| Where, when and why did you first pick up the guitar? | London, 1958, 59. I was about nine. Why? It sounded good, like Buddy Holly records, Everly Brothers records. Then when I was around 12, I had some friends and we'd copy the Shadows. The main influence on most British musicians was the Shadows, an instrumental group. They were really good. We did that for a few years, then branched out from there into folk music, rock & roll, R&B. We'd play for school dances, play at parties. We went through various stages: First we'd copy the Rolling Stones, then we'd copy the Who, and so on. And we used to do folk clubs as well, with a different line-up. |
| In your solo set tonight you performed quite a few songs that your wife Linda sings on record. | When you write a song, it's ambiguous, really -- a love song's a love song. You can turn most songs around so that the he's are she's and the me's are you's. Sometimes at the inception of a song, I get a picture of the whole thing being performed and who's singing it, but you can make most songs male or female. If I get stuck, I can always ask my wife for some insight, the inside story on what it's like to be a woman. |
| What are the advantages and disadvantages of being married to your working partner? | The advantages are that you can get pretty close musically, and there's a lot less ego involved in your relationship. There's a lot less pulling, pushing; the roles are very specific. We don't have any musical arguments, really; we just know what to do, who does what. One disadvantage is that if you're on the road you can get overfamiliar; in fact, off the road we tend to do more things separately. |
| You said earlier that you wanted to "kill folk music" in England. | In England, there's a very wide gap between traditional and popular music. Traditional music virtually stopped around 1920, and popular music came to be imported, as it were, from America -- jazz, and the jazz-based popular styles. So most British people are fairly unaware of their own music, and this thing that's called "folk music" in fact isn't. What happens in the places called folk clubs has very little to do with folk music. Occasionally you get traditional music, but mostly it's just baloney. What started out as a left-wing hobby is now a middle-class conservative hobby, for people in roll-neck sweaters, Thursday nights. And it's not true. Folk music's more like UB40, the more interesting rock bands -- you could class that music more accurately as folk music. Or Kim Wilde, Marty Wilde's daughter. Marty Wilde was a British rock singer in the '50s, and his daughter's now on the charts -- so that's folk music, in the sense of it being handed down in the family. |
| How are UB40 "folk"? | In the sense that they share the concerns of traditional music. Their lyrics are very political and totally tuned to their audience. They're past part of their audience; they're thrown up from their audience. |
| That would apply to a lot of British music from the mid-' 70s. | The only thing that's off about it is the styles in
which the bands play -- white reggae, punk -- it's synthesized music based
more than anything else on the classical tradition. A lot of pop music in
Europe is quite classically based. Composers like Beethoven, Mozart -- it
comes from that. And classical music was originally the music of the
aristocracy, of the aristocratic few. It was all sponsored by kings and
lords. So I just think that it's a shame that people don't have access to their own music and don't play popular music in a style closer to what's really them. And as long as they call it "folk music," that gap is never going to close. If there weren't any labels, they'd be a lot easier to ... infiltrate. |
| Much of your own work is politically focused, but very much rooted in the spiritual. Many of your songs seem to deal with loss and separation -- the separation of lovers, or of the social fabric. | I suppose I write a lot about situations where people cling to illusion, to things in the world they can't hold on to. You never own anything, really. The world slips away from you -- the world runs away from you, as you get older and older. This world world rushes away and the next world rushes closer; it's better to invest in the next world than this one. |
| How does one invest in the next world? | That's a good question. |
| Do the spiritual and the political intertwine? | Totally, totally. In the sense that in the world one needs to be free to practice what one does, to have the freedom to worship, or whatever. And if you don't have that freedom, then you have to do something about it. You have to fight for that right or go somewhere else. You have to fight. And all the world's that way, it's full of it, it's always happening; it's happening here, there and everywhere. There's always tyrants in the world -- the world's full of tyrants. And you have to move out of the way or get rid of them. |
| Is writing songs a way of fighting? | Absolutely. |
to Richard
Thompson, August 28 1982
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