RICHARD & LINDA THOMPSON Hard Luck Stories 1972–1982 UMC
LINDA PETERS and Richard Thompson’s partnership began with a dreadful conversation in a Chelsea restaurant, and ended with the ‘tour from hell’, car theft and an arrest. In between, there were those experiences common to most relationships. You know the sort: marriage, children, six poorly selling albums and more than a year in a couple of intense Sufi Muslim communities.
Hard Luck Stories attempts to catalogue, across eight CDs, this fragile decade the Thompsons spent together and all that they created in that tumultuous time. Inside there’s one masterpiece and three very fine records, all remastered. There are also two albums disowned by their creators and reissued here for the first time in almost 30 years, along with demos and live tracks.
The Thompsons came from folk-rock, of course, with the couple first meetingat London’s Sound Techniques studio in late 1969. But despite the occasional dabble with accordions and crumhorns, the duo’s material was all Richard’s own, oscillating between earthy misanthropy and devotional hymns. Whatever the content, Linda sang with a beautifully sad, ageless poise, her deep voice neither as unadorned as Shirley Collins or the Watersons’, nor as high and clear as Maddy Prior or Jacqui McShee’s. Their first tours in late 1972 found the pair visiting dreary folk clubs, Linda driving as Richard couldn’t, their rare go at trad-arr material represented here by a strident “Napoleon’s Dream”, Richard puffing as if he’s just run from Cecil Sharp House to the Rainbow. His solo debut, April’s , had featured Linda, and a couple of those tracks also appear on the ‘early years’ disc, along with rock’n’roll numbers the pair covered as part of supergroup The Bunch – Linda and Sandy Denny’s take on the Everlys’ “When Will I Be Loved” is a keeper.
