Songs of Sad Experience

By JAY COCKS

The Thompsons create a powerful LP out of a broken marriage

The year so far: Richard and Linda Thompson, British musicians of formidable gifts and marginal celebrity, release their sixth album, Shoot Out the Lights. It is a record that has no contemporary equal for surpassing a particularly difficult goal: working the simple tragedies of the everyday into the stuff of folk legend, and letting the stories flow through melodies that seem to have been tapped from some deep Celtic wellspring. The music, fresh, strong and startling, has ancient reverberations and contemporary overtones. Each song has the clenched power and pitiless clarity of a Francis Bacon painting.

Shoot Out the Lights does not get heavy air play or make a dent in the charts--pitiless clarity not being a commodity eagerly sought in the Top 40--but it receives reverential notices. It also gets the Thompsons to America, Richard's first real visit in ten years, Linda's first ever. Their appearances become events. They are rites of passage for novitiates, acts of communion for initiates. The Thompsons in performance put on shows of acetylene brilliance, but these events for them are something else entirely. They are an ending.

The marriage has run aground. Further collaborations are uncertain. Shoot Out the Lights may have to stand as the summing up of one of the most extraordinary creative partnerships hi rock. There is between the partners now the usual portion of blame and bitterness and confusion. All the clarity comes in Richard's music. He sings: "It's so hard to find/ Who's going to cure/ The Heart of a Man in Need." Linda sings: "It's only the pain/ That's keeping you sane/ And gives you the mind to travel on." And together: "Let me ride on/ The Wall of Death/ ... This is the nearest/ To being alive."

Shoot Out the Lights seems at times to be not so much a record at all as a kind of

Pirandellian reflecting pool. Are the songs refractions of a fractured relationship, or are the Thompsons re-enacting and reliving the songs? Is it life that is caught in the chorus, or the people? "Richard has a very spiritual side of him," Linda explains. "I think in a lot of ways he is scared of the nonspiritual side of him, so he tends to gravitate toward something that's spiritual to help him from going completely over the top. He just does everything with a vengeance, with a vengeance." The memory of a line from the Thompsons' Did She Jump or Was She Pushed? dances across the conversation ("She used to live life with a vengeance") as Linda continues, "He was a vegetarian for years and years and wouldn't wear leather. Then he became a Muslim, and we had to go to this Islamic commune in London and give all our money away, give all our clothing away. And now he loves this woman. With a vengeance."

Two of Richard's older songs are translations of Arabic poetry, but the tone of Shoot Out the Lights is distinctly secular and its power very much of the immediate present. With a vengeance. "I am not pessimistic, I am not obsessed by death, I don't believe in fatalism," Thompson insists. "I am an outside observer, like a journalist." Nevertheless, these observations seem drawn from inside himself. The album's title cut, for example, is a bone-chilling evocation of metropolitan madness, a song full of abrupt violence and long shadows of empty city streets. It's Just the Motion is about drowning, literally and figuratively, slipping off from life at the bottom of the sea.

That song, quiet, terrifying and seductive, is like a lullaby of doom, but it has the flavor of an old ballad. Indeed, Thompson's apprenticeship as part of the seminal English folk-rock band Fairport Convention provides a kind of melodic continuity with the past. "Folk doesn't mean anything any more," he says. "Our strongest roots are in British and Celtic traditional music. In terms of song structure, we come out of the Scottish ballad form more than anything else. But what we play is rock and roll." Thompson, son of a Scotland Yard detective who played guitar in police bands ("He wasn't good. I'm sure he won't mind my saying that"), spent his boyhood listening to early rock coming from his sister's bedroom and from the cafe down the street. He met Linda more than a decade ago, through a mutual friend in Fairport Convention, the late Sandy Denny.

Linda, the daughter of a vaudevillian who billed herself "Vera Love, Specialty Dancer" ("I'd be scared to ask her what 'specialty dancer' meant; it may have been something risque," Linda says), had grown up outside Glasgow and had never had a singing lesson or any overriding interest in the musical life. "I'm one of those idiots who will do what the man I'm involved with does," she says. "If Richard had been a bricklayer, I would have been a fantastic bricklayer." No question, she is a fantastic singer. Not trained, not technical, she has a clear tone and a dramatic delivery that drives every song to the limit. Others may be more polished, but none can surpass her punch. Linda Thompson may be rock's best woman singer.

For the present, she will be a singer without a band. Richard is in California preparing for a September solo tour. Linda has gone back to London, where she has taken charge of the three children and has a singing role at the National Theater in a dramatization of Don Quixote starring Paul Scofield. Without benefit of acting lessons or experience, she should still be finding some familiar territory. The Don, after all, also knew about the weight of dreams.

--By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Denise Worrell/ New York

With reporting by Denise Worrell

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.