Richard Thompson (musician)

His father had seen Django Reinhardt play in Glasgow in the 1930s and played guitar himself.

He was later described by his son as "a bad amateur player ... with three Chords, though, unfortunately, not C, F and G."

All these musical genres were to colour Thompson's playing in the years to come.

American producer Joe Boyd said:

"He can imitate almost any style, and often does, but is instantly identifiable. In his playing you can hear the evocation of the Scottish piper's drone and the melody of the chanter as well as echoes of Barney Kessel's and James Burton's guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis's piano. But no blues clichés."

At the age of 18 Thompson co-founded folk rock group Fairport Convention.

Largely on the strength of Thompson's playing, Boyd took them under his wing and signed them to his Witchseason production and management company.

Boyd said:

"And there was this group of very nice Muswell Hill grammar school boys and a girl playing American music. Leonard Cohen songs, and Richard Fariña songs, and Bob Dylan songs, all being done in a kind of West-Coasty rock style. And then came the guitar solo, and Richard just played the most amazing solo. He played a solo which quotes from Django, from Charlie Christian, you know, an incredibly sophisticated little solo. And that really amazed me, the breadth of his sophistication... and so, you know, at the end of the gig I was in the dressing room saying 'would you guys like to make a record?'"

Shortly thereafter Thompson, already acquiring a reputation as an outstanding guitar player, started writing songs seriously.

This seems to have been out of necessity as Fairport Convention was at first essentially a cover band.

Richard Thompson (born 3 April 1949) is an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

"Listening to Buddy Holly in 1956 was the point at which I wanted to pick up a guitar, although I didn't actually manage to do that until 1960 ... I played Shadows songs in school bands until I started hanging around with the guys that became Fairport Convention, and we would play Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña ... the American singer-songwriters. We would go to Dylan's publisher and ask for songs that hadn't been recorded. We were interested in lyrics, and we were pretty idealistic."

Like so many musicians of his generation, Thompson was exposed to and embraced rock and roll music at an early age, and he was also exposed to his father's jazz and traditional Scottish music record collection.

Thompson first gained prominence in the late 1960s as the lead guitarist and songwriter for the folk rock group Fairport Convention, which he had co-founded in 1967.

"I remember saying to Ashley [ Hutchings, bassist ] after a gig, that I was kind of embarrassed about doing the material we were doing, because it seemed that we should have outgrown doing covers – even though it was only 1967 – it somehow wasn't good enough and other bands were writing their own stuff and we should too. I remember being angry and saying to Ashley this isn't good enough, we've got to get some original material... and stuff started to trickle through."

By early 1969, when Fairport's second album What We Did on Our Holidays was recorded and released, Thompson was starting to emerge as a songwriter of distinction.

As Fairport's lineup and their sound evolved, Thompson continued to grow in stature as a player and as a songwriter with compositions like "Meet on the Ledge".

On 12 May 1969, between the recording and release of their next album Unhalfbricking, Fairport's van crashed on the M1 motorway on the way home from a gig at Mothers, a club in Birmingham.

Drummer Martin Lamble, aged 19, and Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn were killed.

The rest of the band suffered injuries of varying severity.

Later in 1969, Fairport re-grouped with a new drummer, Dave Mattacks, and also invited the well known fiddle player, Dave Swarbrick, to join.

Thompson and Swarbrick worked together to create songs such as "Crazy Man Michael" from the band's seminal 1969 folk-rock album Liege & Lief and "Sloth" from its 1970 follow-up Full House.

After departing the group in 1971, Thompson released his debut solo album Henry the Human Fly in 1972.

The next year, he formed a duo with his wife Linda Thompson, which produced six albums, including the critically acclaimed I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974) and Shoot Out the Lights (1982).

After the dissolution of the duo, Thompson revived his solo career with the release of Hand of Kindness in 1983.

He has released eighteen solo studio albums.

Three of his albumsRumor and Sigh (1991), You? Me? Us? (1996), and Dream Attic (2010)have been nominated for Grammy Awards, while Still (2015) was his first UK Top Ten album.

He continues to write and record new material and has frequently performed at venues throughout the world, although the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to suspend his touring.

Music critic Neil McCormick described Thompson as "a versatile virtuoso guitarist and a sharp observational singer-songwriter whose work burns with intelligence and dark emotion".

His 1991 song "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" was included in Time magazine's "All-TIME 100 Songs" list of the best English-language musical compositions released between 1923 and 2011.

Interviewed in 2003, Thompson said:

His songwriting has earned him an Ivor Novello Award and, in 2006, a lifetime achievement award from BBC Radio.

Thompson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to music.

Many varied musicians have recorded Thompson's compositions.

In 2021, his book Beeswing: Losing my Way and Finding my Voice, 1967–1975 was published, mainly a memoir of his life as a musician from 1967 to 1975.

Richard Thompson was born in Ladbroke Crescent, Notting Hill, West London, England.

His father, a Scot, was a Scotland Yard detective and an amateur guitar player; several other family members had played music professionally.

While attending William Ellis School in Highgate, he formed his first band, Emil and the Detectives (named after a book and a movie by the same title), with classmate Hugh Cornwell, later lead singer and guitarist of the Stranglers, on bass guitar.

When he was a teenager Thompson moved with his family to Whetstone, near the end of the underground's Northern line.