Former Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson has spoken about the role traditional music has played in his life.
By the mid 60s British folk music seemed to have backed itself into a corner. Industrialisation had removed it from the land, while the growth of electricity fuelled pop music made it seem stale.
Until, that is, the arrival of Fairport Convention. The band’s re-wired take on the traditional body of songcraft helped turn a generation on to another Britain, one that was instantly recognisable yet infuriatingly unknowable.
Looking back, Richard Thompson insists that the British folk tradition still guides his songwriting. “By the time we got to doing electric versions of traditional music, or writing new songs in a Scots-Irish-English-rooted way” he explained “then I was pretty much set in what I wanted to do”.
Speaking to The Guardian, Richard Thompson revealed: “If you sing something where the roots go back 1,000 years, and the song still has resonance for you, it must mean it is saying something fundamentally true about the human condition”.
“It’s been tested and not found wanting. Sometimes, as a culture, we pay more attention to imported styles. That was certainly the case in the last century, starting with minstrel music and ragtime and then jazz. All the romance and the mythology was coming from overseas. We wondered if there might be a way of reversing that a bit…”
Richard Thompson is set to curate this year’s Meltdown festival. The bill is typically eclectic, moving from Iranian punk rock to traditional music. The guitarist has chosen the occasion to debut his new album ‘Cabaret Of Souls’ – a satirical work about a talent contest in hell.
Meltdown takes place between June 11th – 21st.
