McCabe’s, a labyrinthine guitar shop in Santa Monica, has not changed much since the 1970s. Back then, though, there was a good chance you might find Fay Wray, mistress of the original King Kong and mother of the owner, wandering its rooms. Then, too, the decor was even more rudimentary.
According to Richard Thompson, as he sniffs disapprovingly at a rather musty guitar, the addition of a carpet spoiled the acoustics a little. Thompson — diffident guitar hero, founding father of folk-rock, Englishman abroad — has a bit of history with McCabe’s. He first visited this Californian haven for roots musicians nearly 40 years ago, on tour with his original band, the revolutionary folk-rockers Fairport Convention. In the 1970s he formed a duo with his first wife, Linda Thompson, and made a series of emotionally draining albums. In 1981, just before he began work on the final Richard & Linda album, Thompson flew to Los Angeles and played a solo show in the back room of McCabe’s, where he sits now.
“I was totally jet-lagged,” he recalls. “I woke up at the end of the set and thought: ‘What have I done?’”
While there, he also “renewed his acquaintance” with Nancy Covey, who booked artists to perform at McCabe’s. “It was the end of my first marriage and I was, er, moving on,” he recalls with characteristic discretion. In fact, Thompson was initiating one of the most visceral but musically rewarding rock break-ups, catalogued with compelling honesty on Richard & Linda’s Shoot out the Lights (1982).
Today, few people would spot 56- year-old Richard Thompson as either a traitorous lover or, indeed, one of Britain’s finest songwriters and guitarists. But Thompson is not your stereotypical middle-aged English guitar hero exiled in California. The man who became a follower of Sufism (an esoteric strand of Islam) in the 1970s remains a relaxed Muslim, intolerant of fundamentalists of all faiths, but he has the air and appearance of a North London scoutmaster whose latest field trip has strayed further than planned. His concerns remain more Muswell Hill than Laurel Canyon: the finessing of his wayward wrist-spinners; his garden; the junior football career of his youngest son.
In fact, for the past few years, he has coached his son’s football team, a task made trickier when one father is demanding that his son Wolfgang plays centre forward, and that father is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“He’s a likeable guy but he’s an egomaniac,” says Thompson, “and he can’t stand the thought of not being in control or losing. Sometimes I played Wolfgang at centre forward and sometimes, if I wanted to p*** off Arnold, I’d put him elsewhere.”
Thompson and Covey have lived just north of Santa Monica for 15 years now. At one end of their road is the Pacific Ocean, at the other end a state park “where you can hike for three days”. The Keystone Cops used to film along the same street. “East Coast history bores me,” he claims. “I’m not interested in Paul Revere’s ride or the Liberty Bell. But the Keystone Cops: now you’re talking.”
Thanks to the success of his solo career in America, Thompson lives there chiefly for work purposes. “The convenient thing about the LA area is that it’s so bland,” he says. “Culturally, it doesn’t impinge on you. If I lived in Paris, somewhere there’s real culture, then I would absorb it.”
California has made a negligible impact on Thompson’s songwriting. Over the past 20 years, his solo albums have become, if anything, more quintessentially English. His latest is called Front Parlour Ballads and is one of the best. Recorded mostly in his garage, its characters find love by Old Thames Side and contemplate lives “dull as the pewter sky over North West 11”.
“It could be seen as the classic exile thing, where you live in Jamaica or somewhere, but you have a very English lifestyle,” he agrees. “It’s a very Victorian idea.” The Victorians did not have the technology that allows Thompson to listen to Radio 4 and download English newspapers. Nevertheless, his songs are rooted in an England that no longer exists.
“Yeah, I suppose the more I’m away, the more I’m out of touch with Britain,” he concedes. “I look at the newspapers and there are politicians I don’t know; huge numbers of TV personalities I don’t know. I started to lose touch around the time of Mr Blobby, and I think that was probably the right time.
“This might sound hypocritical, but I miss the greyness, the black-and-white Britain of the 1950s and 1960s.”
If this gives the impression that Thompson’s songs sound like twee exercises in nostalgia, a listen to Front Parlour Ballads dispels such notions. For such an apparently well adjusted man, his characters remain flawed and disconsolate, cursed with wayward partners and unstable relationships.
“If you really want to say what love is,” he explains, “it’s more complicated than a Julie Andrews song. A good love song is one that says, ‘I love you in spite of. . .’ or, ‘Sometimes I don’t love you, but most of the time I do’.”
He also writes curious and wistful songs such as A Solitary Life, in which he longs for an existence anathema to rock cliché: drab suburban anonymity, “a life of small horizons”.
“I worry why I wrote that song,” he admits. “There’s a bit of the suburbs in me that I can’t quite get rid of.”
It is easy to portray Thompson as a displaced little Englander, with his shirt neatly tucked into his shorts and his concerns that “standards are slowly slipping” at the BBC. But there’s something very modern about him, too: a practising Muslim singing about 1950s England from the comfort of a California garage, kept in touch with the homeland by the internet rather than the expatriate community. We talk about a grim English theme pub in Santa Monica, and it is clear he wouldn't choose it as his local, even if he hadn’t been teetotal for the past 30 years. “The clientele would disturb you,” he says. “It’s chaps drinking Watney’s and playing darts.”
Perhaps, though, his life is as close to suburban normality as a fêted professional musician — the nineteenth best guitarist ever, according to Rolling Stone magazine — could manage.
“Well, it kind of is,” he ponders, “but with sunshine, that’s the difference. There’s more hiking and swimming than you get in Surbiton.”
Front Parlour Ballads is out on Cooking Vinyl on August 8
