As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Richard Thompson – Rams Head On Stage, 2/23/2023

Table 102, Seat 4 – front and center, 4-person table. Exactly the same seat I had when I saw him in 2019.

 

It happens that Richard Thompson was the last live show I saw (January 22, 2020) before the pandemic shut things down. That was at the Birchmere, and Zara Phillips was there to provide backing vocals on several of the songs. Going back to check, about half of the material overlapped between that show and this one.

 

After striding on stage in his black beret/pants/short-sleeved shirt, Thompson showed that he had lost nothing in terms of voice, guitar artistry, or sense of humor. Only a few of the songs were from this century; most came from his Fairport Convention days, his albums with then-wife Linda Thompson, and his 1990s efforts on Capitol – for better or worse, he may have the record (pun intended) for most labels for which an act has ever recorded. While the audience reacted most enthusiastically to the classics “Beeswing” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, as well as the singalongs on the up-tempo “Johnny’s Far Away” (his “cruise” song) and “My Daddy Is A Mummy”, they also paid rapt attention to the ballads, such as the show-closing “Dimming Of The Day”. Thompson also paid tribute to the late Jeff Beck (prior to “Walking The Long Miles Home”) and Sandy Denny (with his performance of her “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?”). At one point he broke into a few bars of “Stewball”, after someone asked whether he had any “horse-racing songs”.

 

Setlist