An eight-disc box set tells the complete story of the talented yet star-crossed UK folk-rock duo, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.
Hard-luck stories are one of Richard Thompson’s specialties. He honed the skill in the 1970s, writing songs with the knowledge that his wife Linda would provide the sugar to sweeten his salt. From a certain perspective, the tale of Richard and Linda Thompson—a partnership that intertwined romance and creativity—is itself a hard-luck story, one plagued by missed opportunities and bad breaks, and culminating in a public divorce.
The eight-disc box set Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) tells this tale in full, adding a host of rarities to the six studio albums the duo released during their decade as collaborators. It’s the rare box set where the rarities feel integral to the compilation’s impact, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.
During their time together, the Thompsons always seemed to be on the verge of greater recognition, yet success eluded them. Some of this can be blamed on circumstances beyond their control: Their debut, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, was held back from the marketplace during the oil shortage of the early 1970s, not appearing in the UK until 1974; it wouldn’t surface in the U.S. until 1976, when it was added as a bonus LP on the since deleted Live (More or Less). Their attempts at bolder, brighter music—1978’s First Light and the following year’s Sunnyvista—satisfied neither the curious nor the dedicated. Once they finally started to gain a wider audience with 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, the couple’s partnership fell apart; they promoted the album with an American tour even though it was clear that they were long past the end.
All these unlucky turns have tended to cast a pall over the entirety of the duo’s career, as if they were fated to a miserable ending. Certainly, this impression is strengthened by Richard’s proclivity for sad songs and gloom, but Thompson was too guarded and flinty to traffic in open autobiography—even though his music was so unadorned, it was easy to conflate the two. Linda Thompson helped draw distinctions between the writer and the singer, with a clear, keening voice that stood as a counterpoint to Richard’s gruffness.
The first disc of Hard Luck Stories shows a chemistry that was evident at the start, collecting scraps and strays from 1972, the year Richard Thompson left his groundbreaking British folk-rock group Fairport Convention. As he bided his time with the Bunch, a folk-rock supergroup masterminded by Fotheringay’s Trevor Lucas, he was accompanied by Linda Peters, his romantic partner since the end of the 1960s. Somewhere between the Bunch, sessions for Richard’s first solo album, and a series of live performances (some captured here), the couple found time to marry. Once Henry the Human Fly proved to be an ignominious beginning to his career—legend has it that it was the poorest seller at Reprise Records at that point—the Thompsons formalized their collaboration, touring British folk clubs as a pair and cutting an album together.
The resulting I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is exquisite, balancing the black depths of “Withered and Died” with the spiritual deliverance of “When I Get to the Border.” Omens and misfortune give the record a heavy, foreboding heart, yet the music never quite descends into grimness. Hope lingers on the edges of the title track; the entire affair benefits from the way the Thompsons, surrounded by a sympathetic collection of supporting players, let this otherwise fatalistic, earthbound music breathe. Some of the gloom lifted on the subsequent Hokey Pokey, in which tempos can be jaunty and the songs often play like gimlet-eyed character sketches. Much of the album feels steeped in old British folk traditions—“Smiffy’s Glass Eye” sways like a sea shanty—yet where I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight appears to float outside of time, Hokey Pokey carries scant evidence of its era. “Georgie on a Spree” lopes along on rounded edges, “The Egypt Room” gets considerable mileage out of its desert trappings, and there’s a slight hippie haze to the ballads, particularly the spiritually settled “A Heart Needs a Home."
By the time Hokey Pokey hit stores in 1975, the Thompsons had converted to Sufism, a sect of Islam that renounced materialism in favor of introspection. Fittingly, Pour Down Like Silver, the album the duo recorded prior to an extended retreat in a Sufi community, is an inward affair. So slow and stately that the rhythm section often provides as much texture as momentum, Pour Down Like Silver wears its austerity with pride. Unlike previous Richard Thompson compositions, songs don’t dwell upon dark twists of fate; sadness is felt deeply but then let go.
Soon, Richard and Linda Thompson let music itself go. Upon the encouragement of Richard’s religious mentor, the duo abandoned the stage and the studio to pursue a monastic life within the confines of their chosen community (which, as both Thompsons have stressed over the years, was not a commune). Linda grew impatient with this lifestyle first, but it wasn’t until Richard decided to return to music that they left their community behind to resume their career. A clutch of unreleased live versions of otherwise unrecorded songs from their 1977 comeback tour are featured on the fifth disc of Hard Luck Stories. They tell a fascinating tale in which the duo pursues a shaggy hybrid of folk, funk, jazz, and Middle Eastern music. Thompson later dismissed these tunes, claiming, “some songs deserve to fall off the radar,” yet these performances, however unwieldy, are a vital transition between the stillness of Pour Down Like Silver and its burnished successor, 1978’s First Light.
On First Light, the two abandoned their ragged fusion in favor of a streamlined folk rock so polished it could almost be classified as soft rock. Spirituality remained a paramount concern in Richard’s songwriting, but his intent could be hard to discern beneath the layers of studio varnish. Still, these gleaming surfaces help highlight the underlying sweetness of Linda’s voice, and some songs cut through the gloss, such as the wistful “Pavanne” and “Layla,” which is so loose, it’s nearly funky. “Layla”—not a cover of Eric Clapton’s song of the same name—pointed toward the lively Sunnyvista, the 1979 LP that closed out their ill-fated stint at Chrysalis Records. Bright and brash, Sunnyvista plays like a breezy riposte to the duo’s heavy-hearted masterworks; even the slow-crawling “Sisters” skirts the pain that lies at its core. It’s the rare Richard and Linda Thompson record that engages with contemporary sounds and ideas.
When Sunnyvista didn’t snag a new audience for the Thompsons, Chrysalis dropped the duo. Fellow British folk rocker Gerry Rafferty offered to bankroll a new album, but Richard bristled at the “Baker Street” hitmaker pushing his duo too far into the middle of the road. The experience still seems to sting the Thompsons: Only a few songs from the scrapped album, dubbed Rafferty’s Folly by fans, appear on Hard Luck Stories, all of which are familiar from other CD reissues. Scrounge up some of the rejected cuts floating around on the internet, such as the original take on the tense, propulsive “Don’t Renege on Our Love,” and it’s easy to hear why they didn’t make the cut: They’re stiff and lifeless in a way Richard and Linda Thompson never were again. Once every label passed on Rafferty’s project, the Thompsons reunited with Joe Boyd, the original producer of Fairport Convention, to re-record the songs for the album that became Shoot Out the Lights.
Shoot Out the Lights hangs heavy in the legacy of Richard and Linda Thompson: It was their first album to garner a significant audience in America and the last they recorded together. The divorce followed so swiftly after the album’s release that the record is sometimes said to have been made as the couple separated, which isn’t quite true. Certainly, it doesn’t take a close listen to determine these are songs written by a man whose restlessness is overtaking his spirit. If Thompson winds up pitying himself a bit too much on “A Man in Need,” “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”—one of only two songs in their catalog co-written by both musicians—acts as its soulful counterbalance, placing blame for a decaying relationship squarely at the feet of the man beset by wanderlust.
Richard and Linda Thompson closed Shoot Out the Lights—and their joint career—with “Wall of Death,” a song whose central metaphor compares romance to an amusement park ride. The song opens with the refrain, “Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time”; the line could be interpreted as a desire to give romance another shot, or to run out and find new love. Richard chose the latter route, but his relationship with Linda persists to this day. She invited him to play on her 2002 comeback Fashionably Late, and in 2014 the pair formed the band Family with their son Teddy and daughter Kami, along with various extended relatives. The latter-day mending of fences somewhat tempers the myth of turmoil that hangs over Shoot Out the Lights, and it’s to Hard Luck Stories’ credit that there’s a hint of that reconciliation in the box’s conclusion, in which the duo can be heard tearing through a rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “High School Confidential” taken from their final tour from 1982. The selection neatly dovetails with another rock’n’roll oldie that opens the set (a barreling version of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock & Roller” by the Bunch), but it’s more than a nifty trick of sequencing. “High School Confidential” illustrates how Richard and Linda Thompson could conjure joy even during their darkest hour, underscoring Hard Luck Stories’s greatest lesson: No matter how high the peak nor how low the valley, the two musicians never lost their incandescent chemistry.
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