There are guitar players who grow old and there are guitar players who grow wise. Richard Thompson, a man who has never seemed particularly interested in becoming fashionable, has managed both. He has spent a lifetime finding the dark seam beneath a pretty tune, the cruelty inside a love affair, the absurdity in a political conviction. His songs contain people you might meet in a pub, people you might cross the street to avoid, and people you might discover, with some embarrassment, that you have been all along.
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is an excellent title because it suggests a parade of human types marching beneath a doubtful flag. Thompson has never been much of a believer in heroes without blemish or villains without a pulse. His characters are compromised, funny, dangerous, sometimes ridiculous. They want money, love, redemption, a better seat at the table. They are the sort of people who make history and then deny having anything to do with it.
And Thompson, as ever, watches them with a clear eye.
The album opens with “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” a pairing of twelve-string guitars and a bright, Byrds-like shimmer, a sound that gives the song an almost innocent surface. But innocence is rarely safe territory in Thompson’s world. The song looks back toward the spiritual searching of the 1970s and the dubious attractions of those who promise enlightenment.
If you want the man at his most sardonic, start here with “Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking” inspired by characters he encountered during the psychedelic era, the song considers the curious transformation of hard cases into apostles of peace and love—and the possibility that the transformation might not last. The track brings a lively, hard-driving exchange between Thompson’s Telecaster and drummer Michael Jerome. It is a terrific reminder that this songwriter can make moral ambiguity swing.
Likewise “Unsung Hero” finds its attention turning to the slow strut of humble labourers, including the navvies who built the infrastructure of modern Britain. There is a particularly Thompson-like justice in this: the people who build the world seldom get to write its history. He has little patience for grandiosity, but plenty of feeling for those whose work outlasts their names.
The other tracks give the record its breadth. “Everybody’s Stealing” takes aim at dishonesty among the well-connected, while “Stringer” returns to the figure of the plausible scoundrel. “Make Believe You Don’t Know Me”, a country-blues statement, and “Pipe Dreams” explore the familiar wreckage of desire, and “The Big Smoke” adds another urban shadow to the collection. Across the twelve tracks, Thompson moves between satire, social observation and heartbreak without making the album feel like a lecture.
On “The Soul is Me” the sharp social observer gives way to the more private and unsettling Thompson. A lonely mandolin accompanies a song of emotional desolation, a reminder that the same man who can expose a con artist with a few lines can also describe the interior ruins left by love. This is the kind of territory in which Thompson has few equals: feeling stripped of decoration, but never stripped of intelligence.
Albums such as Shoot Out the Lights and Mock Tudor revealed a writer capable of moving between intimate tragedy, black comedy, folk narrative and muscular rock. His guitar playing, meanwhile, became a language in itself: intricate without fuss, fierce without bombast, steeped in tradition but never confined by it. Nothing changes here.
The closing track “Siren” is the record’s great emotional wager: Thompson alone with an acoustic guitar, drawing the listener away from the bustling cast of rogues and toward the oldest human predicament of all. Love can be both salvation and a dangerous diversion. Here the arrangement is spare, the effect intimate. It is the sort of song that seems to have been waiting a century to be written, and may still be waiting for a singer a century from now.
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is a timely reminder of what a remarkable instrument a lifetime can be when it is put to artistic use. Thompson has spent decades studying the human animal, and he has not grown bored with the results. He can still make a rogue entertaining, a nobody memorable and a love song almost unbearably sad. His guitar remains capable of violence and grace in the same breath.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is out now.
