Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s car
By Alexis Petridis
The photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut, although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller’s smouldering look to camera, Thompson offers a faintly disturbing grimace. She looks a bit nuts. “Yes,” she nods. “The photographer kept saying: ‘Do that thing that she does’ and I couldn’t. I’d had some banana cake, and I think I was having some kind of sugar rush. I think it’s hilarious. The original cover is so daft, I just thought I’d make it worse.”
It goes without saying that this all runs very contrary to the image of Thompson forged in the 1970s, when she made a string of incredible albums with her then-husband, Richard Thompson. There was something rather stern and austere about the Thompsons even before they gave away all their money and possessions and retreated to a Sufi commune. Their exquisite music was vastly potentiated by Thompson’s voice, a hugely affecting cocktail of fragility and toughness. On their most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, she sang like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway. Their releases were no one’s idea of a barrel of laughs.
Even their love songs were oddly sombre, while the sheer bleakness of Withered and Died or The End of the Rainbow can take your breath away. The most famous footage of them comes from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975, performing the impossibly beautiful A Heart Needs a Home. They sing with eyes closed and somehow look as if they’re freezing to death, him in a ratty woolly hat and her in a headscarf and polo neck: no fans of glittery postmodern glam they. “No, I didn’t listen to Roxy Music at the time,” Thompson confirms. “I was probably listening to Bulgarian folk music. We took ourselves very seriously. We’d read Blavatsky and Gurdjieff – all those terrible old charlatans, but we believed the whole thing. Oh my God, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead … it was Pseuds Corner all the way. And Richard wrote the songs and he had quite a bleak outlook, you know. He’s not a barrel of laughs today.” She chuckles. “I’m kidding. We took things a bit seriously and now I can’t take any of this seriously.”
Indeed, if the image on the cover of Proxy Music is a little hard to square with the Linda Thompson of old, so is the 76-year-old currently plying me with tea, cakes, pastries and sandwiches – she really has laid on quite a spread – in her west London apartment. She is tiny, clad in a Louis Vuitton jumper (“a fake, from China, 15 bucks”) and very funny. Her voice is thin and husky and her grandson Zack is on hand in case it gives out altogether. She rarely gives interviews as a result of the spasmodic dysphonia that has plagued her since the early 70s, gradually robbing her of her singing voice. “I was 25,” she says. “I’d go for my mouth and nothing would come out. It started when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, and I just put it down to the pregnancy, but it wasn’t a happy time in my life. I think my then-husband wasn’t that keen on having a baby, blah blah blah, it was a difficult time, which we got through, but I think it impacted on me a bit.”
Dysphonia can be a trauma response, she explains, but “once that trauma’s happened you can’t mediate it away. At first it was more in my speech, then my singing. Onstage, people would go: ‘You’re off-mic!’, but I wasn’t – nothing was coming out. It’s like a switch just goes off in your brain: you know you’re doing it, but you can’t stop. If I’m alone, I can speak OK, but if anybody’s in the room, I can’t. And it’s a progressive condition, there’s no cure. I could lose my voice entirely, but the progression is very slow and” – she laughs again – “I doubt I’ll live that long anyway.”
In the past, Botox injections in Thompson’s vocal cords have enabled her to sing long enough to complete albums – her last was 2013’s Won’t Be Long Now – and, very occasionally, perform live. On Proxy Music, however, Thompson commissioned other artists to work on her new songs: the Proclaimers, the Unthanks, Rufus Wainwright. John Grant finds himself singing a track called John Grant about Thompson’s love of his work. It works wonderfully, heavily underlining Thompson’s skill as a sharp, witty and occasionally heartbreaking lyricist, as on I Used to Be So Pretty, which takes a very dim view indeed of ageing. “Oh, it’s just scary, being this age – it’s the age you die, when all your friends are dying,” she nods. “I mean, you don’t give a fuck what people think about you any more, and that’s good, but the wisdom-of-age thing is fallacious. You just get stupider, you can’t remember anybody’s name. So that’s a complete crock.”
Meanwhile, Those Damn Roches ruminates on musical families, including the one of which Thompson is the matriarch: Proxy Music features contributions from her ex-husband, her son, daughter, son-in-law and grandson, but the song avers that the Thompsons “can’t get along unless they’re apart”.
“That’s what families are like, isn’t it?” she says. “We don’t spend hours and hours together at Christmas, we have a meal and everyone goes: ‘Bye!’ Nobody likes to hang around. I toured with the family once,” she shudders. “Never again. Too fraught. You can’t tell your kids and your grandkids they’re playing the wrong chord. But there are funny times as well, and I do like what they do.
“Plus,” she adds, “they’re free.”