Front Parlour Ballads

Product Information

Covey, who had been in the UK in 1981 trying to sign Thompson to play at McCabe's, arranged for Thompson well-received 5 and 6 December shows. A favourite of both Robert Plant and Elvis Costello, Thompson has also been covered by acts as varied as feminist punks Sleater-Kinney, REM, David Byrne and, most recently, Mark Ronson, who covered the 1974 title track of Thompson’s album with first wife Linda Thompson, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.

mu:zines is the result of thousands of hours of effort, and will require many thousands more going forward to reach our goals of getting all this content online.In 2003, the BBC produced a documentary about Thompson's long musical career, entitled Solitary Life, directed by Paul Bernays and narrated by John Peel.

Leonard Cohen songs, and Richard Fariña songs, and Bob Dylan songs, all being done in a kind of West-Coasty rock style. It featured interviews with Thompson from his home in California and contributions from Billy Connolly, Bonnie Raitt, ex-wife Linda Thompson, Harry Shearer and Thompson's then wife Nancy Covey. Anniversary re-issue of Richard Thompson’s 1976 collection of rarities with Fairport Convention, Linda Thompson and solo. Thompson took to the road with a stripped-down " power trio" band on a multi-month tour on both sides of the Atlantic to promote the new album.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. They next saw each other 43 years later at a festival in Spain: Cornwell had seen his friend live a few times, but not been brave enough to go backstage. The resulting album Dream Attic, released in August the same year, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. She was resplendent in white,” he says of their 1972 wedding day (he was less resplendent, wearing clogs, as he couldn’t find his shoes thanks to a post-stag-night hangover).

He and Nancy Covey married at an alcohol-free wedding that included a who's who of roots-music performers who Covey knew well from McCabe's and the Los Angeles music scene, and had introduced to Thompson. with Jools Holland, where he performed "All Buttoned Up" and ""She Never Could Resist a Winding Road" from his album Still. Yet subsequent listens reveal the subtler charms of a gorgeous jazz-pop ballad, "I've Got No Right to Have It All", and the righteous anger of "Outside of the Inside", on which Thompson, a devout Muslim, attacks the moral emptiness of religious fanaticism. 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.

The 3-CD set Watching the Dark combines his better-known songs and previously unreleased live and studio tracks. When he was a teenager Thompson moved with his family to Whetstone, near the end of the underground's Northern line.