|
| |
|
|
RICHARD THOMPSON
English lessons
|
|
|
|
|
When Richard Thompson goes back to the roots, he doesn’t mess around. His current show, "1000 Years of Popular Music," offers pretty much what the name promises: his all-covers set at the Berklee Performance Center last Thursday opened with the 13th-century round "Sumer Is Icumen In" and wrapped up, some two hours and seven centuries later, with Bowling for Soup’s current novelty hit "1985." As the Del Fuegos once put it, that’s a long slide for an out. But if this sounds like a joky prospect, guess again. Thompson played everything straight, even the surprise covers of Prince ("Kiss") and Britney Spears ("Oops! I Did It Again," which he noncommittally announced as "a pretty good song"). As he explains in the tour-accompanying official bootleg CD, the show was prompted by Playboy’s asking various performers for the best songs of the past millennium. Figuring that most of the respondents would go back only a couple of decades, Thompson included madrigals and light opera alongside pop hits. His choices at Berklee, then, amounted to a history of English music. Performing with percussionist Debra Dobkin and singer Judith Owen (a Californian who, at least on the folk numbers, sounded remarkably like his former wife and musical partner, Linda Thompson), he devoted the first third of the show to the type of traditional material he once did with Fairport Convention. Part raucous and part tragic, these songs had the haunting themes and broad humor that Thompson has always gravitated toward. The middle of the show flagged a bit as he worked in everything from Gilbert & Sullivan to a World War II song by Noël Coward. But things perked up when the rock era came around, with Thompson getting into country (Buck Owens’s "A-11") and R&B (Jerry Lee Lewis’s "Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee O’Dee"). He might have spent more time with those genres, but he did settle into the British Invasion long enough to cover the Kinks ("See My Friends"), the Beatles ("It Won’t Be Long"), and the Easybeats ("Friday on My Mind") and, later, Squeeze’s "Tempted" — all of which found his celebrated guitar playing finally coming up front. During the encores, requests for Thompson’s own songs were ignored (as was the wag who yelled for "Free Bird"); the feature here was a cynical, cabaret-style number that turned out to be one of Abba’s strangest hits, "Money Money Money," and it was the one offering the diehard Thompsonites didn’t seem to recognize. Too bad — it was one of the best songs he played all night.
BY BRETT MILANO
|
