Richard Thompson has been playing guitar since before most of his interviewers were born, and the Q&A format suits him better than most artists: he answers questions the way he solos, moving quickly through territory that lesser players would overwork. The Fairport Convention years emerge as the heart of the piece. Thompson's observation that 'none of these people really sold many records in their lifetimes, but people are still discovering them now' is the only honest account of that scene's commercial reality, and it doubles as a gentle self-deprecating jab at his own new album. The camaraderie he describes — Joe Boyd's stable of acts, Billy Connolly still a banjo player who told jokes — is warm without being sentimental, which is a difficult register to hit. Sandy Denny gets the best anecdote. Her hypersensitivity as a passenger ('What was that noise? Why did you put the brakes on?') requiring a tutorial on the internal combustion engine, the gin and tonic in Thompson's lap on the transatlantic flight, her total ease on a boat — it's a portrait assembled from behavioral specifics rather than adjectives, which is how you know it's true. Nick Drake, by contrast, was 'so taciturn and hard to know' that Thompson opts out of fabricating warmth, which is its own kind of tribute. The career-fork anecdotes are striking. He turned down Linda Ronstadt's band in 1971 because four members had just left to form the Eagles, decided not to join the Band twice because he 'thought they were gonna drink themselves to death,' was asked to replace Hilton Valentine in a later Animals lineup, and might have ended up playing Dylan covers in California instead of Calvinist folk-rock about motorcycles and armed robbery. His reasoning throughout is consistent: he wanted to sing in his own accent, do his Anglo-Celtic thing, not be surrounded by Californians. The songwriting process sections are the piece's intellectual spine. Thompson separates Beeswing from its assumed subject (Anne Briggs) to restore its actual composite sources — a tramp with Suffolk odd-job stories, Sandy's sense of Anne, and Thompson's own claim to fiction. Cold Kisses gets a similar unpacking: the sneaky surveillance of a new partner's past isn't autobiography, but it's the kind of uncomfortable emotional territory that folk-rock can access more honestly than confessional pop. 'Songwriting can dig below the surface of what's considered civilised' — he means it. The beret detail at the end lands perfectly. Bono's hat flew first class; Thompson has someone staple his Balmoral to his head before the airport. The man sometimes forgets to pack shoes but nobody notices because he wears black socks. Fifty years of professional music distilled into two sentences.
