Richard Thompson – Hippies, Thugs and Heroes Reviewed: Fairport Guitarist Delivers One of the Bleakest, and Best, Records of His Career
[MOJO]
Putting the brio in lugubrious: master misanthrope’s spectacularly dour line-up of miscreants and lost souls.
Richard Thompson – Hippies, Thugs and Heroes
★★★★★
The hypnotic closing jangle on the first Richard Thompson album since 2024’s Ship To Shore, Siren captures another poor sap heading on to the emotional rocks. “It’s only love that stops my breath and makes me sigh and stare in wonder,” sings the ever-mournful Thompson, that desperate desire to love and be loved overriding all the flashing danger signs. “Only you and you alone can sing the spell that I fall under.”
At 77, the musical spell cast by the bumbling former Fairport Convention man with the magic talking guitar is largely unbroken. Not a man given to wild flights of fancy, he has been making intense, gloomy and largely brilliant solo records for well over 55 years, with the chorus of Roll Over Vaughan Williams – the opening track on his 1972 debut, Henry The Human Fly – setting a Henny Penny precedent: “Live in fear, live in fear.”
The sky has not fallen on his head just yet, but his latest outing is one of his darkest and bleakest regardless. A kind of short story collection, Hippies, Thugs And Heroes finds a selection of innocents lining up to meet their fate, Gashlycrumb Tinies-style. Bashed together briskly by his American band, with the assistance of his wife Zara Phillips and long-serving accordion maestro John Kirkpatrick, it offers precious little in terms of light relief; nothing about vintage motorbikes, Jimmy Shand records, or teenage sex from the early ’60s. Instead, it is a Leviathan-worthy vision of a world governed by man’s basest instincts, where life tends to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and (if you are lucky) short. Depending on your outlook, it may be his best since 1999’s Mock Tudor, his best since 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver, or his best full-stop.
Byrds of ill omen flutter ominously over opening track Sorcerer’s Apprentice as Thompson stares into the face of evil and finds a disturbing lack of reason. “It dawns on me that you’re not quite well, you’re not quite compos mentis,” he sings, addressing the malevolent force in the room. If that Phil Ochs line is true – “half the world is crazy, the other half is scared” – it doesn’t take a genius to work out which side of the line Thompson thinks he stands on.
Crazy people are running all over town on Hippies, Thugs And Heroes, though. The strutting Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking tracks a chemically assisted dalliance between a “Kings Road hippie” and a “Saucihall thug”, with a shuddering Jethro Tull-sized riff helping to drown out the sound of loveless debauch.
She Burns It All, meanwhile, is another unhappy trip to the psychiatric ward (Thompson previously visited on Grey Walls from 1991’s Rumor And Sigh). One of his most unusual songs, this otherworldly duet with Phillips has echoes of early ’70s Nico/Kevin Ayers, and reaches the worrying conclusion that neither “Mandrake root or holy water” can soothe a sick soul.
Some people are ill, then, but others are just bad. The lopsided Stringer imagines the truth that underpins the heroic outlaw ballads as it portrays a toxic thug who “murders for pleasure” but somehow wins the public’s affection. “The poor and the needy they sing of his exploits; they feed him and hide him like one of their own,” sneers Thompson, every inch the policeman’s son. “But Stringer is a scoundrel, a taker a user; he cares about Stringer and Stringer alone.”
However, the Stringers of the world may be a symptom of a greater malaise. Muggers and thieves are rampant on the Ayn Rand-via-Joe Brown knees-up of Everybody’s Stealing – a grinning, Cajun-spiced reminder that, 50-plus years on from the release of Thompson’s Larkin-esque End Of The Rainbow, tycoons and barrow boys continue to rob with impunity.
The poor, the gentle and the wounded, meanwhile, continue to suffer. A sort of funky Brother, Can You Spare A Dime, Unsung Hero laments how working people tend to get overlooked in a society that only really has time for big names, while the ominous jangle of Pauper’s Grave is a sombre rumination on a dead drunk, decorated with a suitably mournful strathspey guitar solo. Thompson notes that his luckless John Doe was found with “nothing in his pocket but a letter nearly fallen apart; he read the thing so many times he must have learned it by heart”, and it may be that love – the painful, unresolved, unrequited kind – carves a deeper gouge through Hippies, Thugs And Heroes than any other human foible.
A wronged partner feels the sting of humiliation on The Soul In Me, while Make Believe You Don’t Know Me tiptoes around the frozen wreckage of an impossible affair, apparently with a gloomy brass band for company. The wistful Pipe Dream (a grandson of Don Gibson’s mournful 1955 country smash Sweet Dreams) offers a brief moment of wistful prettiness, but even then it is a song about watching the twinkling fragments of a broken heart tumbling down to earth.
The Big Smoke, meanwhile, echoes The Smiths’ London, unsettled chords and mournful strings a reminder that – in Thompson’s universe – a new career in a new town offers no escape from old-world misery. “I’ve made up my mind this is my time the big smoke is calling,” he sings, the sombre musical accompaniment making it clear that this joyful decision represents the opening of a new portal into Hell.
Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is, then, a bit of a downer, but those who have found their way to Thompson’s songs – via Fairport, or fellow travellers like Robyn Hitchcock, Tom Verlaine, Bob Mould, Pere Ubu, R.E.M. and now The Tubs – will know how intoxicating his kind of gloom can be. Like fellow Muswell Hillbilly Ray Davies, Thompson also knows how to place the tiniest corona of hope around the big black sun of this material, a clumsy little half joke or a sudden luminous flash of guitar enlivening the darkness. Thompson’s central message remains stark, though. Bad things happen to good people; bad things happen to bad people; bad things happen all the time. However – as the poor sap on Siren knows – only one person can sing this kind of spell quite so bewitchingly. To the rocks. Full speed ahead.