Richard Thompson
Richard Thompson
Posted: 01 Feb 2011
Richard Thompson
The Sage Gateshead
26 Jan 2011
Picture by Pam Littky
Two songs in to veteran folk-rocker Richard Thompson’s latest visit to The Sage and the spine-tingling Among the Gorse, Among the Grey told the packed audience what all the fuss was about from his new Grammy- nominated Dream Attic album. As an eerie atmosphere largely created by Joel Zifkin’s violin enveloped Hall One, the message was that master songwriter Thompson, a newly created OBE, was right on form and so were his band that included Michael Jerome on drums, Taras Prodaniuk on bass and the hugely impressive Pete Zorn on just about everything else.
When the people in the row behind you are overheard before the show discussing bands by the model and make of their instruments you know you have aficionados in the audience as well as on stage. Richard Thompson is not a commercially minded artist, proudly introducing the first number of his second set of ‘greatest hits – with a small h’ with the statement: “This is from the worst selling album in Warner Brothers’ history.”
Explaining early on that his show was going to consist of material from Dream Attic in the first half and old favourites after the break allowed his loyal following to sit back and soak up the new stuff which went down really well, even on Here Comes Geordie – a brave number to play on Tyneside given it is less than complimentary about its subject. “I think we’ve got away with it,” Thompson quipped to his band as the applause came.
The letdown came with an abrupt ending. Word had gone round – based on reviews of his London concert the previous week and from audience members who were already onto their second or third night of the tour – that the show lasted close on three hours, so when the band departed after a pulsating version of Tear Stained Letter it seemed they had left far too soon despite being on stage a more than respectable two hours in total. Finishing a second and final encore with I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the man shortlisted for this year’s Folk Musician of the Year and named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the top 20 guitarists in the world disappeared to find the bright lights of the quayside leaving some of his most beautiful and best known numbers conspicuous by their absence in a second set billed as ‘greatest hits.’
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