Richard Thompson at First Avenue
Liz Anderson
)If you’re not close enough at a Richard Thompson concert to see his fingers dancing across his guitar neck, you’re missing one of the most consistently sublime sights in the world of rock music. Thompson moves with such fluidity that it’s astonishing that he’s 61 years old and can still make such virtuosity seem effortless.
That blazing fretwork shone with full force Saturday at First Avenue, where Thompson wrapped up his U.S. tour backing his latest album, Dream Attic. Eschewing an opening act, Thompson instead commanded the stage for the entire evening, playing two sets backed by the quartet with whom he recorded the new album earlier this year. With a leopard-print scarf giving a dash of color to his usual ensemble of black beret, black shirt, and black jeans, he first zipped track-by-track through Dream Attic in its entirety, followed by what he wryly termed “some of our hits-with-a-small-H.”
The venerable English folk-rocker, who got his start with Fairport Convention in the late 1960s and has carved out an enviable if never superstar-level solo career since then, tends to alternate between full-band and solo tours. He’s chattier and more intimate on the latter, with his incisive, satirical wit and ability to spin a tale given free rein. That wasn’t neglected here; Thompson’s laid-back banter with his audience can feel like he’s just playing in his living room for a few friends.
Such a heavy focus on new material could have been quite a grind. Many musicians of Thompson’s longevity are well past their best songwriting years, and even an appreciative audience endures the new stuff as a necessary evil before the old favorites roll in. That’s rarely, if ever, been a problem for Thompson, who still approaches his work with intelligence and creativity, reliably adding a couple new gems to his catalog with each album.
That said, his studio work can also suffer from a certain hemmed-in feeling; it’s on stage, in the immediacy of the live experience, where Thompson really shines. Dream Attic, savvily, was basically designed from inception to be recreated on stage—recorded live, in fact, earlier this year on a West Coast tour. Lyrically, the album is rather dour—the peppiest song begins with the line, “Haul me up, help me, I’m drowning” and gets darker from there. (Thompson joked about that when segueing from the shuffling “Demons In Her Dancing Shoes” to the somber “Crimescene,” calling the song “a little more reflective, a little, frankly, depressing. Unlike the rest of the set.”)
But musically, Dream Attic’s mood ranges far more broadly, shifting easily between up-tempo rockers and stark ballads. It’s a near-perfect showcase not only for Thompson’s wizardry but his formidable bandmates—particularly violinist Joel Zifkin, who added an appropriately Celtic touch, and multi-instrumentalist Pete Zorn, who was surrounded by enough hardware to open his
own music store.
The second set plucked both well-known and obscure material from Thompson’s older catalog, including a smoky-jazz take on “Al Bowlly’s In Heaven” (from 1986’s Daring Adventures) and an amped-up take on “Can’t Win” (from 1988’s Amnesia) that built up to a blistering solo lasting well over four minutes. The band then offered up stomping versions of concert staples “Wall Of Death” and “Tear-Stained Letter” before closing out with a brief encore topped by his 1974 classic, “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight.”
