Thompson Covers Spears Song on Live CD
A Britney Spears song in a time capsule? Perhaps, if the wickedly
subversive Richard Thompson is doing the packing.
Thompson sings Spears' "Oops! ... I Did it Again" on an upcoming live
CD for which he credits Playboy magazine for the idea. The magazine
asked Thompson in 1999 to submit a list of the 10 greatest songs of
the millennium.
"This, if taken literally, is a laughable idea, so I called their
pretentious bluff and started in 1000 A.D.," he told The Associated
Press in an e-mail.
The magazine wouldn't print it, but it gave Thompson the idea for a
fun concert. The set list ranges from a 13th-century Italian ballad
to Hank Williams to Spears.
"It is great fun to play, being an insane toboggan ride through
musical styles," he said. "It is never dull."
Thompson is also releasing "Front Parlour Ballads," his first solo
acoustic album since 1981, in August. It's the start of a busy
stretch: His "1000 Years of Popular Music" CD and DVD will be out in
the fall, as will another live CD and DVD of a 2001 performance
on "Austin City Limits" and his soundtrack to "Grizzly Man."
Oh, and a five-CD boxed set of classic and unreleased tracks.
"I'm sure we can work out some easy payment plan for the fans," he
joked.
Richard Thompson Covers Britney's "Oops..."
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He was in the folk band Fairport Convention that also included the late Sandy Denny who can be heard on Zep's "Battle of Evermore". Following their split he recorded several albums with his wife Linda that were well received, especially Shoot Out the Lights. After their split he's released some well received albums of his own and established a well earned reputation as a solo artist/guitarist in his own right. Perhaps his best known song is "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" which was recently brought back into the limelight by bluegrass outfit the Del McCoury Band.DsilCaribe wrote:thats pretty funny . . .i cant say i know who richard thompson is though
It's rather lengthy but here's a great read about Sandy Denny, her role in Fairport Convention, her friendship with Zeppelin, etc. from The Guardian:
Kurt Cobain's mother called it "that stupid club": the enclosure,
presumably located somewhere in the here-after, in which Jim
Morrison clinks glasses with Brian Jones, Gram Parsons tries to
avoid Sid Vicious, and all those stars who suffered an early death
toast the revenue from posthumous record sales.
But where are the women? Given the inescapable fact that most
successful musicians are men, the gender imbalance - give or take
the likes of Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Mama Cass - seems
pretty much inevitable. There may be another factor at work,
however: the fact that the romantic stereotype of the burned-out
young star is necessarily male. Critics use words like "Dionysian";
further down the musical food chain, it's often a simple matter of
callow young men surveying the wreckage and deriving the usual
vicarious thrills. Either way, women need not apply.
The life, death and reputation of Sandy Denny are a perfect case in
point. Equipped with an incredible voice and an immense songwriting
talent, she was none the less plagued by the chronic insecurities
that led her into excess. Her drinking partners included the late
Keith Moon and John Bonham; the folk-tinged milieu from which she
came also included Nick Drake. She died aged 31, in 1978 - but
whereas lesser talents have been posthumously feted, she remains a
decidedly cult interest.
For some, that's a sign of her singular talent. "The thing that
always amazed me about Sandy," says her friend and contemporary
Linda Thompson, "was that she thought she actually could appeal to
the masses. Of course she couldn't - and who would want to? If
you're writing songs that people can shoot themselves to, you know
you're not going to be in the charts. Sandy's music was
uncomfortable. It demanded too much."
Alexandra Denny was born in 1947, and raised in Wimbledon. Her early
adulthood found her working as a nurse and then putting in time at
art school, while immersing herself in a nocturnal world centred
around the kind of London clubs - the Troubadour in Earl's Court,
Cousins in Soho - where candles burned into the small hours, and
aspiring musicians split their attentions between self-written songs
and traditional folk music. Her vocal abilities took in both a
seductive gentleness and strident power; away from the stage,
according to one of her acquaintances, "she was incredibly funny,
with a very quick mind ... a chaotic intelligence just poured out".
In the spring of 1968, Denny auditioned for the job of vocalist with
Fairport Convention, then fond of cover versions by Bob Dylan and
Joni Mitchell, and attempting to somehow align themselves with the
music drifting into the UK from the American west coast. "It was in
a room attached to a pub in west London," recalls Ashley Hutchings,
the band's then bass player. "We thought we were auditioning her,
and she took over. She told us what she would like us to play for
her. But she had the strong presence that we needed on stage. She
had a wonderful voice. And we immediately liked her."
Denny stayed with the group for three albums. She was instrumental
in nudging them towards the melding of old and new elements that
would mark their effective invention of British folk rock. Equally
importantly, her time with the band saw her take her first decisive
steps as a songwriter. What We Did On Our Holidays from 1969
contained Fotheringay, a evocation of Mary, Queen of Scots that now
sounds rather gauche, but served notice of both her talent and
ambition; the same year's Unhalfbricking featured Who Knows Where
the Time Goes, so brimming with poise and insight that it hardly
sounded like something authored by a 22-year-old.
Linda Thompson (née Peters), was a close friend of Denny, another
fantastically talented singer, and an associate of the group who
would soon marry their guitarist, Richard Thompson. "I can remember
Sandy saying to me, 'I'm going to try to write some songs,'" she
says. "And I thought to myself, 'That's ridiculous. She won't be
able to do that.' We were young, and there weren't many women
writing songs. And she played Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and I
nearly fell off my chair.'
Accounts of her life suggest that Denny was well aware of how good
she was, though her confidence and ambition could never offset her
seemingly innate insecurity. "I don't think she was ever truly
comfortable," says Ashley Hutchings. "She was a restless soul. And
very nervous: nervous about performing, nervous about travelling -
particularly flying. I think she probably needed the props of drink
and drugs. And she needed people around her, who she trusted and
loved, to keep her going; to tell her how good she was. The
question, of course, is how could you be that insecure when you have
so much talent? But she was."
Denny's fragile self-esteem was rattled by a particularly cruel part
of the 1960s pop whirl. One early Melody Maker profile of the band
blithely described Denny as "plump"; according to those who knew
her, the fact that she didn't quite match up with a skinny, mini-
skirted archetype caused her no end of unease.
"She had this amazing talent, this incredible voice - but she always
wanted to be pretty and fanciable," says Linda Thompson. "And she
was! But she never thought she was, because she wasn't
conventionally pretty. And these were the 60s, when no one ate
anything and they were all stick thin. She'd go on these daft diets -
we were all on slimming pills, and God knows what - and she'd get
thinner, but she'd put it on again. And she never quite got over
that. It was so ridiculous: we were all slaves to it, but it was a
real burden for her.
"But some of the things people said were unbelievable. They'd say
things like, 'her sweet, chubby face'. I think that was very hard
indeed. But also, she could always leave the room with the most
interesting guy around - if he had a brain. Because not only was she
attractive, she was so smart and so talented. I think she had
decided long before that she was more witty and talented than any of
these dolly birds. And that's how she wowed men. She had a thing
with Frank Zappa, whenever he was in London. She went out with some
pretty remarkable people."
Denny left Fairport Convention in late 1969. Her exit, in later
accounts, seems to have been prompted by two factors: her unease
with the band's increasing tilt towards folky orthodoxy, and the
fact that touring led to long spells away from her future husband.
Trevor Lucas was an Australian-born folk musician (variously
described as "another alpha male in her life" and "a real ladies'
man") who quickly joined her in the short-lived band they named
Fotheringay. In contravention of the rigid sexual politics of the
time, he was happy enough to allow Denny the starring role.
By 1971, with Lucas's encouragement, she had reluctantly gone solo,
commencing a run of four albums: that year's The North Star Grassman
and the Ravens, Sandy (1972), Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) and
Rendezvous (1977). The first and second, home to songs as
accomplished as Late November, John the Gun and the wondrous It'll
Take a Long, Long Time, frequently crystallised her talent to
marvellous effect; thanks partly to her background in traditional
music, she could make her songs sound as if they were rooted in a
wisdom that was palpably timeless. From thereon in, though she could
still scrape incredible heights, she was rather hampered by soupy
arrangements (she was particularly partial to the string sections
she described as her "fur coat"), and, on her last album, the fact
that her voice was showing the strain that came from her fondness
for drink and drugs.
Commercial success consistently eluded her, though a fleeting place
in the mass market was assured by her appearance on Led Zeppelin IV,
on which she was invited by Led Zeppelin to duet with Robert Plant
on The Battle of Evermore. "She used to hang out with Led Zeppelin,"
recalls Linda Thompson. "Robert and Jimmy [Page], and John Bonham
and Keith Moon - they all knew how fantastic she was. Robert Plant
was the loudest singer on the planet at the time, and Sandy could
blow him off the stage. You'd have to hold on to the furniture when
Sandy was singing. So these guys knew what a star she was. And like
a lot of girls who are unhappy about the way they look, she became
one of the boys. You had to go some to drink with John Bonham. You
couldn't keep up with those guys. But Sandy could."
Inevitably, this was not all the stuff of rock'n'roll high jinks.
Her propensity for excess eventually turned pathological; worse
still, her appetites extended way beyond what was available in the
off licence. In 1977, she became pregnant; it was then that her
closest friends began to feel truly anxious. "I was worried when she
was pregnant, because I knew she was doing drugs and drinking," says
Linda Thompson. "And later on, she was crashing the car and leaving
the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff. And that was worrying.
I've said it before about Nick Drake: these days, we might have done
an intervention or something. But back then, you thought people
would grow out of it.
"When I went to see her in the hospital after she'd had the baby, I
was terribly worried. The baby was premature. She'd abused herself
during pregnancy - and she said, 'They're giving me such a hard
time, telling me off. What about me?' And I thought, 'God, that's so
peculiar.' When you've just had a baby, you don't think about
yourself at all. By that time, I thought it was a little bit
psychotic."
In March 1978, Denny and her newborn daughter Georgia took a holiday
with her parents in Cornish cottage. She fell down a flight of
stairs, and subsequently complained of severe headaches, for which
she was prescribed a painkiller called Distalgesic. If mixed with
alcohol they can be fatal. A month later, she was dead, thanks to
what the coroner later called a "traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage".
It is one of the more tragic aspects of her death that when she fell
into a terminal coma, her husband and baby were elsewhere; fearing
for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas had travelled with Georgia
to his native Australia. As with so many musicians' stories, the
tale is more a matter of grinding dysfunction than of any hedonistic
romance.
This month sees the re-release of Denny's four solo albums,
augmented with an array of bonus tracks, and contextualised via
sleeve notes that make the case for her promotion to the part of
musical history reserved for accredited pioneers. "She's been
namechecked by some high-profile people," considers Ashley
Hutchings. "But she needs to be re-evaluated. She wrote a kind of
song that's very rarely written now - emotional, musically
interesting, sung really well - serious songwriting. She was head
and shoulders above the rest. And she remains so."
· The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old
Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous are out now on Island/Universal.
Burning Bright, Ashley Hutchings' box set, is out on Free Reed
Music. Linda Thompson appears with Martha Wainwright in Strange How
Potent at the Lyric Hammersmith (box office: 08700 500 511), London
W6, on May 12, 13 and 14.
Kurt Cobain's mother called it "that stupid club": the enclosure,
presumably located somewhere in the here-after, in which Jim
Morrison clinks glasses with Brian Jones, Gram Parsons tries to
avoid Sid Vicious, and all those stars who suffered an early death
toast the revenue from posthumous record sales.
But where are the women? Given the inescapable fact that most
successful musicians are men, the gender imbalance - give or take
the likes of Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Mama Cass - seems
pretty much inevitable. There may be another factor at work,
however: the fact that the romantic stereotype of the burned-out
young star is necessarily male. Critics use words like "Dionysian";
further down the musical food chain, it's often a simple matter of
callow young men surveying the wreckage and deriving the usual
vicarious thrills. Either way, women need not apply.
The life, death and reputation of Sandy Denny are a perfect case in
point. Equipped with an incredible voice and an immense songwriting
talent, she was none the less plagued by the chronic insecurities
that led her into excess. Her drinking partners included the late
Keith Moon and John Bonham; the folk-tinged milieu from which she
came also included Nick Drake. She died aged 31, in 1978 - but
whereas lesser talents have been posthumously feted, she remains a
decidedly cult interest.
For some, that's a sign of her singular talent. "The thing that
always amazed me about Sandy," says her friend and contemporary
Linda Thompson, "was that she thought she actually could appeal to
the masses. Of course she couldn't - and who would want to? If
you're writing songs that people can shoot themselves to, you know
you're not going to be in the charts. Sandy's music was
uncomfortable. It demanded too much."
Alexandra Denny was born in 1947, and raised in Wimbledon. Her early
adulthood found her working as a nurse and then putting in time at
art school, while immersing herself in a nocturnal world centred
around the kind of London clubs - the Troubadour in Earl's Court,
Cousins in Soho - where candles burned into the small hours, and
aspiring musicians split their attentions between self-written songs
and traditional folk music. Her vocal abilities took in both a
seductive gentleness and strident power; away from the stage,
according to one of her acquaintances, "she was incredibly funny,
with a very quick mind ... a chaotic intelligence just poured out".
In the spring of 1968, Denny auditioned for the job of vocalist with
Fairport Convention, then fond of cover versions by Bob Dylan and
Joni Mitchell, and attempting to somehow align themselves with the
music drifting into the UK from the American west coast. "It was in
a room attached to a pub in west London," recalls Ashley Hutchings,
the band's then bass player. "We thought we were auditioning her,
and she took over. She told us what she would like us to play for
her. But she had the strong presence that we needed on stage. She
had a wonderful voice. And we immediately liked her."
Denny stayed with the group for three albums. She was instrumental
in nudging them towards the melding of old and new elements that
would mark their effective invention of British folk rock. Equally
importantly, her time with the band saw her take her first decisive
steps as a songwriter. What We Did On Our Holidays from 1969
contained Fotheringay, a evocation of Mary, Queen of Scots that now
sounds rather gauche, but served notice of both her talent and
ambition; the same year's Unhalfbricking featured Who Knows Where
the Time Goes, so brimming with poise and insight that it hardly
sounded like something authored by a 22-year-old.
Linda Thompson (née Peters), was a close friend of Denny, another
fantastically talented singer, and an associate of the group who
would soon marry their guitarist, Richard Thompson. "I can remember
Sandy saying to me, 'I'm going to try to write some songs,'" she
says. "And I thought to myself, 'That's ridiculous. She won't be
able to do that.' We were young, and there weren't many women
writing songs. And she played Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and I
nearly fell off my chair.'
Accounts of her life suggest that Denny was well aware of how good
she was, though her confidence and ambition could never offset her
seemingly innate insecurity. "I don't think she was ever truly
comfortable," says Ashley Hutchings. "She was a restless soul. And
very nervous: nervous about performing, nervous about travelling -
particularly flying. I think she probably needed the props of drink
and drugs. And she needed people around her, who she trusted and
loved, to keep her going; to tell her how good she was. The
question, of course, is how could you be that insecure when you have
so much talent? But she was."
Denny's fragile self-esteem was rattled by a particularly cruel part
of the 1960s pop whirl. One early Melody Maker profile of the band
blithely described Denny as "plump"; according to those who knew
her, the fact that she didn't quite match up with a skinny, mini-
skirted archetype caused her no end of unease.
"She had this amazing talent, this incredible voice - but she always
wanted to be pretty and fanciable," says Linda Thompson. "And she
was! But she never thought she was, because she wasn't
conventionally pretty. And these were the 60s, when no one ate
anything and they were all stick thin. She'd go on these daft diets -
we were all on slimming pills, and God knows what - and she'd get
thinner, but she'd put it on again. And she never quite got over
that. It was so ridiculous: we were all slaves to it, but it was a
real burden for her.
"But some of the things people said were unbelievable. They'd say
things like, 'her sweet, chubby face'. I think that was very hard
indeed. But also, she could always leave the room with the most
interesting guy around - if he had a brain. Because not only was she
attractive, she was so smart and so talented. I think she had
decided long before that she was more witty and talented than any of
these dolly birds. And that's how she wowed men. She had a thing
with Frank Zappa, whenever he was in London. She went out with some
pretty remarkable people."
Denny left Fairport Convention in late 1969. Her exit, in later
accounts, seems to have been prompted by two factors: her unease
with the band's increasing tilt towards folky orthodoxy, and the
fact that touring led to long spells away from her future husband.
Trevor Lucas was an Australian-born folk musician (variously
described as "another alpha male in her life" and "a real ladies'
man") who quickly joined her in the short-lived band they named
Fotheringay. In contravention of the rigid sexual politics of the
time, he was happy enough to allow Denny the starring role.
By 1971, with Lucas's encouragement, she had reluctantly gone solo,
commencing a run of four albums: that year's The North Star Grassman
and the Ravens, Sandy (1972), Like an Old Fashioned Waltz (1974) and
Rendezvous (1977). The first and second, home to songs as
accomplished as Late November, John the Gun and the wondrous It'll
Take a Long, Long Time, frequently crystallised her talent to
marvellous effect; thanks partly to her background in traditional
music, she could make her songs sound as if they were rooted in a
wisdom that was palpably timeless. From thereon in, though she could
still scrape incredible heights, she was rather hampered by soupy
arrangements (she was particularly partial to the string sections
she described as her "fur coat"), and, on her last album, the fact
that her voice was showing the strain that came from her fondness
for drink and drugs.
Commercial success consistently eluded her, though a fleeting place
in the mass market was assured by her appearance on Led Zeppelin IV,
on which she was invited by Led Zeppelin to duet with Robert Plant
on The Battle of Evermore. "She used to hang out with Led Zeppelin,"
recalls Linda Thompson. "Robert and Jimmy [Page], and John Bonham
and Keith Moon - they all knew how fantastic she was. Robert Plant
was the loudest singer on the planet at the time, and Sandy could
blow him off the stage. You'd have to hold on to the furniture when
Sandy was singing. So these guys knew what a star she was. And like
a lot of girls who are unhappy about the way they look, she became
one of the boys. You had to go some to drink with John Bonham. You
couldn't keep up with those guys. But Sandy could."
Inevitably, this was not all the stuff of rock'n'roll high jinks.
Her propensity for excess eventually turned pathological; worse
still, her appetites extended way beyond what was available in the
off licence. In 1977, she became pregnant; it was then that her
closest friends began to feel truly anxious. "I was worried when she
was pregnant, because I knew she was doing drugs and drinking," says
Linda Thompson. "And later on, she was crashing the car and leaving
the baby in the pub and all sorts of stuff. And that was worrying.
I've said it before about Nick Drake: these days, we might have done
an intervention or something. But back then, you thought people
would grow out of it.
"When I went to see her in the hospital after she'd had the baby, I
was terribly worried. The baby was premature. She'd abused herself
during pregnancy - and she said, 'They're giving me such a hard
time, telling me off. What about me?' And I thought, 'God, that's so
peculiar.' When you've just had a baby, you don't think about
yourself at all. By that time, I thought it was a little bit
psychotic."
In March 1978, Denny and her newborn daughter Georgia took a holiday
with her parents in Cornish cottage. She fell down a flight of
stairs, and subsequently complained of severe headaches, for which
she was prescribed a painkiller called Distalgesic. If mixed with
alcohol they can be fatal. A month later, she was dead, thanks to
what the coroner later called a "traumatic mid-brain haemorrhage".
It is one of the more tragic aspects of her death that when she fell
into a terminal coma, her husband and baby were elsewhere; fearing
for his daughter's safety, Trevor Lucas had travelled with Georgia
to his native Australia. As with so many musicians' stories, the
tale is more a matter of grinding dysfunction than of any hedonistic
romance.
This month sees the re-release of Denny's four solo albums,
augmented with an array of bonus tracks, and contextualised via
sleeve notes that make the case for her promotion to the part of
musical history reserved for accredited pioneers. "She's been
namechecked by some high-profile people," considers Ashley
Hutchings. "But she needs to be re-evaluated. She wrote a kind of
song that's very rarely written now - emotional, musically
interesting, sung really well - serious songwriting. She was head
and shoulders above the rest. And she remains so."
· The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, Sandy, Like an Old
Fashioned Waltz and Rendezvous are out now on Island/Universal.
Burning Bright, Ashley Hutchings' box set, is out on Free Reed
Music. Linda Thompson appears with Martha Wainwright in Strange How
Potent at the Lyric Hammersmith (box office: 08700 500 511), London
W6, on May 12, 13 and 14.