Richard & Linda Thompson
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

“When the bird settles on a wall and sees the seeds that serve as bait in the trap, desire drives it towards these seeds. It looks at them, then looks towards the vast highlands. The bird that resists this temptation takes flight towards the highlands, filled with joy”.

It is a Sufi tale.

The talented guitarist Richard Thompson, at a very young age with Fairport Convention, had rewritten (see “Unhalfbricking” and “Liege And Lief”) the rules of British Folk. But in 1971, at just over twenty, he decided to leave to pursue the path of songwriting and develop those ideas in a personal way.

Noteworthy are the collaborations preceding his solo debut: Nick Drake, John Martyn, John Cale, Sandy Denny, Ian Matthews. After all, he is a refined guitarist with excellent technique. Then here is “Henry The Human Fly” (Island, 1972), where he debuted with a volatile, inconsistent, Barrett-esque Folk Rock. In the meantime, he had married Linda Peters, also inaugurating a fruitful artistic partnership. She was a mezzo-soprano with a crystalline, enchanting, and throbbing voice.

“I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” (Island, 1974), recorded in a very short time and on a low budget, is already a masterpiece. It harbors that Folk Revival, made of popular traditions, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, and much awareness, in a definitively guitar Rock, surrounded by an aura of solemnity. Contrary to Pop sentimentalism. A fervent and adventurous music, half electric, half acoustic, shadowy, dark, and vaguely intellectual. The author paints the suburban fresco of a humanity without prospects, victim of an adverse fate, apparently incontrovertible. A humanity made up of beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, violent fathers, crude and mean people, traitors, envious, solitary, defeated, oppressed, tormented mothers, and afflicted children. He speaks with a certain recurrence of death. Cosmic pessimism? No. Nor the empty nihilism that many insist on reading into it. Richard Thompson always lamented how his lyrics were systematically misunderstood. There are traces of compassion, next to not infrequent black humor. Certainly, he is a mournful, compunctious, fatalistic writer, but nothingness is not the final answer to his secular psalms, which await a paradoxical messianism, beyond coming, and yet begun.

Dark, shadowy lyrics, guided by the electric guitar, plus the spiritual inspiration of Linda's singing, a “song of innocence,” complementing Richard's “song of experience.” A desolate, degraded, disheartened world, but beautiful before the fall, a Miltonian “Paradise Lost,” almost suffering from a cosmic fracture difficult to mend. Yet hope can rise beyond all possibility. Thompson was a passionate fan of William Blake and even for the poet's little chimney sweeps, redemption exists. So for the newborn baby in “The End Of The Rainbow,” to whom the mother transmits her disillusioned gaze (“There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow”). The author stated: “there's always a bit of hope in the third verse of my songs.” And, in the end, they always emerge with an unexpected sense of peace. Thompson empathizes with the characters (somewhat Dickensian) he describes. He does not judge them. In pragmatic ataraxy. Not the convenient misanthropy he was often accused of. And there is never self-pity. Even the beggar has a subtle dignity, the loner is not defeated, the child still in the cradle won't necessarily look at the world with his mother's eyes. Even without direction, a step is still possible. Even if only fueled by doubt. Liberation may loom. Thompson seems almost to move from a late medieval sensitivity. His spiritual search, shared for a long time with Linda, is thus another trace to follow. Sufism, the mystical branch of Islamism, to which soon adhere, corresponds to a universal quest for meaning. Thus, desolation and anguish are no longer paradigms of nullification. One awaits, almost does not await, an additional event, which will perhaps arrive a day after its arrival.

“When I Get To The Border”, timbres of folk dances, but enveloped in a chamber sonata, longs for the wanderings of the soul: “The dusty road shines sweetly/ the gold shines through my steps/…/ as I go to my border”.

“Calvary Cross” is a modern gospel with a solemn pace marked by deep piano chords, a dramatic sermon where death is personified by a waxen maid, who tells the protagonist that everything he does, he does for her. Strong as love is death, overturning the Song of Songs. “One day you'll take a train/ without ever leaving the station”. Mercilessly, as the electric guitar becomes bloodthirsty, thorny, and tormenting.

“The Great Valerio”: a circus metaphor of the tightrope walker, with the crowd as the stomping protagonist. To exalt him, to envy him, to desire his ruin. All “tightrope walkers of love,” ”until the heart becomes like the seasons” and yells, feasting on the fatality of the moment, of fragile existence. The hypnotic instrumental tail openly cites the minimalism of Erik Satie.

“The End Of The Rainbow” is a disquieting lullaby. “I feel for you, little horror/ soft at your mother’s breast/ no stroke of luck waiting around the corner/ because your father is a no-good/ and thinks you're a calamity/ And your sister, she's no better than a whore”. “But look out of the cradle/ Look at the empty and sad faces/ that pass by you along the road/ All rushing to sleep, to dive into the dream./ And every loving handshake/ is another man to break/ so your heart is sick/ just for opening up and being hurt”.

“I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” has an almost outrageous, evasive, plastic beauty, adorned with baroque fanfares. “I’m so tired of working every day/ Now, the weekend has come/ I’m about to throw my problems away./ If you have taxi money, sir, everything will be all right/ I want to see the bright lights tonight/ …/ Take me to the dance and hold me tight/ I want to see the bright lights tonight”. Linda's singing excels, dry, fragile, nervous, passionate. Her vocal harmonies bring new hypersensitive, naturalistic, quite unique at the time. Someone pronounced about her: “She sings as if she were sitting on a time bomb”.

“The Little Beggar Girl”, a restrained tarantella, almost a prayer, a resplendent example of folk-rock. The protagonist, Sally, dances around her wooden leg and plays the accordion “I like to take the money of a snob like you”. She biblically prefers to be rich after rather than before, “If my words hurt your conscience/ keep in mind that…/ … I am just a little beggar girl”.

“We Sing Hallelujah” is a pub song, heavy and austere.

“A man is like a rusty wheel
of a rusty cart
Sings his song rattling along
And then falls apart

And we sing hallelujah
At the end of the year
And we work every day the old way
Until the shining star appears

A man is like a thorn
He covers himself with thorns
Laughs like a clown, when fate is against him
And his clothes are worn and torn

A man is like a three-stringed violin
Hanging on a wall
Plays when someone scrapes his bow
…
A man is like his father
He wishes he was never born...”

Ten intense, mature, almost liturgical songs. In the 2004 remastering, also three live tracks from 1975, very beautiful. The guitar becomes transcendental. Also burning. The male-female modulation is fundamental, Peters’ contribution gives the work a sacred foreboding.

A note of merit to Simon Nicol on the dulcimer, and the master John Kirkpatrick on the Anglo concertina and accordion.

The following album, “Hokey Pokey” will refer to the Music Hall, with a certain humor. From 1975, the two spouses become Sufis, completing the spiritual journey that had bound them to Islam and recording “Pour down like silver”, a severe and collected album. In 1982, another masterpiece of the duo, “Shoot out the Lights” produced by John Boyd. Here they sing about their relationship, which had sadly come to a break. The most suffering is Richard.

His songwriting continues uninterrupted to this day.

To conclude on “I want to see the bright lights tonight”: amidst so much desolation, death, nullification, returning to the Sufi tale, are the seeds. The horizons to turn to, the bright lights, are to be sought elsewhere. Even traveling arduous, seemingly bitter distances. In the chaste joy of setting out on a journey.