We have Hugh Hefner to thank. In 1999, Playboy invited Richard Thompson, among others, to name his favourite music of the millennium. The magazine was disconcerted to find that, rather than surveying the second half of the 20th century, Thompson did as asked and produced a selection ranging from the troubadours through opera and music hall to the present day.
Playboy never used Thompson’s list, but he did: he has turned the conceit into a show, 1,000 Years Of Popular Music, with an ever-changing set list that now runs from the 13th-century Marian hymn “Edi Beo Thu Hevene Quene” to Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater”. He is accompanied by the Welsh singer Judith Owen and by the percussionist Debra Dobkin.
Just as Theme Time Radio Hour traces the diverse sources whose currents eddy through its host Bob Dylan’s river of song, so Thompson’s canter through musical history makes visible his many influences. There are no Thompson originals but devotees will recognise the resonances.
The medieval and renaissance material feeds through into his folk songs. A bawdy Italianate stomp (sung, he insisted, in colloquial renaissance Italian) touched on his pet theme of betrayal; the crows pecking at a dead knight in “Three Crows” reappear in Thompson’s own Iraq war ballad, “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me”.
But the later material also mirrors Thompson’s own music: hints of music hall (the lurching tale of homelessness, “I Live In Trafalgar Square”), the rock ’n’ roll of “Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” or the Café De Paris jazz strum he deployed on “Java Jive”. A honky-tonk country song of divorce recalled the heyday of Richard and Linda.
Owen’s bossa-tinged “Night And Day” and her “Cry Me A River”, starting out icily calm amid Thompson’s echoing guitar and building into impassioned scat, were
a reminder of his skills as an accompanist.
Some of the show was simply fun: Abba’s “Money Money Money”, with its electric piano cascade reproduced on high-speed guitar, or a joyous closing Beatles medley. Some of it misfired: Henry Youll’s Jacobean madrigal “Pipe, Shepherds, Pipe”, amplified and rough-hewn, withered and died, and no one left wanting more Gilbert and Sullivan. For the most part, though, this was a reassuring stock-take of Thompson’s creative capital.
