Podcast appearances and mentions of Richard Thompson

JB has a classic from Richard Thompson, some Raggle Taggle gypsies, Clash Vooar and a kitted cat!

Irish singer-songwriter Mark Geary left Ireland with a one-way ticket to New York and a heart full of hope over twenty years ago. There, in Sin-é cafe, Mark honed his craft and sang alongside the best of them, including the late Jeff Buckley. Time Out NY said, “His delicate songs about love and defiance recall Richard Thompson and John Lennon.” Geary has featured on bills with musicians as diverse as Glen Hansard, John Prine, Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, Coldplay and The Frames amongst others, plus extensive headlining tours in Europe, the US and Switzerland. He has composed the full score for three films - Loggerheads (2005), Steel City (2006) and Sons of Perdition (2010) - and has had many songs featured in films and TV programmes. In 2022, he completed a sell-out month-long residency in the new Little Whelan's in Dublin where, with his band, he welcomed special guests each week and personally curated the shows. 2023 saw Geary tour the north and central regions of Italy as well as Ireland, selling out Whelan's (upstairs), Couglan's, Phil Grimes (Co. Waterford) and Castle St. (Co. Mayo). His latest album, In The Time Of Locusts, was released in February 2024, and was recorded in his cottage in the forest with the help of Ruth O' Mahony Brady, Glen Hansard, Dave Hingerty, Dave and Karl Odlum. Following his acclaimed 2024 album, In The Time of Locusts (4 stars, The Irish Times), Antebellum is an intimate six-track EP bound with tender acoustic instrumentation and the familiar warmth of Geary's sincere vocals and reflective lyricism. Recalling, vulnerability and enduring hope, the EP reflects Geary's creative response to one of Ireland's stormiest New Year's on record. He says, “I stared out to a January of rain and cold and thought, ‘I need to get back to my desk'. If I stayed watching the news, or in a cycle of streaming shows, I'd crumble. I threw out my telly and set up a writing room by my bed. Tuned all my guitars and would jump out of bed and sing. These songs are what came of it: Fear, regret, love, romance, terror, and the weather forecast.” Navigating moments of reposeful contemplation to passages of trepidation, Geary reflects on the human condition within a more concentrated run time, where each track emerges as a resonant meditation on fear, love, regret, and hope. With six studio albums, three live albums and what will be his second ever EP release with Antebellum, writing, touring and live performance remain Geary' s lifeblood. Treating Antebellum with trademark Geary honesty, his lyrics slice right through to the core, revealing a life laid bare of human emotional frailty, failed relationships, tenderness, hurt, making amends, desire and parting. His treasured guitar collection is always close at hand, each set up in a different tuning and ready to capture any emotion.

What does it mean to become a "Sound Liberator"?In this episode of The Piano Pod, pianist, composer, educator, filmmaker, scholar, and advocate Joe Williams joins host Yukimi Song for a wide-ranging conversation on artistry, legacy, belonging, improvisation, education, and the evolving landscape of concert music.Currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Williams has built a multifaceted career championing composers of African descent while developing his own distinctive creative voice. From premiering new works and producing documentary films to contributing scholarship on Florence Price and composing music rooted in liberation, spirituality, and human connection, Williams exemplifies what it means to be a 21st-century artist.Throughout the episode, listeners will hear musical excerpts featuring works by Florence Price, Maria Thompson Corley, Richard Thompson, Brian Raphael Nabors, and Joe Williams himself.

In November 2024 Harshita Brella's body was found in the boot of a car in Ilford, East London, approximately 100 miles away from where she lived in Corby, Northamptonshire. Now her family have arrived in the UK to appeal for renewed action by police in the stalled investigation into her death; bringing the alleged murderer to justice. Nuala McGovern is joined by Harshita's sister Sonia Dabas and Poonam Joshi, founder of Indian Ladies UK who support Indian victims of domestic abuse.The England Rugby team now has 38 straight victories, 8 Six Nations titles, the Rugby World Cup title and a world number one ranking after their latest victory in the Six Nations yesterday. The BBC pundit Ruby Tui said they may just be the best team ever, in any sport. But is their dominance hurting the game at large? Nuala is joined by Katy Daley-McLean, who was captain of the England team when they won the 2014 Women's Rugby World Cup.Folk and classical singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney has collaborated with some of the biggest names in folk music, including Shirley Collins and Richard Thompson, and her The Queen of Hearts collaborative album with the Decemberists was Grammy nominated. She discusses her current album and how it felt to have her music included in the box office hit film Wuthering Heights.Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power is the title of the new book from Lauren Elkin. For millennia women singing were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. But in this part memoir, part feminist manifesto, Lauren Elkin explores how women from Cyndi Lauper to feminist punk rockstar Kathleen Hanna to Beyonce have used their voices as women to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism.Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Andrea Kidd

“My father taught me … keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” – Michael (Al Pacino) The Godfather Part II (1974) Could this explain our ‘dearest allies’, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Great Britain? Today, we focus on the increasingly tenuous, unholy ‘alliance’ between America and Israel in particular. Is it me, or does Pike’s outline of WWIII (i.e., PZ vs. PI) in his Aug 15, 1871 letter to Italian Illuminatus, Giuseppi Mazzini seem like it’s coming more to fruition with each passing day…? Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. – Exodus 20:16 KJV Links Videos / Clips [x] = Played ‘War is Back on the Menu’ – RPI Lake Jackson Conference 2026. – YouTube playlist Daniel McAdams – “The War on War Reporting.” [x] Brian McGlinchey – “How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World.” Robert Pape – “Iran and the Escalation Trap: Avoiding a Future of Forever Wars in the Middle East.” Marjorie Taylor Greene – “MAGA is Dead. Where Do We Go From Here?” Joe Kent – “A National Security Strategy For Our Republic, Not An Empire.” Ron Paul – Lake Jackson 2026 Headlines [x] = Mentioned / Discussed [x] The Labour Theory of Value [x] Israeli Paper Admits That The Mossad Astroturfed The January Riots In Iran. – IAK Daily Update [x] Israeli Paper Admits That The Mossad Contrived The Riots In Iran [x] Israeli Paper Admits That The Mossad Astroturfed The January Riots In Iran. [x] AI Is Already Going Rogue — Wreaking Havoc Because It Feels Like It [x] How'd Lutnick Do? Depends Who You Ask. “Very good talks” Links for 5-7-26 – by Jim Cardoza – LibertyPen Origins of Declaration of Independence | Video | C-SPAN.org Silicon Valley’s Cultural Cosplay at the Met Gala Is a Dangerous Smokescreen In OpenAI trial, former technology chief says Altman sowed ‘chaos,’ distrust among top executives The Rest [x] = Mentioned / Discussed Related to Brian McGlinchey’s RPI Talk [x] By Way of Deception – Wikipedia [x] Fox News Series on Israeli Spying on US Telecommunications [x] Israeli spying in the USA: Suppressed four-part Fox News series with Carl Cameron : Fox News : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive [x] How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World – The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity [x] Join The US Military – Kill And Die For Israel [x] How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World [x] Brian McGlinchey | Substack [x] Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | Substack Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | The Libertarian Institute Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | Facebook [x] Rachel Corrie death: struggle for justice culminates in Israeli court | Rachel Corrie | The Guardian [x] Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands: Sakwa, Richard: 9781784535278: Amazon.com: Books > NATO exists to manage the threats created by its existence… [x] FrontPage Magazine – Our Culture, What's Left Of It > Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. [x] Websters 1828 – Webster’s Dictionary 1828 – Probity > Primarily, tried virtue or integrity, or approved actions; but in general, strict honesty; sincerity; veracity; integrity in principle, or strict conformity of actions to the laws of justice. probity of mind or principle is best evinced by probity of conduct in social dealings, particularly in adhering to strict integrity in the observance and performance of rights called imperfect, which public laws to not reach and cannot enforce. ‘On This Day’ Related [x] WW3 – Albert Pike and the Three World Wars > The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion. We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time. [x] Orange Crush (song) – Wikipedia [x] We Didn’t Start the Fire – Wikipedia [x] Forest Fire as a Military Weapon – AD0509724.pdf [x] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Road Warrior Radio – Facebook > The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. [x] Naturalism (philosophy) – Wikipedia On This Day Events May 2026 Calendar of Public Holidays | Office Holidays Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2026 What day is it today? Important events every day ad-free | United States OTD Worldwide Public Holidays Thursday May 7th 2026 | Office Holidays On This Day – What Happened on May 7 Today in History: May 7, RMS Lusitania torpedoed, sunk by German submarine | AP News What Happened on May 7 – On This Day What Happened on May 7 | HISTORY May 7 – Wikipedia What Happened On May 7 In History? 07 | May | 2020 | Executed Today Holidays National Day of Prayer Historical Events 2004 – Marine biologist Richard Thompson coins the term “microplastics” 2000 – Vladimir Putin becomes President of Russia: The former KGB officer enjoys high approval ratings in his country as living standards in Russia have improved drastically under his rule. Internationally, he has been criticized for his authoritarian style of government. 1998 – Daimler-Benz (Mercedes-Benz) buys Chrysler for $40 billion and forms DaimlerChrysler in the largest industrial merger in history. 1984 – Monsanto and six other chemical companies agreed to pay a $180 million settlement to Vietnam veterans who were exposed to the chemical herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. 1975 – President Gerald R. Ford formally declared an end to the “Vietnam era.” In Ho Chi Minh City — formerly Saigon — the Viet Cong celebrated its takeover. 1960 – Leonid Brezhnev becomes leader of the USSR 1954 – the 55-day Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam ended with Vietnamese insurgents overrunning French forces; it would be the last major battle of the First Indochina War. 1952 – The concept of the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, is first published by Geoffrey Dummer 1946 – Sony is founded: The company started as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering. It is now one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products. 1945 – Germany’s Nazi regime surrenders unconditionally: The capitulation ended World War II, one of the bloodiest conflicts of all time. According to estimates, between 40 and 71 million people died in the war and the Holocaust initiated by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. 1915 – A German U-Boat sinks the RMS Lusitania: 1198 lives were lost in the attack, making it the deadliest shipwreck during World War I. The fact that some of the dead were U.S. citizens influenced the country’s decision to enter the war in 1917. 1912 – Columbia University approves plans to award the Pulitzer Prize in several categories, after establishment by Joseph Pulitzer 1895 – Alexander Popov demonstrates the world’s first radio receiver: The Russian physicist had initially built the device as a lightning detector. He achieved the first radio transmission between two buildings the following year. In some parts of the former Soviet Union the anniversary of this day is celebrated as Radio Day. 1867 – Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite in England, the first of three patents he receives for the explosive material 1843 – First Japanese immigrant arrives in the U.S. 1794 – French Revolution: Robespierre introduces the Cult of the Supreme Being in the National Convention as the new state religion of the French First Republic. 1718 – The city of New Orleans is founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. 1429 – English siege of Orleans broken by Joan of Arc and the French army 558 – In Constantinople, the dome of the Hagia Sophia collapses. Justinian I immediately orders that the dome be rebuilt. 351 – The Jewish revolt against Gallus breaks out. After his arrival at Antioch, the Jews begin a rebellion in Palestine. Births 1997 – Cameron Young, American golfer 1950 – Tim Russert, American television journalist and lawyer (died 2008) 1933 – Johnny Unitas, American football player and sportscaster (died 2002) 1919 – Eva Perón, Argentinian actress, 25th First Lady of Argentina (died 1952) 1901 – Gary Cooper, American actor (died 1961) 1892 – Archibald MacLeish, American poet, playwright, and lawyer (died 1982) 1885 – George “Gabby” Hayes, American actor (died 1969) 1840 – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian composer and educator (died 1893) 1833 – Johannes Brahms, German pianist and composer (died 1897) 1812 – Robert Browning, English poet (died 1889) 1711 – David Hume, Scottish economist, historian, philosopher (died 1776) Deaths 2011 – Seve Ballesteros, Spanish golfer (born 1957) 2000 – Douglas Fairbanks Jr., American captain, actor, and producer, only son of silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (born 1909) 1998 – Eddie Rabbitt, American musician (born 1941) 1968 – Craig Wood, distinguished American golfer (born 1901) 1940 – George Lansbury, English journalist and politician (born 1859) 973 – Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor, also known as Otto the Great (born 912)

The Crossing No.86 from RaidersBroadcast.com, as aired in April 2026, featuring the classic 1975 album “Pour Down Like Silver”, from Richard & Linda Thompson. TRACK LISTING: Couldn't Love You More - John Martyn; Things Behind the Sun - Nick Drake; Te Apartas De Mi - Compay Segundo; De Una Manera Espantosa - Chucho Valdes & Irakere; Streets of Paradise - Richard & Linda Thompson; Hard Luck Stories - Richard & Linda Thompson; I Think of You - Renaissance; This Woman's Work - Kate Bush  ; I'll Always Leave the Light On - Kris Drever; Proud to Play a Pipe - Breabach; Dimming of the Day / Dargai - Richard & Linda Thompson; Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair - Richard & Linda Thompson; Road to the North / Hanging Bridge / All at Sea - Kathryn Tickell.

Can Brendon McCullum prove he can adapt and learn after the ECB announced he will remain as England Head Coach? Can the ECB improve the culture of the team both on and off the field? What will England do to adapt and learn after a 4-1 defeat in the Ashes? Has Richard Gould and Richard Thompson made the right decision by backing Brendon McCullum to turn things around? Will there now be an improved relationship between England and County Cricket? Will there be more accountability when it comes to England selection?Instagram: @talkSPORT_CricketYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9vsecLHNgTj-yoNumw63lQX: @Cricket_TS @NeilManthorp @Harmy611Hosts: Neil Manthorp and Steve HarmisonProducer: Scott TaylorHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pointing the scanner of inquiry at the baggage carousel of news to see what gets the lights flashing, which this week includes … … we know what's making Morrissey miserable … bands that can get a whole stadium singing … the rock star who misses the music press most … “a Likely Lads for the rave generation”, anyone? … the speed at which news now travels … Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson, Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, Steve Martin and Martin Short … in praise of inseparable old pals! … Anfield Rap (Red Machine in Full Effect)! Lift it High (All About Belief)! Whatever happened to football singles? … I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, Trouble Over Bridgewater: albums you bought because you liked the title … “English radio stations won't play new music!” Really? Plus birthday guest Adrian Ainsworth on the Sensual World, Us, Monster, the Rhythm of the Saints and other great experimental sequels to big-selling albums.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pointing the scanner of inquiry at the baggage carousel of news to see what gets the lights flashing, which this week includes … … we know what's making Morrissey miserable … bands that can get a whole stadium singing … the rock star who misses the music press most … “a Likely Lads for the rave generation”, anyone? … the speed at which news now travels … Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson, Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, Steve Martin and Martin Short … in praise of inseparable old pals! … Anfield Rap (Red Machine in Full Effect)! Lift it High (All About Belief)! Whatever happened to football singles? … I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, Trouble Over Bridgewater: albums you bought because you liked the title … “English radio stations won't play new music!” Really? Plus birthday guest Adrian Ainsworth on the Sensual World, Us, Monster, the Rhythm of the Saints and other great experimental sequels to big-selling albums.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pointing the scanner of inquiry at the baggage carousel of news to see what gets the lights flashing, which this week includes … … we know what's making Morrissey miserable … bands that can get a whole stadium singing … the rock star who misses the music press most … “a Likely Lads for the rave generation”, anyone? … the speed at which news now travels … Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson, Ben Sidran and Boz Scaggs, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer, Steve Martin and Martin Short … in praise of inseparable old pals! … Anfield Rap (Red Machine in Full Effect)! Lift it High (All About Belief)! Whatever happened to football singles? … I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, Trouble Over Bridgewater: albums you bought because you liked the title … “English radio stations won't play new music!” Really? Plus birthday guest Adrian Ainsworth on the Sensual World, Us, Monster, the Rhythm of the Saints and other great experimental sequels to big-selling albums.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we need new math to explain dark matter? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Paul Mecurio explore unsolved problems in math, simulation theory, base systems and more with mathematician Terence Tao.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/is-the-universe-a-math-problem-with-terence-tao/Thanks to our Patrons Drake Mccammon, Lourosa Thomas, Christopher, WireRider, Kevin Walter, Erik Majsai, Zoe Briskey, Roger W. Cavallo Jr., Tibi Chiorean, Maggie, Guy Cummins, Sean E, Sebastian, Ty Powell, Iceo Bergins, Anissa Aponte, Keith Autry, Guy_%, Kyle Kern, Scott Morris, Francisco Cueto, Psychoquark, Joe Rivera, Chris Coyle, Brian White, Michael Boring, Adrian Mihai, Rowdy Payton, Ben Huang, Jerred Cook, KennyS, Gonzalo Oria, Herb Tobias, Kevin Revels, Sean Taylor, AndersonRobotics, Faruk Arslan, Antonio Alcala, Rudolfo Munguia, Tim Winter, B Boyette, Pilar Rodriguez, Justin Brackenbury, Kosta Papageorgiou, Mickey Mouse, Charles Garcia, Sultan Bin Zaal, Brian Rall, Mike, Dave, Rodolphe Phelouzat, Joshua Fisher, Xan Kriegor, Michael L. Price, Wendy Welch, RichInDC, Justin Lebron, Brad Cook, Auralen Isara Maelis, Obi Wan Kenobi, Avinav Abraham, Stanko, Colton Murphy, Patrick Quinn, Haze, John Stamm, Roberto Delgado, Hans Gab, Richard Nolan, Tony R, Trisha Hadden, Stephen Flenley, Robby Vasquez, Abraham, Dr. Bebop, Damon, Richard Thompson, Prince N., David Rivanis, Daniel Slack, Guy Bergeson, Shawna Couplin, MrFish, Lisette Ramos-Voigt, Scott Mccoy, Steffen Thomas, Cassio Magellan Campos, Rodger Reinhardt, Michael Becker, Billie Lyons-Super, Todd Chambers, Mo Elzeinab, Talal, Joseph Glynn, John Hermanns, TheNaden, Mark Parker, Seth Davison, Anon328648926, and David Bentley for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

(00:00:00) Beaten to Death - Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos / 2022 (00:29:25) Phish - Billy Breathes / 1996 (01:00:56) Richard Thompson - Two Letter Words / 1996

Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, Jude Johnstone began writing songs at about age 8.  At 18, she was "discovered" by Bruce Springsteen's saxophonist, Clarence Clemons.  After spending some time in New York and New Jersey under his wing, in 1979, she moved to Los Angeles, where her songs quickly became sought after by other artists. She has been covered by Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Bette Midler, Johnny Cash, Stevie Nicks, Mary Black, Jennifer Warnes, Trisha Yearwood and more, including a #1 song for Yearwood's debut album called "The Woman Before Me" which earned her a BMI award. Her songs then appeared on 8 other Yearwood cds. She also penned the title track to Johnny Cash's 1997 Grammy winning album "Unchained." Jude has released 9 cds of her own that run the gamut from Celtic, Gospel, Americana, to Jazz, Blues, and even Big Band. She has been featured on the CBS Early Show, and NPR Radio's "Morning Edition." Her songs have also been on several television shows including "Nurse Jackie",  "Army Wives" and "Lie To Me."Jude has opened shows for Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Richard Thompson, Shawn Colvin, Chris Hillman, 10,000 Maniacs, David Crosby and many others and toured Europe under her own name numerous times. "If Jude Johnstone is not yet a musical household name, she sure as hell should be." Henry Carrigan, No Depression"Turning emotional pain into art is a tricky business.Sometimes I wonder if the end result is worth it.Jude Johnstone makes a good case that it is."Rodney Crowell"Jude's fertility, in regards to songwriting, is truly awe inspiring." Bonnie Raitt..."She's patently a master at capturing the heart's dark and desperate moments, just as she's capable of  encouraging belief in its resurrection." Mike Davies, Roots and Branches/The BeatTheme song: “Hollywood Faded' by Luna Halo@treymitchellphotography @feeding_the_senses_unsensoredfacebook.com/profile.php?id=100074368084848www.threads.net/@treymitchellphotographyftsunashville@gmail.com

Listing Joe Boyd’s most significant accomplishments as a producer, label owner, and music historian is a tall order. A short list of artists he’s worked with includes Nick Drake (heard here), Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, The Incredible String Band, R.E.M., Vashti Bunyan, Billy Bragg, and 10,000 Maniacs. Additionally, he was the founder of Hannibal Records, the label responsible for bringing the term “world music” into the lexicon, as well as serving as a music producer for Warner Bros., where he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange and 1972’s Deliverance. His most recent work is as the author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, as well as And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, which came out in 2024. On this episode, hear how songs by Fats Domino, Fairport Convention, and Carlos Gardel shaped his sensibilities. Boyd will be a part of this year’s Big Ears Festival taking place in Knoxville, TN in March of 2026.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, DL shares personal reflections on his vacation while diving into the Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest albums and songs. He discusses the influence of The Stooges and Black Flag on punk rock, critiques contemporary artists like John Mayer, and highlights Richard Thompson's folk music. The conversation also touches on Azalea Banks and her controversial reputation in modern hip-hop.   00:00Introduction and Personal Reflections 08:28Exploring the Rolling Stone Lists 17:15The Stooges and Punk Rock History 25:43Black Flag and the Evolution of Punk 34:17John Mayer and Contemporary Music Critique 42:55Richard Thompson and Folk Influences 51:47Azalea Banks and Modern Hip-Hop Perspectives

Microplastics are everywhere, from our oceans and ecosystems to our food, water, and bodies, but their story began with a simple question: what are we missing? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Richard Thompson, marine biologist at the University of Plymouth and the scientist who coined the term microplastics. Tune in to hear how curiosity led to a landmark discovery, why plastic pollution is fundamentally a design problem that affects public health, and why science must now shift from defining the problem to rigorously testing solutions.Dr. Richard Thompson is a Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth and a leading authority on plastic pollution. His research has shaped global understanding of microplastics and informed major policies to improve environmental health, including the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive and legislation banning microbeads in cosmetics. As an independent scientist, his work guides policymakers, industry, and the public toward safer and more sustainable use of plastics.

Rural traditions, from morris dancing to dry stone walling and tartan weaving, could be internationally protected by UNESCO. The government has launched its search for examples of living heritage to go onto an inventory.With dairy companies continuing to cut the prices they pay farmers for milk, the man appointed to ensure fairness and transparency in the UK agricultural supply chain says he'll be watching out for any breaches in the coming months. Richard Thompson is the first in the new adjudicator role, looking first at the dairy supply chain. His report says some farmers are still afraid to speak out in case of reprisals.The UK has temporarily banned all imports of pig products from Spain after an outbreak of African swine fever in wild boars there. It's Spain's first case since 1994. The disease is spread by ticks and can be devastating to commercial herds. The National Pig Association here says it's vital our government puts adequate controls at borders to keep the disease out.The first cases of bluetongue disease In Northern Ireland have been confirmed. Two cows on a farm in County Down have the disease with a further 44 in the same herd suspected of having it. A 20km control zone has been implemented around Bangor in County Down. There have been more than 200 cases in England and Wales since July this year, though none in Scotland so far. This year's summer drought has cost arable farmers in England an estimated £828 million. The think tank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit says crops were hit by a very hot spring and summer as well as the resulting lack of water.All week we've been looking at winter jobs, including hedge laying and tidying sheds.Presenter = Charlotte Smith Producer = Rebecca Rooney

Rural traditions - from morris dancing, to dry stone walling to tartan weaving - could be internationally protected by UNESCO. The government has launched its search for examples of living heritage, from the people who are involved with them to go onto an inventory. With dairy companies continuing to cut the prices they pay farmers for milk, the man appointed to ensure fairness and transparency in the UK agricultural supply chain says he'll be watching out for any breaches in the coming months. Richard Thompson is the first in the new adjudicator role, looking first at the dairy supply chain. His report, which covers the year from July 2024 to June 2025, says some farmers are still afraid to speak out in case of reprisals. And you've probably noticed cattle vanishing from the fields as they come inside to protect the grass for spring. For livestock farmers this marks the start of months of daily feeding and changing bedding- and as part of our week looking at winter farming jobs we're off to the North York Moors with new entrant Mark Burrell. Presented by Charlotte Smith and produced by Sally Challoner.

Voices are not always needed to create good music – fine instrumentalists make great music on their own. We'll share some tunes from Richard Thompson, The Rebirth Brass Band, Cindy Kallet & Grey Larsen along with a few surprises. Send the singer home … this week (and next) on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysRuss Barenberg / “Little Monk” / When At Last / CompassAlasdair Fraser & Natalie Haas / “Keeping Up With Christine” / Ports of Call / CulburnieJoel Mabus / “Ukulele Scrabble” / Ukulele Crimes / FossilRebirth Brass Band / “You Move Ya Lose” / Rollin' / RounderDon Pedi / “Walking in the Parlor” / Little Songs from The Southern Mountains / Walnut MountainBill Frisell / “Surfer Girl” / Guitar in the Space Age / OkehRichard Thompson / “Rockin' in Rhythm” / Strict Tempo / CarthageRuss Barenberg / “On Milo's Back” / When At Last / CompassCindy Kallet & Grey Larsen / “Playing with a Full Deck” / Cross the Water / Sleepy CreekDavey Graham / “The Road to Lisdoonvarna (Jig & Reel)” / The Complete Guitarist / Stefan Grosman's Guitar WorkshopChris Thile / “Panhandle Rag” / Leading Off / Sugar HillFlaco & Max / “Fiesta alegre” / Legends & Legacies / Smithsonian FolkwaysFleetwood Mac / “Albatross” / The Pious Bird of Good Omen / ColumbiaAl Di Meola / “I'll Follow the Sun” / Across the Universe / Ear MusicPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Listen to the English songwriter and guitarist perform at the 2025 XPoNential Music Festival.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Childcare policy affects all of us at some point in our lives. And depending on where you live, your country's parental leave and early-education policies can determine everything from what you do for a living to how you divide household labor to how you plan for your future. Reporters Maja Stepančič and Uršula Zaletelj took a whirlwind trip across Europe to find out which country does childcare policy best. And even if you don't have kids of your own, we're pretty sure you'll enjoy taking the journey with them. Maja and Uršula are the hosts of the Slovenian-language parenting podcast Šala za starše, or ‘A Joke for Parents'. You can find their show here. This series was fully funded by you, our listeners. Our generous crowdfunders hit our goal within two months, making it possible for us to do extensive reporting fully independently. We couldn't be more grateful. If you're feeling inspired to support The Europeans' ongoing work, please go to patreon.com/europeanspodcast.  Want to support us in another way? Please share this episode with one or two friends who you think might find it interesting. It's the most effective way for us to reach people! Additional resources for this episode:  The Day Iceland Stood Still  UNICEF report on parental leave and family-friendly policies Zoe Williams' Guardian piece “‘These are not numbers – they are people': what ex-communist Slovenia can teach the world about child poverty” 00:00:43 Introducing Uršula Zaletelj and Maja Stepančič 00:05:52 How childcare made this episode about childcare possible 00:13:55 How Icelandic women went on strike and brought the entire country to a halt 00:17:25 A Swedish toddler trouble 00:21:52 Is it best to raise your child in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower? 00:28:26 The longest parental leave in Europe 00:34:54 Italy: La Famiglia Mulino Bianco 00:42:39 No place like home! Written, reported and produced by: Uršula Zaletelj and Maja Stepančič Additional production: Katz Laszlo Editors: Jasmin Baoumy, Katz Laszlo Editorial support: Dominic Kraemer, Katy Lee, Morgan Childs Sound design: Jesse Lou Lawson Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak Music and SFX: Jim Barne, Epidemic, FreeSound.org Artwork: RTiiiKA With thanks to everyone that talked to us for this episode: Mathieu Lefèvre, Ana Marija Sikirić Simčic, Martina Pezer, Petra Klasić, Ivona Ivić Lovrenović, Mojca Dominikovič, Katarina Hovfing, Katy Lee, Stephanie Scherer, Dana Thompson, Richard Thompson, Madalina Ion, Corina Parvu, Alenka Švab, Katarina Bogataj, Carlotta Giordano, Giulia Milan, Letizia Mencarini, Maria Rosaria Gualano and Anne Wiebke Peters. And a final, heartfelt thanks to the wonderful professionals who looked after Uršula and Maja's children so they could work on this episode ❤️ YouTube | Bluesky | Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | Mastodon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | hello@europeanspodcast.com

Named one of the Top 20 Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone, Richard Thompson is one of the world's most critically acclaimed and prolific songwriters. In addition to his beloved catalog and in addition to many other honors - Thompson has received Lifetime Achievement Awards for Songwriting on both sides of the Atlantic.He'll be in the WAMC region early next month, playing The Bardavon in Poughkeepsie, New York on November 7 and Stone Church in Brattleboro, Vermont on November 8.Will Hermes is a regular contributor to NPR, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork. He's the author of “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” and “Lou Reed: The King of New York.” His substack of music writing is at newmusicoldmusic.substack.com.Hermes spoke with Richard Thompson for WAMC.

“Look like trouble” (Damaged Goods Records) es el nuevo disco de Holly Golightly. La británica comenzó su carrera en solitario en 1995 mientras era integrante de Thee Headcoatees. Asentada desde hace años en EEUU lanza ahora esta nueva colección de canciones marcadas por sus habituales atmósferas oscuras, su exquisito sonido orgánico y esa voz tan personal y cercana.Playlist;(sintonía) HOLLY GOLIGHTLY “Sail on” HOLLY GOLIGHTLY “Rolling along”HOLLY GOLIGHTLY “My get back”HOLLY GOLIGHTLY “It’s all”THEE HEADCOATEES “You’re gonna lose that boy”THE COURETTES “Keep dancing”HUGH CORNWELL and RICHARD THOMPSON “Tobacco Road”LA LUZ “Strange world”VIBEKE SAUGESTAD “Another light”THE RUBINOOS “Es la edad”Versión y Original; LOS SALVAJES “Es la edad” (1965)THE MINUS 5 “Let the rope hold, Cassie Lee”THE DAHLMANNS “Leatherboys”THE PRIZE “Connie” SINO HEARTS “Taste of romance”Escuchar audio

Richard Thompson, Air NZ CFO, joins us to discuss the headwinds facing our national carrier. With engine disruptions pushing costs skyward and grounding sections of the fleet, and up against a tough economy, Richard explains why he remains confident in Air NZ’s future. Why are the new engines from Rolls-Royce lasting only a quarter of their normal maintenance cycle? How do unseen costs like extra inventory play into the engine crisis? How does a weak NZ dollar impact the cost of US parts and materials? And why has the airline chosen this troubled time to carry out a $100 million share buyback? Plus, how rising costs of entry—including pricey visas and a conservation levy—have become a "friction point" for our visitors. For more or to watch on YouTube—check out http://linktr.ee/sharedlunchShared Lunch is brought to you by Sharesies Australia Limited (ABN 94 648 811 830; AFSL 529893) in Australia and Sharesies Limited (NZ) in New Zealand. It is not financial advice. Information provided is general only and current at the time it’s provided, and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation and needs. We do not provide recommendations and you should always read the disclosure documents available from the product issuer before making a financial decision. Our disclosure documents and terms and conditions—including a Target Market Determination and IDPS Guide for Sharesies Australian customers—can be found on our relevant Australian or NZ website. Investing involves risk. You might lose the money you start with. If you require financial advice, you should consider speaking with a qualified financial advisor. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Appearance on Shared Lunch is not an endorsement by Sharesies of the views of the presenters, guests, or the entities they represent. Their views are their own.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From a traditional "direct" medium to a data-driven powerhouse, out-of-home media has undergone a true evolution. Over a 17-year period, the out-of-home space has gone from commanding a mere 3% of industry ad revenue to approximately 18%, expanding to fill the void left by fragmenting media channels like linear television. Duncan Greive is joined by Kurt Malcolm, Head of Trading and Platforms at JCDecaux NZ, and Richard Thompson, Founder of D3, to discuss how innovations like knOOH - a cross-industry collaboration to measure audience - have contributed to the continued rise of out-of-home in Aotearoa. This is the final episode of our partnership with JC Decaux. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seems like whenever musical history was made over the last sixty years, Joe Boyd was there. He produced Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, and introduced startling world music to Western audiences, including Trio Bulgarka, Ivo Papasov, and Toumani Diabate. The founder of Hannibal Records, He's even the guy who refused to unplug Bob Dylan when Pete Seeger complained at the Newport Folk Festival. So what does he think about what's happened to music today?

Nick is joined by ITV's Oli Bell to look behind today's racing headlines. With the Arc just days away, Nick catches up with three-handed Francis Graffard, who also makes positive noises about Zarigana in the Foret. Also today, P-Y Bureau, racing manager to the Wertheimers, assesses the relative merits of Sosie and last year's runner-up Aventure, while Richard Thompson delights in a first ever Cheveley Park Arc runner in Estrange. Plus, RMG CEO Nick Mills on the new ITV deal, Goffs Group CEO Henry Beeby wraps up the Orby sale, and JA McGrath has the latest from Hong Kong.

Nick is joined by ITV's Oli Bell to look behind today's racing headlines. With the Arc just days away, Nick catches up with three-handed Francis Graffard, who also makes positive noises about Zarigana in the Foret. Also today, P-Y Bureau, racing manager to the Wertheimers, assesses the relative merits of Sosie and last year's runner-up Aventure, while Richard Thompson delights in a first ever Cheveley Park Arc runner in Estrange. Plus, RMG CEO Nick Mills on the new ITV deal, Goffs Group CEO Henry Beeby wraps up the Orby sale, and JA McGrath has the latest from Hong Kong.

Three stories from a week in the sports business.James Emmett comes fresh from the IMG-Redbird Summit.David Cushnan on what and who lurks behind The Enhanced Games.Richard on Jamie Redknapp and Richard Thompson's new football agency. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner' on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you're interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Rob Walbourne grew up in North London and started playing drums at the age of 10 before working professionally at the age of 15. After his move to the U.S., he lived briefly in New York City before eventually settling down in Simsbury, CT where he found work at the Noble and Cooley drum company. He's had the opportunity to have played with such luminaries as Shane MacGowan, Jason Isbell, St Etienne, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Johnny Marr, Justin Townes Earle, Richard Thompson the North Mississippi Allstars and the Pretenders. In this episode, Rob talks about:     Drumming with Johnny Marr     From the UK to the US     Balancing family and touring     Taking a break from the hustle to rediscover the love of drumming     Working at Noble and Cooley     Touring with The Pretenders     New Live Pretenders Album ⁠Here's our Patreon⁠ ⁠Here's our Youtube⁠ ⁠Here's our Homepage

Michael Cremo's book Forbidden Archeology, coauthored with Richard Thompson, caused shock waves in the world of science, It exposed evidence for a human presence on this planet going much further back in time than the current dominant consensus in the world of science allows.In Extreme Human Antiquity, Cremo builds on the foundation of Forbidden Archeology, introducing explosive new cases from all phases of archeological research, from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on his knowledge of the history and philosophy of science, he documents how evidence for extreme human antiquity has been subjected to a process of knowledge filtration, by which this evidence is ignored, forgotten, set aside, or dismissed on flimsy grounds.Evidence for extreme human antiquity includes human bones, human footprints, and human artifacts. Cremo's understanding of what counts as human includes discoveries that have previously been attributed to Neanderthals and other hominin species. Cremo presents for each case the pros and cons for taking it as evidence for extreme human antiquity and lets readers make their own decision.MICHAEL A. CREMO is an independent historian of archeology. He is a member of the World Archaeological Congress and the European Association of Archaeologists. Cremo is the principal author of the book Forbidden Archeology, a comprehensive historical survey of archaeological anomalies. Cremo examines the history of the archeology from the standpoint of alternative worldviews, particularly worldviews with foundations in ancient Indian thought. He has given invited lectures on his work at the Royal Institution in London, the anthropology department of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the archeology department of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and many other scientific institutions. He has also lectured on his work at universities throughout the world. He is a frequent guest on radio and television programs, and has a wide presence on the web. His website is www.mcremo.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/earth-ancients--2790919/support.

On this episode, listen to an audio production of John Wesley's sermon from 2 Samuel 12:23. This sermon was accessed from the Wesley Center Online. It was edited by George Lyons with formatting by Ryan Danker for the Wesley Center for Applied Theology. The Wesley Center Online website is a collection of historical and scholarly resources about the Wesleyan Tradition, theology, Christianity, and the Nazarene church hosted by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology at Northwest Nazarene University. We are thankful for the work of Richard Thompson in overseeing this repository.   Lifelong Learning Code: 80890 Click here to learn about Lifelong Learning   *this episode was created with the help of AI*

Chris quits his job! ALSO: These monopolists have got us over a virtual barrel. PLUS: A beautiful song of the week from Richard Thompson!!!Richard Thompson - "Beeswing": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HApy-Xoix-g&list=RDHApy-Xoix-g&start_radio=1Cold Brew Patreon: Patreon.com/ChrisCroftonChannel Nonfiction: ChannelNonfiction.com

RT Williams (1883-1946) was a minister and general superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene. Born in Texas, he became a minister in 1908 and later served as president of Texas Holiness University. He was the youngest person to be elected general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene at age 33 and served in that role from 1916 until his death in 1946.    "An appreication by BF Haynes Dr. Williams has done the disciples of our Lord a distinct service in giving in printed form this dissertation on "Temptation." He enters the arena of the daily struggles of the believer and helps him along the most practical and needy lines of his life. Strange indeed that Temptation should ever have become a neglected theme, but it is true, as the author suggests. We admire the clear and logical and discriminating way in which the subject is treated in these pages."   This article was accessed on The Wesley Center Online, which is a collection of historical and scholarly resources about the Wesleyan Tradition, theology, Christianity, and the Nazarene church hosted by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology at Northwest Nazarene University. We are thankful for the work of Richard Thompson in overseeing this repository.   Lifelong Learning Code: 80890 Click here to learn about Lifelong Learning   *this episode was created with the help of AI*

In this episode of Fed Time Stories, hosts Dave Brant and John Gill welcome Richard Thompson, former British Army officer, UK diplomat, chief of police, and co-founder of ARX Partners. As the podcast's first guest from outside the U.S., Richard shares lessons learned from decades of public service in the UK and abroad.From leading troops in Hong Kong and Northern Ireland to working through the legal and ethical challenges of Iraq, Richard reflects on how a commitment to public service shaped a career across military, diplomatic, and law enforcement roles. The conversation explores his transition into leadership roles beyond his original field, including being appointed to head a national UK police force — the first time in decades the role went to someone from outside traditional policing.The episode also looks at Richard's move into the private sector and the founding of ARX Partners. He explains how risk management has been a consistent focus throughout his career and shares his perspective on leadership, emphasizing the importance of humility, emotional intelligence, and having a clear sense of purpose.Fed Time Stories is brought to you by Kaseware, an investigative case management solution. Learn more at www.kaseware.com/fedtimestoriespodcast

Jonathan Agnew speaks to the ECB chair Richard Thompson in a wide-ranging interview at The Oval.They look at the future of Test cricket, what the investment in The Hundred franchises could mean for the sport in the UK, and how cricket will look at the next Olympics.

It's vacation time with music from John Gorka, John Hartford, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Thompson and lots more. Traveling on … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysBen Plotnick / “Railroad to Babylon” / Greenland / Self-producedJohn Gorka / “Holed Up in Mason City” / Bright Side of Down / Red HouseJohn Hartford / “Steam Powered Aereo-Plain” / Aereo-Plain / RounderRachel Baiman / “Never Tire of the Road” / Shame / Free DirtRob Ickes & Trey Hensley / “Georgia on a Fast Train” / Before the Sun goes Down / CompassJim & Lynna Woolsey / “Last Train Out” / Last Train Out / Broken RecordsBen Bedford / “The Pilot and the Flying Machine Pt. 1” / The Pilot and the Flying Machine / WaterbugMose Allison / “Night Ride” / I Love the Life I Live / Real GoneBen Plotnick / “K & K Waltz” / Greenland / Self-producedKris Kristofferson w/ Jackson Browne / “Me and Bobby McGee” / The Austin Sessions / RhinoRichard Thompson / “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” / Acoustic Classics / BeeswingAnna & Elizabeth / “Little Black Train” / Anna & Elizabeth / Free DirtRed Knuckles & the Trailblazers / “The Golden Rocket” / Shades of the Past / Sugar HillMark Baker / “Early Morning Rain” / And I Ride / Self-producedPeter Mayer / “Driving with my Knee” / Novelties / Blue BoatPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Legendary guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson's 1999 album Mock Tudor explores the dark corners of suburban England with sharp wit and rich storytelling. Produced by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, the album steers away from Thompson's signature folk-rock sound towards a leaner, more contemporary approach. While still rooted in traditional genres with touches of rockabilly and reggae, the album feels urgent and modern, capturing a sense of unease beneath its melodic surface.   Songs In This Episode Intro - Sibella 9:42 - Hard On Me 11:44 - Bathsheba Smiles 22:24 - Dry My Tears and Move On 33:39 - Cooksferry Queen Outro - Sights And Sounds of London Town   Support the podcast, join the DMO UNION at Patreon. Listen to the episode archive at DigMeOutPodcast.com.

On this episode, listen to an audio production of John Wesley's sermon from Revelation 21:5. This sermon was accessed from the Wesley Center Online and was edited by Jennette Descalzo with corrections by Ryan Danker and George Lyons for the Wesley Center for Applied Theology. The Wesley Center Online web site is a collection of historical and scholarly resources about the Wesleyan Tradition, theology, Christianity, and the Nazarene church hosted by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology at Northwest Nazarene University. We are thankful for the work of Richard Thompson in overseeing this repository.   Lifelong Learning Code: 80890 Click here to learn about Lifelong Learning   *this episode was created with the help of AI*

Love is mysterious, and the death of love even more so: it's complicated, sticky, and heart breaking. When there are children impacted, as was the case with Marvin and Anna Gaye, and Richard and Linda Thompson, the emotional brutality can resonate for generations. Is it worthy compensation if the anguish produces great art? Life is short - Art is long, and isn't that what every artist hopes for, that their art will endure beyond the grave? Who can weigh that balance?Today's cuts illuminate couples in crisis: In the case of the Thompsons, they were dissolving a recording and performing team; in Marvin's, he was being ousted by the sister of the man who gave him his break. Neither scenario is pretty, but the resultant music remains divine.HERE MY DEAR / MARVIN GAYEAnna Gordy Gaye wanted a million dollars as a divorce settlement from Marvin. She took out a warrant for his arrest for failing to pay alimony, and put a restraining order on him. Check. So, a deal was struck: in exchange for $600K (1/2 in advance; half to be taken out of royalties), Marvin would produce a new album to get her paid. Check mate.Initially intending to make a quick knock off, Marvin became fascinated with the project, devoting himself to making it a passionate sacrifice, detailing the death of love. It was a critical and commercial failure upon its release, but has since been reconsidered, and is now thought of as one of his finest achievements. The title cut that introduces the album disturbingly cuts off in mid-phrase - a distinctly telling gesture.WALL OF DEATH / RICHARD AND LINDA THOMPSONLinda was pregnant with Richard's third child when producer Joe Boyd got them into the studio to record the album “Shoot Out the Lights” - a record which Rolling Stone designated as #9 on its list of the “Best Albums of the 1980s”.  They were supposed to tour immediately after to promote the record, but unfortunately, this had to be delayed to allow Linda to give birth. In the interim, Richard, who had fallen in love with another woman, dropped the bad news on her as they set out on tour.After being together for 10 years, and Linda converting to Sufi Islam for Richard, renouncing worldly pleasures, she was now trapped inside a loveless, commercial obligation, ironically, to promote their finest collaboration.Wall of Death, which closes the album, depicts love as a dangerous carnival ride in which you take your chances at calamity, but still want to go back to ride, again and again.  

Welcome back to All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast, presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. You may have noticed our awesome theme music. No, you're not hearing some unreleased Neil Young and Crazy Horse rehearsal. You're hearing Coca Leaves and Pearls, the Philadelphia-based Neil tribute band fronted by guitarist Chris Forsyth and featuring John Murray (guitar), Jordan Burgis (bass), and Joey Sullivan (drums). They've been playing primarily Ditch-era Neil tunes at various clubs around the northeast for the past few years, bringing a very Horse-y vibe to the chosen few (you can check out a tasty recording via Archive.org). They're incredible—and Coca Leaves and Pearls was kind of enough to record some killer theme music for All One Song at Jeff Zeigler's Uniform Studios. Now, Chris Forsyth is much more than just the leader of a great Neil Young tribute band, of course. Much more! For more than a decade, he's been one of our favorite guitarists, blending Richard Thompson with Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine with John McLaughlin, Sonny Sharrock with … well, Neil Young. His albums with the Solar Motel Band are modern day classics, and his recent work with the Basic trio has been insanely good. Chris is an extremely tasteful player, but he's also willing to stretch beyond the barriers of tastefulness into the sublime. For his All One Song appearance, Chris selected “Lookout Joe,” which first appeared on Tonight's the Night just about 50 years ago in the summer of 1975. It's a darkly humorous tune that has all the hallmarks of Neil's Ditch era—that seedy swagger, a druggy vibe, Ben Keith's wild pedal steel and backing vocals, and some dangerous guitar work. “Lookout Joe” was recorded with the Stray Gators in late 1972 at Neil's northern California barn, but it's a million miles away from the country rock gloss of Harvest. As we get into in our conversation, “Lookout Joe” sees Neil taking on the changing and challenging times of the 1970s. A weird, dark era! It's a deep cut, but it's a deep cut that's very much worth getting into.  Looking for a digital music platform that feels more like a record shop? ⁠Qobuz⁠ is the high quality music streaming & download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles, offering unique editorial, exclusive artist interviews, expertly curated playlists, liner notes, and more. With Qobuz Club, subscribers can connect and share music discoveries with a community of fellow music lovers. And for those who like to own their music, the Qobuz Download Store lets you browse and download albums in Hi-Res and CD quality. Give ⁠Qobuz⁠ a try now with an extended 30-day free trial.

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services. The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries' Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin's What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank's Fairport Convention on Track. Rob Young's Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement. Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries' Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson's own autobiography Beeswing.  Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin's No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton's I've Always Kept a Unicorn. I also used Joe Boyd's autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell's The Islander.  And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport's music currently in print. Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript. One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”] Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs, and songs by the Beatles, the Ink Spots, the Kinks, and the Who, all the way to “Oops! I Did It Again”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Oops! I Did it Again”] And to finish the show, and to show how all this music actually ties together, he would play what he described as a “medieval tune from Brittany”, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”] We have said many times in this podcast that there is no first anything, but there’s a reason that Liege and Lief, Fairport Convention’s third album of 1969, and the album other than Unhalfbricking on which their reputation largely rests, was advertised with the slogan “The first (literally) British folk rock album ever”. Folk-rock, as the term had come to be known, and as it is still usually used today, had very little to do with traditional folk music. Rather, the records of bands like The Byrds or Simon and Garfunkel were essentially taking the sounds of British beat groups of the early sixties, particularly the Searchers, and applying those sounds to material by contemporary singer-songwriters. People like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan had come up through folk clubs, and their songs were called folk music because of that, but they weren’t what folk music had meant up to that point — songs that had been collected after being handed down through the folk process, changed by each individual singer, with no single identifiable author. They were authored songs by very idiosyncratic writers. But over their last few albums, Fairport Convention had done one or two tracks per album that weren’t like that, that were instead recordings of traditional folk songs, but arranged with rock instrumentation. They were not necessarily the first band to try traditional folk music with electric instruments — around the same time that Fairport started experimenting with the idea, so did an Irish band named Sweeney’s Men, who brought in a young electric guitarist named Henry McCullough briefly. But they do seem to have been the first to have fully embraced the idea. They had done so to an extent with “A Sailor’s Life” on Unhalfbricking, but now they were going to go much further: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (from about 4:30)] There had been some doubt as to whether Fairport Convention would even continue to exist — by the time Unhalfbricking, their second album of the year, was released, they had been through the terrible car accident that had killed Martin Lamble, the band’s drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Most of the rest of the band had been seriously injured, and they had made a conscious decision not to discuss the future of the band until they were all out of hospital. Ashley Hutchings was hospitalised the longest, and Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Sandy Denny, the other three surviving members of the band, flew over to LA with their producer and manager, Joe Boyd, to recuperate there and get to know the American music scene. When they came back, the group all met up in the flat belonging to Denny’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas, and decided that they were going to continue the band. They made a few decisions then — they needed a new drummer, and as well as a drummer they wanted to get in Dave Swarbrick. Swarbrick had played violin on several tracks on Unhalfbricking as a session player, and they had all been thrilled to work with him. Swarbrick was one of the most experienced musicians on the British folk circuit. He had started out in the fifties playing guitar with Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band before switching to fiddle, and in 1963, long before Fairport had formed, he had already appeared on TV with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, led by Ian Campbell, the father of Ali and Robin Campbell, later of UB40: [Excerpt: The Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Shanten Bells (medley on Hullaballoo!)”] He’d sung with Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd: [Excerpt: A.L. Lloyd, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” ] And he’d formed his hugely successful duo with Martin Carthy, releasing records like “Byker Hill” which are often considered among the best British folk music of all time: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, “Byker Hill”] By the time Fairport had invited him to play on Unhalfbricking, Swarbrick had already performed on twenty albums as a core band member, plus dozens more EPs, singles, and odd tracks on compilations. They had no reason to think they could actually get him to join their band. But they had three advantages. The first was that Swarbrick was sick of the traditional folk scene at the time, saying later “I didn’t like seven-eighths of the people involved in it, and it was extremely opportune to leave. I was suddenly presented with the possibilities of exploring the dramatic content of the songs to the full.” The second was that he was hugely excited to be playing with Richard Thompson, who was one of the most innovative guitarists of his generation, and Martin Carthy remembers him raving about Thompson after their initial sessions. (Carthy himself was and is no slouch on the guitar of course, and there was even talk of getting him to join the band at this point, though they decided against it — much to the relief of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol, who is a perfectly fine player himself but didn’t want to be outclassed by *two* of the best guitarists in Britain at the same time). And the third was that Joe Boyd told him that Fairport were doing so well — they had a single just about to hit the charts with “Si Tu Dois Partir” — that he would only have to play a dozen gigs with Fairport in order to retire. As it turned out, Swarbrick would play with the group for a decade, and would never retire — I saw him on his last tour in 2015, only eight months before he died. The drummer the group picked was also a far more experienced musician than any of the rest, though in a very different genre. Dave Mattacks had no knowledge at all of the kind of music they played, having previously been a player in dance bands. When asked by Hutchings if he wanted to join the band, Mattacks’ response was “I don’t know anything about the music. I don’t understand it… I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same… but if you want me to join the group, fine, because I really like it. I’m enjoying myself musically.” Mattacks brought a new level of professionalism to the band, thanks to his different background. Nicol said of him later “He was dilligent, clean, used to taking three white shirts to a gig… The application he could bring to his playing was amazing. With us, you only played well when you were feeling well.” This distinction applied to his playing as well. Nicol would later describe the difference between Mattacks’ drumming and Lamble’s by saying “Martin’s strength was as an imaginative drummer. DM came in with a strongly developed sense of rhythm, through keeping a big band of drunken saxophone players in order. A great time-keeper.” With this new line-up and a new sense of purpose, the group did as many of their contemporaries were doing and “got their heads together in the country”. Joe Boyd rented the group a mansion, Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, and they stayed there together for three months. At the start, the group seem to have thought that they were going to make another record like Unhalfbricking, with some originals, some songs by American songwriters, and a few traditional songs. Even after their stay in Farley Chamberlayne, in fact, they recorded a few of the American songs they’d rehearsed at the start of the process, Richard Farina’s “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” and Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad of Easy Rider”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Ballad of Easy Rider”] Indeed, the whole idea of “getting our heads together in the country” (as the cliche quickly became in the late sixties as half of the bands in Britain went through much the same kind of process as Fairport were doing — but usually for reasons more to do with drug burnout or trend following than recovering from serious life-changing trauma) seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan and the Band getting together in Big Pink. But very quickly they decided to follow the lead of Ashley Hutchings, who had had something of a Damascene conversion to the cause of traditional English folk music. They were listening mostly to Music From Big Pink by the Band, and to the first album by Sweeney’s Men: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”] And they decided that they were going to make something that was as English as those records were North American and Irish (though in the event there were also a few Scottish songs included on the record). Hutchings in particular was becoming something of a scholar of traditional music, regularly visiting Cecil Sharp House and having long conversations with A.L. Lloyd, discovering versions of different traditional songs he’d never encountered before. This was both amusing and bemusing Sandy Denny, who had joined a rock group in part to get away from traditional music; but she was comfortable singing the material, and knew a lot of it and could make a lot of suggestions herself. Swarbrick obviously knew the repertoire intimately, and Nicol was amenable, while Mattacks was utterly clueless about the folk tradition at this point but knew this was the music he wanted to make. Thompson knew very little about traditional music, and of all the band members except Denny he was the one who has shown the least interest in the genre in his subsequent career — but as we heard at the beginning, showing the least interest in the genre is a relative thing, and while Thompson was not hugely familiar with the genre, he *was* able to work with it, and was also more than capable of writing songs that fit in with the genre. Of the eleven songs on the album, which was titled Liege and Lief (which means, roughly, Lord and Loyalty), there were no cover versions of singer-songwriters. Eight were traditional songs, and three were originals, all written in the style of traditional songs. The album opened with “Come All Ye”, an introduction written by Denny and Hutchings (the only time the two would ever write together): [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Come All Ye”] The other two originals were songs where Thompson had written new lyrics to traditional melodies. On “Crazy Man Michael”, Swarbrick had said to Thompson that the tune to which he had set his new words was weaker than the lyrics, to which Thompson had replied that if Swarbrick felt that way he should feel free to write a new melody. He did, and it became the first of the small number of Thompson/Swarbrick collaborations: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael”] Thompson and Swarbrick would become a brief songwriting team, but as much as anything else it was down to proximity — the two respected each other as musicians, but never got on very well. In 1981 Swarbrick would say “Richard and I never got on in the early days of FC… we thought we did, but we never did. We composed some bloody good songs together, but it was purely on a basis of “you write that and I’ll write this, and we’ll put it together.” But we never sat down and had real good chats.” The third original on the album, and by far the most affecting, is another song where Thompson put lyrics to a traditional tune. In this case he thought he was putting the lyrics to the tune of “Willie O'Winsbury”, but he was basing it on a recording by Sweeney’s Men. The problem was that Sweeney’s Men had accidentally sung the lyrics of “Willie O'Winsbury'” to the tune of a totally different song, “Fause Foodrage”: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “Willie O’Winsbury”] Thompson took that melody, and set to it lyrics about loss and separation. Thompson has never been one to discuss the meanings of his lyrics in any great detail, and in the case of this one has said “I really don't know what it means. This song came out of a dream, and I pretty much wrote it as I dreamt it (it was the sixties), and didn't spend very long analyzing it. So interpret as you wish – or replace with your own lines.” But in the context of the traffic accident that had killed his tailor girlfriend and a bandmate, and injured most of his other bandmates, the lyrics about lonely travellers, the winding road, bruised and beaten sons, saying goodbye, and never cutting cloth, seem fairly self-explanatory: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Farewell, Farewell”] The rest of the album, though, was taken up by traditional tunes. There was a long medley of four different fiddle reels; a version of “Reynardine” (a song about a seductive man — or is he a fox? Or perhaps both — which had been recorded by Swarbrick and Carthy on their most recent album); a 19th century song about a deserter saved from the firing squad by Prince Albert; and a long take on “Tam Lin”, one of the most famous pieces in the Scottish folk music canon, a song that has been adapted in different ways by everyone from the experimental noise band Current 93 to the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the comics writer Grant Morrison: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin”] And “Matty Groves”, a song about a man killing his cheating wife and her lover, which actually has a surprisingly similar story to that of “1921” from another great concept album from that year, the Who’s Tommy. “Matty Groves” became an excuse for long solos and shows of instrumental virtuosity: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves”] The album was recorded in September 1969, after their return from their break in the country and a triumphal performance at the Royal Festival Hall, headlining over fellow Witchseason artists John and Beverly Martyn and Nick Drake. It became a classic of the traditional folk genre — arguably *the* classic of the traditional folk genre. In 2007 BBC Radio 2’s Folk Music Awards gave it an award for most influential folk album of all time, and while such things are hard to measure, I doubt there’s anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of British folk and folk-rock music who would not at least consider that a reasonable claim. But once again, by the time the album came out in November, the band had changed lineups yet again. There was a fundamental split in the band – on one side were Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, whose stance was, roughly, that Liege and Lief was a great experiment and a fun thing to do once, but really the band had two first-rate songwriters in themselves, and that they should be concentrating on their own new material, not doing these old songs, good as they were. They wanted to take the form of the traditional songs and use that form for new material — they wanted to make British folk-rock, but with the emphasis on the rock side of things. Hutchings, on the other hand, was equally sure that he wanted to make traditional music and go further down the rabbit hole of antiquity. With the zeal of the convert he had gone in a couple of years from being the leader of a band who were labelled “the British Jefferson Airplane” to becoming a serious scholar of traditional folk music. Denny was tired of touring, as well — she wanted to spend more time at home with Trevor Lucas, who was sleeping with other women when she was away and making her insecure. When the time came for the group to go on a tour of Denmark, Denny decided she couldn’t make it, and Hutchings was jubilant — he decided he was going to get A.L. Lloyd into the band in her place and become a *real* folk group. Then Denny reconsidered, and Hutchings was crushed. He realised that while he had always been the leader, he wasn’t going to be able to lead the band any further in the traditionalist direction, and quit the group — but not before he was delegated by the other band members to fire Denny. Until the publication of Richard Thompson’s autobiography in 2022, every book on the group or its members said that Denny quit the band again, which was presumably a polite fiction that the band agreed, but according to Thompson “Before we flew home, we decided to fire Sandy. I don't remember who asked her to leave – it was probably Ashley, who usually did the dirty work. She was reportedly shocked that we would take that step. She may have been fragile beneath the confident facade, but she still knew her worth.” Thompson goes on to explain that the reasons for kicking her out were that “I suppose we felt that in her mind she had already left” and that “We were probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though there wasn't a name for it back then.” They had considered inviting Trevor Lucas to join the band to make Denny more comfortable, but came to the (probably correct) conclusion that while he was someone they got on well with personally, he would be another big ego in a band that already had several, and that being around Denny and Lucas’ volatile relationship would, in Thompson’s phrasing, “have not always given one a feeling of peace and stability.” Hutchings originally decided he was going to join Sweeney’s Men, but that group were falling apart, and their first rehearsal with Hutchings would also be their last as a group, with only Hutchings and guitarist and mandolin player Terry Woods left in the band. They added Woods’ wife Gay, and another couple, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, and formed a group called Steeleye Span, a name given them by Martin Carthy. That group, like Fairport, went to “get their heads together in the country” for three months and recorded an album of electric versions of traditional songs, Hark the Village Wait, on which Mattacks and another drummer, Gerry Conway, guested as Steeleye Span didn’t at the time have their own drummer: [Excerpt: Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner”] Steeleye Span would go on to have a moderately successful chart career in the seventies, but by that time most of the original lineup, including Hutchings, had left — Hutchings stayed with them for a few albums, then went on to form the first of a series of bands, all called the Albion Band or variations on that name, which continue to this day. And this is something that needs to be pointed out at this point — it is impossible to follow every single individual in this narrative as they move between bands. There is enough material in the history of the British folk-rock scene that someone could do a 500 Songs-style podcast just on that, and every time someone left Fairport, or Steeleye Span, or the Albion Band, or Matthews’ Southern Comfort, or any of the other bands we have mentioned or will mention, they would go off and form another band which would then fission, and some of its members would often join one of those other bands. There was a point in the mid-1970s where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport Convention while Fairport Convention had none. So just in order to keep the narrative anything like wieldy, I’m going to keep the narrative concentrated on the two figures from Fairport — Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson — whose work outside the group has had the most influence on the wider world of rock music more broadly, and only deal with the other members when, as they often did, their careers intersected with those two. That doesn’t mean the other members are not themselves hugely important musicians, just that their importance has been primarily to the folk side of the folk-rock genre, and so somewhat outside the scope of this podcast. While Hutchings decided to form a band that would allow him to go deeper and deeper into traditional folk music, Sandy Denny’s next venture was rather different. For a long time she had been writing far more songs than she had ever played for her bandmates, like “Nothing More”, a song that many have suggested is about Thompson: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Nothing More”] When Joe Boyd heard that Denny was leaving Fairport Convention, he was at first elated. Fairport’s records were being distributed by A&M in the US at that point, but Island Records was in the process of opening up a new US subsidiary which would then release all future Fairport product — *but*, as far as A&M were concerned, Sandy Denny *was* Fairport Convention. They were only interested in her. Boyd, on the other hand, loved Denny’s work intensely, but from his point of view *Richard Thompson* was Fairport Convention. If he could get Denny signed directly to A&M as a solo artist before Island started its US operations, Witchseason could get a huge advance on her first solo record, while Fairport could continue making records for Island — he’d have two lucrative acts, on different labels. Boyd went over and spoke to A&M and got an agreement in principle that they would give Denny a forty-thousand-dollar advance on her first solo album — twice what they were paying for Fairport albums. The problem was that Denny didn’t want to be a solo act. She wanted to be the lead singer of a band. She gave many reasons for this — the one she gave to many journalists was that she had seen a Judy Collins show and been impressed, but noticed that Collins’ band were definitely a “backing group”, and as she put it “But that's all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you're playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.” Most other people in her life, though, say that the main reason for her wanting to be in a band was her desire to be with her boyfriend, Trevor Lucas. Partly this was due to a genuine desire to spend more time with someone with whom she was very much in love, partly it was a fear that he would cheat on her if she was away from him for long periods of time, and part of it seems to have been Lucas’ dislike of being *too* overshadowed by his talented girlfriend — he didn’t mind acknowledging that she was a major talent, but he wanted to be thought of as at least a minor one. So instead of going solo, Denny formed Fotheringay, named after the song she had written for Fairport. This new band consisted at first of Denny on vocals and occasional piano, Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Lucas’ old Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway on drums. For a lead guitarist, they asked Richard Thompson who the best guitarist in Britain was, and he told them Albert Lee. Lee in turn brought in bass player Pat Donaldson, but this lineup of the band barely survived a fortnight. Lee *was* arguably the best guitarist in Britain, certainly a reasonable candidate if you could ever have a singular best (as indeed was Thompson himself), but he was the best *country* guitarist in Britain, and his style simply didn’t fit with Fotheringay’s folk-influenced songs. He was replaced by American guitarist Jerry Donahue, who was not anything like as proficient as Lee, but who was still very good, and fit the band’s style much better. The new group rehearsed together for a few weeks, did a quick tour, and then went into the recording studio to record their debut, self-titled, album. Joe Boyd produced the album, but admitted himself that he only paid attention to those songs he considered worthwhile — the album contained one song by Lucas, “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, and two cover versions of American singer-songwriter material with Lucas singing lead. But everyone knew that the songs that actually *mattered* were Sandy Denny’s, and Boyd was far more interested in them, particularly the songs “The Sea” and “The Pond and the Stream”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “The Pond and the Stream”] Fotheringay almost immediately hit financial problems, though. While other Witchseason acts were used to touring on the cheap, all packed together in the back of a Transit van with inexpensive equipment, Trevor Lucas had ambitions of being a rock star and wanted to put together a touring production to match, with expensive transport and equipment, including a speaker system that got nicknamed “Stonehenge” — but at the same time, Denny was unhappy being on the road, and didn’t play many gigs. As well as the band itself, the Fotheringay album also featured backing vocals from a couple of other people, including Denny’s friend Linda Peters. Peters was another singer from the folk clubs, and a good one, though less well-known than Denny — at this point she had only released a couple of singles, and those singles seemed to have been as much as anything else released as a novelty. The first of those, a version of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” had been released as by “Paul McNeill and Linda Peters”: [Excerpt: Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”] But their second single, a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “You’re Taking My Bag”, was released on the tiny Page One label, owned by Larry Page, and was released under the name “Paul and Linda”, clearly with the intent of confusing particularly gullible members of the record-buying public into thinking this was the McCartneys: [Excerpt: Paul and Linda, “You’re Taking My Bag”] Peters was though more financially successful than almost anyone else in this story, as she was making a great deal of money as a session singer. She actually did another session involving most of Fotheringay around this time. Witchseason had a number of excellent songwriters on its roster, and had had some success getting covers by people like Judy Collins, but Joe Boyd thought that they might possibly do better at getting cover versions if they were performed in less idiosyncratic arrangements. Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway went into the studio to record backing tracks, and vocals were added by Peters and another session singer, who according to some sources also provided piano. They cut songs by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “You Get Brighter”] Ed Carter, formerly of The New Nadir but by this time firmly ensconced in the Beach Boys’ touring band where he would remain for the next quarter-century: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “I Don’t Mind”] John and Beverly Martyn, and Nick Drake: [Excerpt: Elton John, “Saturday Sun”] There are different lineups of musicians credited for those sessions in different sources, but I tend to believe that it’s mostly Fotheringay for the simple reason that Donahue says it was him, Donaldson and Conway who talked Lucas and Denny into the mistake that destroyed Fotheringay because of these sessions. Fotheringay were in financial trouble already, spending far more money than they were bringing in, but their album made the top twenty and they were getting respect both from critics and from the public — in September, Sandy Denny was voted best British female singer by the readers of Melody Maker in their annual poll, which led to shocked headlines in the tabloids about how this “unknown” could have beaten such big names as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. Only a couple of weeks after that, they were due to headline at the Albert Hall. It should have been a triumph. But Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway had asked that singing pianist to be their support act. As Donahue said later “That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]… We'd done these demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he'd be a really good opener for us.” Unfortunately, Elton John was rather *too* good. As Donahue continued “we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage.” To make matters worse, Fotheringay’s set, which was mostly comprised of new material, was underrehearsed and sloppy, and from that point on no matter what they did people were counting the hours until the band split up. They struggled along for a while though, and started working on a second record, with Boyd again producing, though as Boyd later said “I probably shouldn't have been producing the record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn't have helped the atmosphere. We'd put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy's tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor's sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I'd been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn't the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.” The record would not be released for thirty-eight years: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Wild Mountain Thyme”] Witchseason was going badly into debt. Given all the fissioning of bands that we’ve already been talking about, Boyd had been stretched thin — he produced sixteen albums in 1970, and almost all of them lost money for the company. And he was getting more and more disillusioned with the people he was producing. He loved Beverly Martyn’s work, but had little time for her abusive husband John, who was dominating her recording and life more and more and would soon become a solo artist while making her stay at home (and stealing her ideas without giving her songwriting credit). The Incredible String Band were great, but they had recently converted to Scientology, which Boyd found annoying, and while he was working with all sorts of exciting artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nico, he was finding himself less and less important to the artists he mentored. Fairport Convention were a good example of this. After Denny and Hutchings had left the group, they’d decided to carry on as an electric folk group, performing an equal mix of originals by the Swarbrick and Thompson songwriting team and arrangements of traditional songs. The group were now far enough away from the “British Jefferson Airplane” label that they decided they didn’t need a female vocalist — and more realistically, while they’d been able to replace Judy Dyble, nobody was going to replace Sandy Denny. Though it’s rather surprising when one considers Thompson’s subsequent career that nobody seems to have thought of bringing in Denny’s friend Linda Peters, who was dating Joe Boyd at the time (as Denny had been before she met Lucas) as Denny’s replacement. Instead, they decided that Swarbrick and Thompson were going to share the vocals between them. They did, though, need a bass player to replace Hutchings. Swarbrick wanted to bring in Dave Pegg, with whom he had played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but the other band members initially thought the idea was a bad one. At the time, while they respected Swarbrick as a musician, they didn’t think he fully understood rock and roll yet, and they thought the idea of getting in a folkie who had played double bass rather than an electric rock bassist ridiculous. But they auditioned him to mollify Swarbrick, and found that he was exactly what they needed. As Joe Boyd later said “All those bass lines were great, Ashley invented them all, but he never could play them that well. He thought of them, but he was technically not a terrific bass player. He was a very inventive, melodic, bass player, but not a very powerful one technically. But having had the part explained to him once, Pegg was playing it better than Ashley had ever played it… In some rock bands, I think, ultimately, the bands that sound great, you can generally trace it to the bass player… it was at that point they became a great band, when they had Pegg.” The new lineup of Fairport decided to move in together, and found a former pub called the Angel, into which all the band members moved, along with their partners and children (Thompson was the only one who was single at this point) and their roadies. The group lived together quite happily, and one gets the impression that this was the period when they were most comfortable with each other, even though by this point they were a disparate group with disparate tastes, in music as in everything else. Several people have said that the only music all the band members could agree they liked at this point was the first two albums by The Band. With the departure of Hutchings from the band, Swarbrick and Thompson, as the strongest personalities and soloists, became in effect the joint leaders of the group, and they became collaborators as songwriters, trying to write new songs that were inspired by traditional music. Thompson described the process as “let’s take one line of this reel and slow it down and move it up a minor third and see what that does to it; let’s take one line of this ballad and make a whole song out of it. Chopping up the tradition to find new things to do… like a collage.” Generally speaking, Swarbrick and Thompson would sit by the fire and Swarbrick would play a melody he’d been working on, the two would work on it for a while, and Thompson would then go away and write the lyrics. This is how the two came up with songs like the nine-minute “Sloth”, a highlight of the next album, Full House, and one that would remain in Fairport’s live set for much of their career: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth”] “Sloth” was titled that way because Thompson and Swarbrick were working on two tunes, a slow one and a fast one, and they jokingly named them “Sloth” and “Fasth”, but the latter got renamed to “Walk Awhile”, while “Sloth” kept its working title. But by this point, Boyd and Thompson were having a lot of conflict in the studio. Boyd was never the most technical of producers — he was one of those producers whose job is to gently guide the artists in the studio and create a space for the music to flourish, rather than the Joe Meek type with an intimate technical knowledge of the studio — and as the artists he was working with gained confidence in their own work they felt they had less and less need of him. During the making of the Full House album, Thompson and Boyd, according to Boyd, clashed on everything — every time Boyd thought Thompson had done a good solo, Thompson would say to erase it and let him have another go, while every time Boyd thought Thompson could do better, Thompson would say that was the take to keep. One of their biggest clashes was over Thompson’s song “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”, which was originally intended for release on the album, and is included in current reissues of it: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”] Thompson had written that song inspired by what he thought was the unjust treatment of Alex Bramham, the driver in Fairport’s fatal car crash, by the courts — Bramham had been given a prison sentence of a few months for dangerous driving, while the group members thought he had not been at fault. Boyd thought it was one of the best things recorded for the album, but Thompson wasn’t happy with his vocal — there was one note at the top of the melody that he couldn’t quite hit — and insisted it be kept off the record, even though that meant it would be a shorter album than normal. He did this at such a late stage that early copies of the album actually had the title printed on the sleeve, but then blacked out. He now says in his autobiography “I could have persevered, double-tracked the voice, warmed up for longer – anything. It was a good track, and the record was lacking without it. When the album was re-released, the track was restored with a more confident vocal, and it has stayed there ever since.” During the sessions for Full House the group also recorded one non-album single, Thompson and Swarbrick’s “Now Be Thankful”: [Excerpt, Fairport Convention, “Now Be Thankful”] The B-side to that was a medley of two traditional tunes plus a Swarbrick original, but was given the deliberately ridiculous title “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”] The B. McKenzie in the title was a reference to the comic-strip character Barry McKenzie, a stereotype drunk Australian created for Private Eye magazine by the comedian Barry Humphries (later to become better known for his Dame Edna Everage character) but the title was chosen for one reason only — to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the song with the longest title. Which they did, though they were later displaced by the industrial band Test Dept, and their song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes and Is Constantly Perfected Under the Immaculate Guidance of the Great, Honourable, Generous and Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is the Blue Sky in the Hearts of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage and Bow in Deep Respect and Gratitude to Her. The Milk of Human Kindness”. Full House got excellent reviews in the music press, with Rolling Stone saying “The music shows that England has finally gotten her own equivalent to The Band… By calling Fairport an English equivalent of the Band, I meant that they have soaked up enough of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over, while they maintain their roots in rock.” Off the back of this, the group went on their first US tour, culminating in a series of shows at the Troubadour in LA, on the same bill as Rick Nelson, which were recorded and later released as a live album: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth (live)”] The Troubadour was one of the hippest venues at the time, and over their residency there the group got seen by many celebrities, some of whom joined them on stage. The first was Linda Ronstadt, who initially demurred, saying she didn’t know any of their songs. On being told they knew all of hers, she joined in with a rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”. Thompson was later asked to join Ronstadt’s backing band, who would go on to become the Eagles, but he said later of this offer “I would have hated it. I’d have hated being on the road with four or five miserable Americans — they always seem miserable. And if you see them now, they still look miserable on stage — like they don’t want to be there and they don’t like each other.” The group were also joined on stage at the Troubadour on one memorable night by some former bandmates of Pegg’s. Before joining the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Pegg had played around the Birmingham beat scene, and had been in bands with John Bonham and Robert Plant, who turned up to the Troubadour with their Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page (reports differ on whether the fourth member of Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, also came along). They all got up on stage together and jammed on songs like “Hey Joe”, “Louie Louie”, and various old Elvis tunes. The show was recorded, and the tapes are apparently still in the possession of Joe Boyd, who has said he refuses to release them in case he is murdered by the ghost of Peter Grant. According to Thompson, that night ended in a three-way drinking contest between Pegg, Bonham, and Janis Joplin, and it’s testament to how strong the drinking culture is around Fairport and the British folk scene in general that Pegg outdrank both of them. According to Thompson, Bonham was found naked by a swimming pool two days later, having missed two gigs. For all their hard rock image, Led Zeppelin were admirers of a lot of the British folk and folk-rock scene, and a few months later Sandy Denny would become the only outside vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record when she duetted with Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” on the group’s fourth album: [Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “The Battle of Evermore”] Denny would never actually get paid for her appearance on one of the best-selling albums of all time. That was, incidentally, not the only session that Denny was involved in around this time — she also sang on the soundtrack to a soft porn film titled Swedish Fly Girls, whose soundtrack was produced by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow?”] Shortly after Fairport’s trip to America, Joe Boyd decided he was giving up on Witchseason. The company was now losing money, and he was finding himself having to produce work for more and more acts as the various bands fissioned. The only ones he really cared about were Richard Thompson, who he was finding it more and more difficult to work with, Nick Drake, who wanted to do his next album with just an acoustic guitar anyway, Sandy Denny, who he felt was wasting her talents in Fotheringay, and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, who was more distant since his conversion to Scientology. Boyd did make some attempts to keep the company going. On a trip to Sweden, he negotiated an agreement with the manager and publisher of a Swedish band whose songs he’d found intriguing, the Hep Stars. Boyd was going to publish their songs in the UK, and in return that publisher, Stig Anderson, would get the rights to Witchseason’s catalogue in Scandinavia — a straight swap, with no money changing hands. But before Boyd could get round to signing the paperwork, he got a better offer from Mo Ostin of Warners — Ostin wanted Boyd to come over to LA and head up Warners’ new film music department. Boyd sold Witchseason to Island Records and moved to LA with his fiancee Linda Peters, spending the next few years working on music for films like Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange, as well as making his own documentary about Jimi Hendrix, and thus missed out on getting the UK publishing rights for ABBA, and all the income that would have brought him, for no money. And it was that decision that led to the breakup of Fotheringay. Just before Christmas 1970, Fotheringay were having a difficult session, recording the track “John the Gun”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “John the Gun”] Boyd got frustrated and kicked everyone out of the session, and went for a meal and several drinks with Denny. He kept insisting that she should dump the band and just go solo, and then something happened that the two of them would always describe differently. She asked him if he would continue to produce her records if she went solo, and he said he would. According to Boyd’s recollection of the events, he meant that he would fly back from California at some point to produce her records. According to Denny, he told her that if she went solo he would stay in Britain and not take the job in LA. This miscommunication was only discovered after Denny told the rest of Fotheringay after the Christmas break that she was splitting the band. Jerry Donahue has described that as the worst moment of his life, and Denny felt very guilty about breaking up a band with some of her closest friends in — and then when Boyd went over to the US anyway she felt a profound betrayal. Two days before Fotheringay’s final concert, in January 1971, Sandy Denny signed a solo deal with Island records, but her first solo album would not end up produced by Joe Boyd. Instead, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens was co-produced by Denny, John Wood — the engineer who had worked with Boyd on pretty much everything he’d produced, and Richard Thompson, who had just quit Fairport Convention, though he continued living with them at the Angel, at least until a truck crashed into the building in February 1971, destroying its entire front wall and forcing them to relocate. The songs chosen for The North Star Grassman and the Ravens reflected the kind of choices Denny would make on her future albums, and her eclectic taste in music. There was, of course, the obligatory Dylan cover, and the traditional folk ballad “Blackwaterside”, but there was also a cover version of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”] Most of the album, though, was made up of originals about various people in Denny’s life, like “Next Time Around”, about her ex-boyfriend Jackson C Frank: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Next Time Around”] The album made the top forty in the UK — Denny’s only solo album to do so — and led to her once again winning the “best female singer” award in Melody Maker’s readers’ poll that year — the male singer award was won by Rod Stewart. Both Stewart and Denny appeared the next year on the London Symphony Orchestra’s all-star version of The Who’s Tommy, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for Stewart before Roger Daltrey got involved. Stewart’s role was reduced to a single song, “Pinball Wizard”, while Denny sang on “It’s a Boy”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “It’s a Boy”] While Fotheringay had split up, all the band members play on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Guitarists Donahue and Lucas only play on a couple of the tracks, with Richard Thompson playing most of the guitar on the record. But Fotheringay’s rhythm section of Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway play on almost every track. Another musician on the album, Ian Whiteman, would possibly have a profound effect on the future direction of Richard Thompson’s career and life. Whiteman was the former keyboard player for the mod band The Action, having joined them just before they became the blues-rock band Mighty Baby. But Mighty Baby had split up when all of the band except the lead singer had converted to Islam. Richard Thompson was on his own spiritual journey at this point, and became a Sufi – the same branch of Islam as Whiteman – soon after the session, though Thompson has said that his conversion was independent of Whiteman’s. The two did become very close and work together a lot in the mid-seventies though. Thompson had supposedly left Fairport because he was writing material that wasn’t suited to the band, but he spent more than a year after quitting the group working on sessions rather than doing anything with his own material, and these sessions tended to involve the same core group of musicians. One of the more unusual was a folk-rock supergroup called The Bunch, put together by Trevor Lucas. Richard Branson had recently bought a recording studio, and wanted a band to test it out before opening it up for commercial customers, so with this free studio time Lucas decided to record a set of fifties rock and roll covers. He gathered together Thompson, Denny, Whiteman, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway, pianist Tony Cox, the horn section that would later form the core of the Average White Band, and Linda Peters, who had now split up with Joe Boyd and returned to the UK, and who had started dating Thompson. They recorded an album of covers of songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Otis and others: [Excerpt: The Bunch, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The early seventies was a hugely productive time for this group of musicians, as they all continued playing on each other’s projects. One notable album was No Roses by Shirley Collins, which featured Thompson, Mattacks, Whiteman, Simon Nicol, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Ashley Hutchings, who was at that point married to Collins, as well as some more unusual musicians like the free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill: [Excerpt: Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, “Claudy Banks”] Collins was at the time the most respected female singer in British traditional music, and already had a substantial career including a series of important records made with her sister Dolly, work with guitarists like Davey Graham, and time spent in the 1950s collecting folk songs in the Southern US with her then partner Alan Lomax – according to Collins she did much of the actual work, but Lomax only mentioned her in a single sentence in his book on this work. Some of the same group of musicians went on to work on an album of traditional Morris dancing tunes, titled Morris On, credited to “Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield”, with Collins singing lead on two tracks: [Excerpt: Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield with Shirley Collins, “The Willow Tree”] Thompson thought that that album was the best of the various side projects he was involved in at the time, comparing it favourably to Rock On, which he thought was rather slight, saying later “Conceptually, Fairport, Ashley and myself and Sandy were developing a more fragile style of music that nobody else was particularly interested in, a British Folk Rock idea that had a logical development to it, although we all presented it our own way. Morris On was rather more true to what we were doing. Rock On was rather a retro step. I'm not sure it was lasting enough as a record but Sandy did sing really well on the Buddy Holly songs.” Hutchings used the musicians on No Roses and Morris On as the basis for his band the Albion Band, which continues to this day. Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks both quit Fairport to join the Albion Band, though Mattacks soon returned. Nicol would not return to Fairport for several years, though, and for a long period in the mid-seventies Fairport Convention had no original members. Unfortunately, while Collins was involved in the Albion Band early on, she and Hutchings ended up divorcing, and the stress from the divorce led to Collins developing spasmodic dysphonia, a stress-related illness which makes it impossible for the sufferer to sing. She did eventually regain her vocal ability, but between 1978 and 2016 she was unable to perform at all, and lost decades of her career. Richard Thompson occasionally performed with the Albion Band early on, but he was getting stretched a little thin with all these sessions. Linda Peters said later of him “When I came back from America, he was working in Sandy’s band, and doing sessions by the score. Always with Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks. Richard would turn up with his guitar, one day he went along to do a session with one of those folkie lady singers — and there were Pat and DM. They all cracked. Richard smashed his amp and said “Right! No more sessions!” In 1972 he got round to releasing his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which featured guest appearances by Linda Peters and Sandy Denny among others: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away”] Unfortunately, while that album has later become regarded as one of the classics of its genre, at the time it was absolutely slated by the music press. The review in Melody Maker, for example, read in part “Some of Richard Thompson’s ideas sound great – which is really the saving grace of this album, because most of the music doesn’t. The tragedy is that Thompson’s “British rock music” is such an unconvincing concoction… Even the songs that do integrate rock and traditional styles of electric guitar rhythms and accordion and fiddle decoration – and also include explicit, meaningful lyrics are marred by bottle-up vocals, uninspiring guitar phrases and a general lack of conviction in performance.” Henry the Human Fly was released in the US by Warners, who had a reciprocal licensing deal with Island (and for whom Joe Boyd was working at the time, which may have had something to do with that) but according to Thompson it became the lowest-selling record that Warners ever put out (though I’ve also seen that claim made about Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, another album that has later been rediscovered). Thompson was hugely depressed by this reaction, and blamed his own singing. Happily, though, by this point he and Linda had become a couple — they would marry in 1972 — and they started playing folk clubs as a duo, or sometimes in a trio with Simon Nicol. Thompson was also playing with Sandy Denny’s backing band at this point, and played on every track on her second solo album, Sandy. This album was meant to be her big commercial breakthrough, with a glamorous cover photo by David Bailey, and with a more American sound, including steel guitar by Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose overdubs were supervised in LA by Joe Boyd): [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”] The album was given a big marketing push by Island, and “Listen, Listen” was made single of the week on the Radio 1 Breakfast show: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Listen, Listen”] But it did even worse than the previous album, sending her into something of a depression. Linda Thompson (as the former Linda Peters now was) said of this period “After the Sandy album, it got her down that her popularity didn't suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and that was the start of her really fretting about the way her career was going. Things only escalated after that. People like me or Martin Carthy or Norma Waterson would think, ‘What are you on about? This is folk music.'” After Sandy’s release, Denny realised she could no longer afford to tour with a band, and so went back to performing just acoustically or on piano. The only new music to be released by either of these ex-members of Fairport Convention in 1973 was, oddly, on an album by the band they were no longer members of. After Thompson had left Fairport, the group had managed to release two whole albums with the same lineup — Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, and Mattacks. But then Nicol and Mattacks had both quit the band to join the Albion Band with their former bandmate Ashley Hutchings, leading to a situation where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport plus their longtime drummer while Fairport Convention itself had no original members and was down to just Swarbrick and Pegg. Needing to fulfil their contracts, they then recruited three former members of Fotheringay — Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, Donahue on lead guitar, and Conway on drums. Conway was only a session player at the time, and Mattacks soon returned to the band, but Lucas and Donahue became full-time members. This new lineup of Fairport Convention released two albums in 1973, widely regarded as the group’s most inconsistent records, and on the title track of the first, “Rosie”, Richard Thompson guested on guitar, with Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Rosie”] Neither Sandy Denny nor Richard Thompson released a record themselves in 1973, but in neither case was this through the artists’ choice. The record industry was changing in the early 1970s, as we’ll see in later episodes, and was less inclined to throw good money after bad in the pursuit of art. Island Records prided itself on being a home for great artists, but it was still a business, and needed to make money. We’ll talk about the OPEC oil crisis and its effect on the music industry much more when the podcast gets to 1973, but in brief, the production of oil by the US peaked in 1970 and started to decrease, leading to them importing more and more oil from the Middle East. As a result of this, oil prices rose slowly between 1971 and 1973, then very quickly towards the end of 1973 as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict that year. As vinyl is made of oil, suddenly producing records became much more expensive, and in this period a lot of labels decided not to release already-completed albums, until what they hoped would be a brief period of shortages passed. Both Denny and Thompson recorded albums at this point that got put to one side by Island. In the case of Thompson, it was the first album by Richard and Linda as a duo, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Today, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, and as one of the two masterpieces that bookended Richard and Linda’s career as a duo and their marriage. But when they recorded the album, full of Richard’s dark songs, it was the opposite of commercial. Even a song that’s more or less a boy-girl song, like “Has He Got a Friend for Me?” has lyrics like “He wouldn’t notice me passing by/I could be in the gutter, or dangling down from a tree” [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Has He got a Friend For Me?”] While something like “The Calvary Cross” is oblique and haunted, and seems to cast a pall over the entire album: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross”] The album itself had been cheap to make — it had been recorded in only a week, with Thompson bringing in musicians he knew well and had worked with a lot previously to cut the tracks as-live in only a handful of takes — but Island didn’t think it was worth releasing. The record stayed on the shelf for nearly a year after recording, until Island got a new head of A&R, Richard Williams. Williams said of the album’s release “Muff Winwood had been doing A&R, but he was more interested in production… I had a conversation with Muff as soon as I got there, and he said there are a few hangovers, some outstanding problems. And one of them was Richard Thompson. He said there’s this album we gave him the money to make — which was I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight — and nobody’s very interested in it. Henry the Human Fly had been a bit of a commercial disappointment, and although Island was altruistic and independent and known for only recording good stuff, success was important… Either a record had to do well or somebody had to believe in it a lot. And it seemed as if neither of those things were true at that point of Richard.” Williams, though, was hugely impressed when he listened to the album. He compared Richard Thompson’s guitar playing to John Coltrane’s sax, and called Thompson “the folk poet of the rainy streets”, but also said “Linda brightened it, made it more commercial. and I thought that “Bright Lights” itself seemed a really commercial song.” The rest of the management at Island got caught up in Williams’ enthusiasm, and even decided to release the title track as a single: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Neither single nor album charted — indeed it would not be until 1991 that Richard Thompson would make a record that made the top forty in the UK — but the album got enough critical respect that Richard and Linda released two albums the year after. The first of these, Hokey Pokey, is a much more upbeat record than their previous one — Richard Thompson has called it “quite a music-hall influenced record” and cited the influence of George Formby and Harry Lauder. For once, the claim of music hall influence is audible in the music. Usually when a British musician is claimed to have a music ha

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby It’s You” by Smith. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Today on Too Opinionated, singer Zara Phillips comes back for another visit. Somebody's Daughter - and the 2018 book and 2022 one-woman show the film is based on – focusses on Zara's personal journey of overcoming early addiction, navigating her life and meeting her birth father after many years and struggles after connecting with her birth mother. The project's true driving force is tofacilitate honest, vulnerable conversations about adoption. Too many people, she says, are ignoring these important issues. In addition to acting and writing, Zara is also a talented singer and songwriter who launched her career in the 80s, appearing in music videos and providing backing vocals on tour with Bob Geldof, Matt Bianco, David Essex and Nick Kamen. While taking some years away from creative endeavors to raise a family, she came back strong in the 2000s, releasing two albums(When The Rain Stops and You. Me & Us) produced by Ted Perlman, whose multi-faceted musical resume includes Whitney Houston, Bob Dylan and Chicago; earning a Best Homegrown Documentary honor for her 2008 film Roots Unknown at the Garden State Film Festival; and publishing in 2008 her first book Mother Me, a compelling memoir about her ongoing struggles as an adoptee now raising a family of her own. A few years later, Zara's song “I'm Legit,” co-written with Darryl McDaniels (DMC of Run-DMC), was a successful single in the adoption world and beyond. In 2014, Zara's one woman show Beneath My Father's Sky, directed by Eliza and Eric Roberts won Best Direction at NYC's United Solo Festival and was performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Connecticut and London in 2016. During this era, she was presented with an Angel in Adoption Award by the Congressional Coalition of Adoption Institute. Her most recent album, released in 2020, is Meditation and Kitkats, and she currently tours and performs with her husband, British folk-rock legend Richard Thompson, who scored Somebody's Daughter.   Want t owatch: YouTube Meisterkhan Pod (Please Subscribe)

Titans of Science series is back for another run. And to kick us off, marine biologist Richard Thompson, who first brought to the world's attention 20 years ago the problem that is micro - and now nano - plastic pollution... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Visit: www.salty.com.au No ride here to the 50's, just one or two - but OMG it's cool! THE 58's is a genre hopping douse of goodness. Cuts from Mitch Ryder, Samantha Fish, Bob Lanza, Stormcellar, Southern Avenue, Little Feat, Lecia Louise, Steve Mondel, Watchhouse, Wareen Haynes, Richard Thompson, Neil Young, Nathan Beretta, Jen Mize, Lucinda Williams, Esther Phillips, Clayton Doley, Jason Isbell, Otis Namrell, Inspector Cluzo, 63 Deluxe, The Blow Out, Ian Siegal, Endless Boogie. ARTIST / TRACK / ALBUM ** Australia 1. Mitch Ryder / Lilli May / With Love 2. Samantha Fish / I'm Done Running' / Paper Doll 3. The Bob Lanza Blues Band / Upside of Lonely / Breadman's Blues 4. ** Stormcellar / A Little Too Much Is Never Enough / Basilisk 5. Southern Avenue / What Do I Do / Southern Avenue 6. Little Feat / Too High To Cut My Hair / Strike Up The Band 7. ** Lecia Louise / One Man / single release 8. ** Steve Mondel / Long-Haul Flights / Long-Haul Flights 9. Watchhouse / Belly of The Beast / Watchhouse 10. Warren Haynes / Day Of Reckoning / Million Voices Whisper 11. Richard Thompson / Persuasion / Celtschmerz (Live UK '98) 12. Neil Young / Star of Bethlehem / Homegrown 13. ** Nathan Beretta / Drinking Alone / Love Taxman 14. ** Jen Mize / My Buzz / Neon N Nothin' Else 15. Lucinda Williams / Joy / Car Wheels On A Gravel Road 16. Esther Phillips / Flesh, Blood and Bone / Release Me - The Best of Esther Phillips 17. ** Clayton Doley's Organ Donors / Return of the Prodigal Son / Tension! 18. Jason Isbell / Ride To Robert's / Foxes In The Snow 19. ** Otis Namrell / Hard To Breath / Otis Namrell Trio 20. The Inspector Cluzo / The Duck 'Guit' Blues / Gasconha Rocks 21. ** 63 Deluxe / My Favourite Hurricane / 63 Deluxe 22. ** The Blow Out / That Ain't Lovin' Me / Version of You 23. Ian Siegal / Won't Be Your Shotgun Rider / All The Rage 24. Endless Boogie / Occult Banker / Long Island

EVERY OTHER KREATIVE KONTROL EPISODE IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE TO MONTHLY $6 USD PATREON SUPPORTERS. Enjoy this excerpt and please subscribe now via this link to hear this full episode. Thanks!Owen Williams from the Tubs discusses their excellent album, Cotton Crown, DADGAD guitar tuning and affinities for artists like Big Star, Richard Thompson, and SZA, how the humour in his music can be overlooked for its sentimentality, his unique musical upbringing and penchant for misbehaviour as a young teen, processing his mother's suicide, his prose writing background, starting Perfect Angel Press, and updates about two of his novels, what Gob Nation is all about and spitting on people, Sonic Youth and Superchunk allusions, touring, working on a new album, other future plans, and much more.Support vish on Patreon!Support Y.E.S.S., Pride Centre of Edmonton, and Letters Charity. Follow vish online.Related episodes/links:Ep. #909: Jade HairpinsEp. #900: Fugazi and Jem CohenEp. #892: Fucked UpEp. #880: Guided By VoicesEp. #834: J MascisEp. #738: SuperchunkEp. #722: The BethsEp. #673: Sonic YouthEp. #634: Richard ThompsonEp. #578: Chris Rowley of Adulkt LifeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/kreative-kontrol. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While we're on a brief hiatus from making all-new episodes, we thought it would be fun to compile all the moments where Paul asks his guests "What Was The First Record You Ever Bought?" and put them in a couple of "clip shows." Here's part one, featuring De La Soul, Dhani Harrison, Mac McCaughan & Laura Ballance (from Superchunk), Ringo Starr, Shelby Lynne, Redd Kross, NPR's Ann Powers, The Edge (from U2), Richard Thompson, and Matthew Caws (from Nada Surf). The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music.  Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton. Record Store Day 2025 is April 12th. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, including The List, visit RecordStoreDay.com) Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.  

British singer/guitarist Richard Thompson spoke to Fresh Air in 1994 and 2022 about about his formative years and about pioneering a new musical genre that blended rock with traditional music of the British isles. He has a new album called Ship to Shore. Justin Chang reviews the new film Janet Planet, the first feature from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy