BEESWING: FAIRPORT, FOLK ROCK AND FINDING MY VOICE, 1967-75 by Richard Thompson

“The music world is full of arseholes – absolute arrogant, self-serving dickheads who imagine it all revolves around them,” writes Richard Thompson in his otherwise fairly benevolent, yet highly readable, new memoir Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock And Finding My Voice, 1967-75. “I’ve met plenty and there’s plenty I avoid. To work for these people can be painful, and usually an unmusical, unrewarding experience.”

I half expected the next sentence to follow the famous example of Richard’s namesake, Hunter S., commenting on the music business, as in “There’s also a negative side”, but it didn’t. It went on to imply that Thompson is equally happy to play to an audience of 30 in a folk club as he is to appear on a big stage anywhere. And what’s more, after reading Beeswing, I believe him. 

        I was late discovering Richard Thompson. Island labelmates Free, Traffic and Cat Stevens diverted me from Fairport Convention, and what with everything else going on during those years – mainly The Who and Bowie – the kind of music that Richard Thompson was making passed me by. Indeed, it wasn’t until a road journey to the Frankfurt Book Fair undertaken in the early nineties with Omnibus Press sales manager, Cajun music expert and Thompson fan Frank Warren at the wheel, that I got to hear ‘Mother Knows Best’ from his LP Rumour And Sigh. Like the Porsches overtaking us at 120mph plus on the autobahn, the song is taken at a breakneck speed, and includes many extraordinary between-verses electric guitar solos, all worthy of James Burton or his UK counterpart Albert Lee, with the one at the close coming to an abrupt, unexpected end, almost as if Thompson decided he simply couldn’t go any faster or he’d crash. “Play it again Frank,” I said. 

        This stirring introduction to Richard Thompson prompted me to set out on a crash course. Two box sets, half a dozen CDs, two live shows and a reappraisal of Fairport Convention later I figured I knew my Thompson and I made myself a playlist, and kept his Live In Austin, Texas, CD in the car for months. When I played ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ to a biker pal who was unfamiliar with the song he burst into tears.

        But back to Beeswing, the memoir. Thompson has great recall for details, people and places, including a time when “every music shop in the West End had a sign that said ‘No credit for The Who’”, which made me chuckle, coming as it did during the same week that Pete Townshend put his Richmond house on sale for £15 million. I also liked his story about the Fairports appearing on Top Of The Pops in 1969 to promote ‘So Tu Dois Partir’: “The Bee Gees were also on the show and were acting like prima donnas, so I thought we should do the same. When the producer complained we had too many members on stage… I explained with a straight face that we were a tribe that lived communally, and the others would be devastated not to be included. The poor man, who must have dealt with acres of bullshit every week, just rolled his eyes and adjusted the cameras.”

        Beeswing, though not overlong at 262 pages including an index, is full of funny little tales like this, as well as interesting anecdotes about fellow travellers like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny. Thompson’s father was a senior policeman, which makes for more interesting asides, especially in situations involving the looser cannons among the Fairports, who did, indeed, live communally at times. 

        Anyone familiar with Richard Thompson’s songs will know that he rarely wastes words, and so it is with this memoir, at times droll, at times poignant, always literate, and above all truthful in a modest, occasionally self-deprecatory way. As you would expect, his disdain for fashion, fame and capitalist values feature strongly, as does his constant search for sensory fulfilment, found in his discovery of Sufism, and for new genres of music and inspiration. 

        The pity is that it ends in 1975, although the brief afterword and epilogue allude to the future, the breakdown of his marriage to Linda Peters and his regret at not being the best of fathers to his children. “The attic is empty now,” he concludes, which suggests there won’t be a second volume. “It was time to throw out some old junk, but in doing so, it brought up a lot of memories, fond, tragic, regretful, loving. The arrow is arcing back towards earth now, and catching a glint of gold from the setting sun.”

        The book includes two eight-page photo sections. One appendix features lyrics from songs mentioned in the book and the second, intriguingly, offers straightforward narratives from the author’s dreams, which are left to the reader to interpret.