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You won't hear him on mainstream radio because (1) his songs are intelligent, well-crafted, and idiosyncratic (2) his voice isn't conventionally pretty, and (3) he lost his major label deal and now records for a small indie. And he plays a jaw-droppingly magnificent guitar.
If you don't know his stuff, here's the deep background. He was a founding member of Fairport Convention back in the '60s, when they were a bunch of singer/songwriters knocking around the London folk clubs, and were collectively impressed by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and all the other American bands that singer/songwriters were forming under the influence of whatever there was to influence. He was still there when Fairport discovered their own folk heritage, and recorded Liege and Lief and Full House, still the best records of English electric folk rock ever made. Then he went solo, and has made a couple dozen records on his own, with a body of songs massively influenced by British Isles ballad and dance tunes. As a guitarist, he's been invited to appear on boatloads of other people's records, from other English folkies to American experimentalists like Henry Kaiser and David (Pere Ubu) Thomas to African high-life musicians, and even Rolling Stone recognized him as one of their top 100 guitar slingers; I think he came in at something like #17.
His soloing is peculiar. While the traditional dance tune sound is seldom far from the surface, he allows incursions from other genres. He'll do a fair amount of rockabilly style chicken picking, or sweep the pick across all the strings in a flurry of odd notes. He does a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs, and when he's in that frame of mind his guitar almost sounds like something else, clarinet or bagpipe or something. And he doesn't always stick with standard harmony or the "blues box," even though his song melodies seldom stray from the diatonic folkie realm. His fingerpicking is amazing; he can chord with half of his hands and play contrapuntal accompaniment with the other halves. He uses several alternate tunings, and I don't know what they are, so I can't follow what he's doing by looking at him :-(
Can you tell I'm a partisan? I don't claim he's the *best guitarist in the world,* because it seems to me if you really were the best, you could cut everybody else, and there are too many other magnificent players out there with their own styles. I would never claim Thompson could do Fripp or Verlaine. But neither could Fripp or Verlaine do Thompson, and his style is fully mature and elegant and highly expressive, and his technique is world class, and he deserves your attention. Unless you hate everything remotely Celtic :-)
All that said, I'm disappointed in his latest record, The Old Kit Bag. I think he took the idea of being on an indie too much to heart, and deliberately tried to sound like REM or something. My favorite of his from the '90s is Mirror Blue; it's full of good-to-great songs and contains several solos that just might nail you to the floor. And of course the classic Thompson record is Shoot Out the Lights, which "everybody knows" is about the breakup of his marriage to his long time singing partner Linda-- except he swears it isn't, and really, the stuff he's writing about on SOTL is the same sort of alienation and desperation he's always written about-- and that's the other reason you won't hear him on the radio, he is definitely not a feel-good kinda guy.
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