Richard Thompson began his career in music. A pioneer of folk-rock, hugely influential singer-songwriter and one of Britain’s most astonishing guitarists, he was only a month out of his teens on the morning of 12 May 1969 when all promise was nearly stopped short. His band, Fairport Convention, had been signed on the spot in 1967 when producer Joe Boyd saw his talent with a guitar at 17, and their mission to reconnect British rock with the older, beautiful songs of their home country was well under way.

He’d already jammed with Jimi Hendrix and supported Pink Floyd; now Thompson’s band had recently finished their third album, Unhalfbricking, with new singer Sandy Denny. A work full of ambitious originals and covers that still regularly appears in best British album polls, it got to No 12 in the charts then; decades later, it became a touchstone for the Green Man festival-endorsed folk-rock revival of the 2000s when everyone who liked Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham raved about it.

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