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

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

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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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Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 , by Richard Thompson

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British folk-rock guitar virtuoso recalls his early years in a new memoir.

BY DAVID LUHRSSEN

I sold guitar strings to Richard Thompson. The 6-string virtuoso busted some during sound check and my concert promoter friend rushed him to the music store where I worked. Thompson was unassuming, friendly, happy to be helped out of a last-minute jam. The show was only an hour or two away.

The person I met that night is evident throughout his memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975. Thompson was at the younger end of the generation of British musicians who found their way in the postwar rubble of the empire, inspired in large part by the intriguing sounds emanating from the states. But only in part. In the tentative advent of his first band, Fairport Convention, Thompson played songs by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but was also aware of the British folk tradition at this doorstep.

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