Guitarist Richard Thompson keeps good company. His name is regularly found alongside those of Hendrix, Clapton, and Jimmy Page on various “Best Guitarists of All Time” lists. But while they all riffed off the American blues, Thompson has always done his own thing. “It’s not really bluesy. It’s more sort of Celtic. We wanted to go back to the roots of the traditional style and really revive that.”
For his new album, Electric, Richard Thompson takes those Celtic-infused guitar stylings and turns them up to eleven. He sits down with Kurt to talk about the album and play a few songs. “Stony Ground” is a bleakly comic tale – in a particularly English manner – of “a silly old man with his teeth all gone,” who lusts after young women and gets a good beating as a result. Thompson admits that he likes this song because “it’s about lust in old people. Some of our more senior bands perpetuate the myth that they’re eternal teenagers, but I like the idea of getting older and writing about older things.”
Richard Thompson and his band – Michael Jerome on drums and Taras Prodaniuk on bass – played all the interstitial music used in this week’s episode of Studio 360.
Bonus Track: “Sally B”
Video: “Stuck On The Treadmill”