August AOTM: Linda Thompson – Proxy Music

Something odd is happening. Over the past few years, I’ve started to really like folk music. I suspect I’ve always liked some of it – think Laura Marling for modern artists, but far less from the golden 60s and 70s eras – but just not realised. Much more so than me liking country, though it also turns out I quite like things that are a little bit country, though more western than country. But I digress.

I wasn’t intending on a folk album this month. I’m not sure what I was intending. But the music release calendar doesn’t always match up how you like. There were a slew of brilliant albums up to May, then a barren spell before a brewing cavalry charge in the late summer. And having leant hard on securing a spot for my beloved Yard Act in March, things didn’t quite fall as I’d planned. Everything Everything’s Mountainhead, one of my Top 10 albums of the year, nailed on, was out simply too long ago. Another love of mine, the mighty Crowded House, back from their 90s heyday with unexpected new record, Gravity Stairs, proved a little too niche to my surprise and slight sadness. But then the themes of that album’s treatise on ageing, family and music’s place in the universe, turned out to lead me to the one I picked this month: British Folk legend Linda Thompson’s intriguing new album, Proxy Music.

Unlike Joey’s picking of Charli xcx’s Brat last month, I had listened to this album a number of times in my scrap to find something that would fit my interest but also give us enough mileage for a podcast episode. I can’t think of a more contrasting record to follow it up, but in some ways this is very much befitting that slot. Because it’s an album that shares a similar intention of putting your true self to music, even if the artist, genre and style are as different as heavy metal and Chicago house. However, as I dealt with the disappointment of Crowded House failing the pod test, the more I listened to this record, the more it crept up on me and felt a better and better fit.

Linda Thompson’s backstory alone is fascinating enough. You can read about it in many places, so I won’t regurgitate it line by line, but she made her name on the late-60s London folk scene, joined folk supergroup ‘The Bunch’, whose members included former Fairpoirt Convention alumni, including her future husband and musical collaborator, Richard Thompson. This led to recording with Fairport Convention, then, following their marriage in 1972, releasing a number of acclaimed albums with Richard across the first half of that decade. Richard distracted with dabbling in Sufism, came back to release a trio of further albums, for which the final one, Shoot Out The Lights, found success in the US, and sparked a tour in 1982. Having separated before they embarked on it, the tour saw the couple fall out in public, past the end of their own tethers, and the end of their musical relationship for two decades.

Linda was first hit around this time by the condition spasmodic dysphonia, which affected her speech and singing voice. While some solo work was released in the mid-80s, she wasn’t to record again until the 2000s, when temporary treatment allowed her to perform and record into the next decade, including musical reunions with Richard Thompson, and also recording with her children, particularly Teddy and Kami Thompson, and finally on the album Family, a work created and produced by Teddy, and featuring a number of the extended Thompson clan. This was to be her final vocal work before her condition meant a reappraisal of how she would have to make music.

So the release of Proxy Music was unexpected, because what is expected of a woman with no voice to sing any more? But having continued to write well into her 70s, the album’s existence allows us to see another late-stage chapter in Thompson’s storied career, and we are all better off for it. Recruiting not just family Kami, Teddy and even Richard again, the album – a wry riff on Roxy Music’s debut down to the brilliantly off-kilter reimagining of its cover with a rictus grinner Linda on the cover – reaches further out into her extended world of friends, fans and musical connections, with both Martha and Rufus Wainwright, John Grant, The Proclaimers and Ren Harvieu, with different generations of artists from the UK . and US. But because this is new music, it cunningly shifts away from the tired genre of covers albums. This is new, and feels it.

While impressive-sounding on paper, it would’ve been easy for the album to be disjointed and elegiacal. Given the freshness of its songs and their ability to partner so well with their performers, at the hands of Teddy Thompson as producer, what results is an winding collection of absorbing and beautiful songs that criss-cross through Thompson’s life and leave us with the impression of an artist we all should have known more than we do, and a life lived to its full extent, both success and failure, joy and tragedy. It’s another example of an album that finds you more than you find it, a slice of internet-driven happenstance that I could’ve pictured David reviewing much more easily than I (Thompson, after all, once had a dalliance with Davide’s folk icon Nick Drake).

And from the opening bars of The Solitary Traveller, it grabs you, Kami Thompson’s wistful harmonies flipping the tales of love and loss back on its heels as you realise the solitude of her mother’s tale hasn’t left her alone and unhappy, but the opposite. It’s a picture of a determined, strong woman looking back on her life with fondness and pride, and not ennui. ‘Lonely life / where is thy sting? / lonely life, there’s no such thing’. Her younger life may have been darkened by misogyny but she’s celebrating her hard-won freedom as her years advance. It also sets the scene of a record that doesn’t shy away from heartbreak and sadness – and riffs on its place in the folk canon – but willingly looks at life in all its glory and bleakness, as if one cannot exist without the other.

The songs roll through at speed and full of vibrancy, from the simplicity of piano of Martha Wainwright’s rueful vocals on Or Nothing At All, ‘there’s the future, here’s the past / another dream that couldn’t last in love’s economy’. The Proclaimer’s emotional delivery on Bonnie Lass is a surprising delight, singing of dreams and the past, and Rufus Wainwright’s smoky jazz-influenced work on Darling This Will Never Do, perhaps the only moment that feels a bit out of step with the rest of the album’s folk (but perhaps that’s just me). Thompson’s desire to go back to the pre-rock’n’roll era of the ‘pop’ of her parents was behind that song, and who are we to suggest that’s out of step on an album concocted from her eight decades on this planet?

There are many highlights: the biggest – for me – is the meta John Grant, sung by the man himself, about Linda’s love for his own work. In the hands of others less able to align themselves with that knowing nod of the story and attach their rich vocals to it, it could come off as overly ironic, but it’s a truly wonderful song that Grant himself has fully invested himself in. Mudlark, performed by The Rails (Thompson’s daughter Kami and her husband Pretenders and Pogues guitarist James Walbourne) is a slice of early morning acoustic beauty, that seems to blow cobwebs away for me, and Shores Of America is delivered perfectly by Virginian Dori Freeman, full of Thompson’s wit from the (perhaps autobiographical) tale of a woman leaving her man behind: “And if it’s true/That only the good die young/Lucky old you/’Cause you’ll be around until kingdom come.”

One of the albums other struggles for me was That’s The Way the Polka Goes, a song which I’ve been on a hell of a journey with. It feels as if it could be on a Decemberists album, with its stomping, clapping theatrics and lyrics, and I veer between quaint interest and the desire to skip. Three Shaky Ships could be a modern folk classic, at the hands of The Unthanks, and there’s a real poignancy about Teddy finishing off with Those Damn Roches, a treatise on the bonds of a fractured family that only mend when they are in song – ‘bound together in blood and song / who can break us? / when we are singing loud and strong / who can take us? = but can’t stand each other’s company for long when they aren’t making music: ‘faraway Thompsons tug at my heart / can’t get along except when we’re apart’. In itself, a story of a remarkable family’s history and how music forever pulls them together, five decades in.

It has really surprised me by how much I like it, and how much I find myself singing its songs, especially the opening three. This is not an album that is made for me. It’s not a story or songs that should be anywhere my wheelhouse, but this blog and podcast has frequently pushed me out of my comfort zone, and if this is the result, then I can only lean into it each time it throws up a surprise.

I’m fascinated to hear what you all make of it.