This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
My dad took me to my first concert — Paul Jones (ex Manfred Mann) with the Blues Band at Cambridge Corn Exchange — when I was nine.
At the time, I thought this was about the most exciting thing ever, since Jones was then starring in a children’s BBC series called “Uncle Jack” about an environmentalist secret agent.
It’s possible, though I hope this is a false memory, that I might have shouted “UNCLE JACK!” as he came on stage.
Over time, I’ve attempted to return the favour, not always successfully. In 2005, I took my dad to see Texan guitar expressionists Explosions in the Sky in Nottingham.
He thought they were quite good, but he managed to take a nap during the support set from Four Tet — now one of the biggest electronic artists in the world but not to my dad, who described the bit of the show he didn’t sleep through as “just watching a man fiddle about on a computer”.
However, I like going to gigs with my dad. So when he phoned up and invited me to see Richard Thompson in Harpenden with him and his best friend, I said an immediate yes.
Thompson has been performing since the late 1960s, when he formed Fairport Convention and inaugurated British folk-rock, and he’s now 76. You can forgive me for expecting a heritage act — something polite, practised and not very exciting.
Support act Smith and Brewer did not exactly get my hopes up: a gratingly cheery close-harmony folk duo who have scrupulously sanded every hint of an edge off their music. The most glowing review quote they could find for their website calls them “neatly crafted”, and that’s about the size of it. These are songs with hospital corners, everything tucked in tight and cosy.
And then Thompson came on, and everything changed. Only having heard him on record, I expected a solo show to be — as solo shows usually are — stripped back, which often means a thinner version of the songs you know. What I hadn’t realised is that what sounds like two guitars overlaid in the studio is actually all coming from him.
Thompson uses a pick-and-fingers or hybrid picking technique: he plays the bass notes with a plectrum whilst plucking the higher strings. That is rare enough amongst guitarists, but rarer still is his incredible fluency and the independence of his hands.
Thompson sounds as though he’s duetting with himself, and effectively he is. His fingers fly. I caught myself thinking: if he can do this now, then in his twenties he must have been able to tie the wind in knots.
One of the reasons this virtuosity can slip under the radar in recordings is that, as well as being in with a good shout of being the greatest guitarist to come out of the UK, he’s also one of the greatest songwriters, and his craft is always in the service of the song.
On top of that, you could make a strong case for him as one of our greatest storytellers because almost everything in his catalogue is a brilliantly spun piece of narrative.
Take “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” — a song he introduced in Harpenden as being “about a mythical beast” (the Vincent Black Lightning is a motorbike so rare and so beloved that in 2021, one sold at auction for $929,000).
The rest of the audience, most of whom had seen Thompson multiple times, realised where he was going before I did, and a hum of anticipation shivered through the auditorium.
“1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, from the 1991 album Rumor and Sigh, is a favourite, and for good reason. It’s a love story between two people and a motorbike: James, the bandit lead character who has “robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine”, and Red Molly, the woman he falls in love with when she admires his ride.
But their love is doomed from the start by his outlaw ways — “Now I’m twenty-one years, I might make twenty-two,” he tells her, “And I don’t mind dyin’ but for the love of you.” By verse five, James has been shot through the chest, living just long enough for Molly to visit his bedside and take the keys to the Vincent.
It’s a song replete with melodrama, owing a lot to the ballad tradition, and maybe a little to the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” (another story of a bad boy, a broken-hearted girl and some sexy wheels). All the while, Thompson’s guitar thrums and chimes, the engine of the song: as he played the song out, I could see Molly with her “red hair and black leather”, still riding.
When Thompson first wrote it, he was already deep into his third era, post Fairport and post his time as half of a duo with his then-wife Linda. It’s a tribute to the length and consistency of his career that it now counts as mid-period. With plenty more great songs to his name since, his fans can welcome it like an old friend making a return journey.
But I think “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” has a particularly special place in Thompson’s repertoire because it’s about the relationship between human and machine.
The Vincent, to James and to Thompson, is the only bike with a “soul”: there’s a spiritual bond between the rider and his bike, just as there is between the guitarist and his instrument. In that affinity, transcendence happens.
