Review: Proxy Music by Linda Thompson
One of England’s great voices releases an LP without (strictly speaking) her voice. But she comes through loud & clear. ALSO: A deep-dive 4 hr playlist.
Photo copyright © 2024 Linda Thompson/Pettifer Sounds
“When I meet a new boy, that I want for mine/ he always breaks my heart in two, it happens every time.” Linda Peters sung those gender-flipped verses to the Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved?” on a 1972 album by The Bunch, an English folk-rock supergroup featuring Sandy Denny (who sings duet on the song’s chorus) and her ex-Fairport Convention bandmate Richard Thompson. Peters, soon to become Thompson’s wife, sings with a world-weary fatalism, leaning into the “always,” seeming sure, in her mid-20s, that breaking in two is what hearts are destined to do, again and again.
Linda Thompson formed a musical team with her new husband, among the dozen or so greatest and most distinctive electric guitarists of the rock era. The six Richard and Linda Thompson albums stand with the finest folk-rock / singer-songwriter albums of the time — beginning with the yearningly transcendent I Want To See Those Bright Lights Tonight and ending, poetically, with the breathtakingly pained Shoot Out The Lights (they wrote lots of songs about “light,” fitting for artists so consumed with dark themes).
Rare co-writes aside (“Pavanne,” “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”), the songs were penned by Richard, who often sang lead. But when Linda took the mic, the air changed; her voice, a stunning instrument, transmitted more power and emotion, and added more weight. To cite but one of many indelible moments, listen to the way she summons ruefulness in her lower register on “Walking On A Wire,” the pair screaming “I’m fallin’” simultaneously but not quite in unison at the end like they’re literally plummeting off a cliff — side by side yet terribly, existentially alone.
They had three children together. When the couple split after — perhaps during — one final, famously tortured tour in 1982, Linda Thompson began a solo career. Of sorts: not long after her separation she was beset by spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that rendered her unable to sing. She struggled with it over the years, making four albums under her own name. She also raised kids, remarried, ran an antique jewelry shop in London.
Now, for her fifth solo album, Proxy Music, she passes the baton, writing all the songs but enlisting others to sing them: her kids (Teddy Thompson, Kami Thompson), her friends’ kids (Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Eliza Carthy), and other acts with roots in the traditional music of the UK and Ireland (The Unthanks, The Proclaimers).
It's a brilliant record. For starts, the packaging is hilarious: the perfectly-punned title set atop Thompson’s cheeky recreation of Roxy Music’s debut LP cover — the famous Vargas Girl shot of Kari-Ann Muller by Karl Stoecker, who also shot the back cover of Lou Reed’s Transformer. Mugging with a slightly pained-looking grin, Thompson also sends up the pimping rock’n’roll traditions she’s managed to survive.
The music, too, is smart, funny, and unflinching. “I had a voice clear and true… and now that voice is gone” begins the album’s circus-waltz opening track, “The Solitary Traveler,” a doubling-down on what sounds like a standard tragic Linda Thompson narrative, sung by her daughter, Kami. Poignant, no? Who else will carry our voices if not our children? But after numbering still more losses — a son who runs off, a lover man “sick and so painful” who does the same — the verses pivot into a celebration of being single, empty-nested, even “solvent,” raising a toast to the “health of the solitary traveller.”
Family drama backstories ghost other songs via other families. Martha Wainwright has a voice that splits the difference between her late mom’s and her aunt’s (Kate and Anna McGarrigle, respectively; her dad is Loudon Wainwright III). Here she sings of broken bonds in “Or Nothing At All,” while her brother Rufus delivers a bilingual number — fitting for a man born to an American dad and a French-Canadian mom — about love’s minefield in old music hall style, rhyming “billets doux,” “mon pauvre parvenu,” and “amour fou” with the title reprise of “darling, this will never do.” Eliza Carthy, the similarly-accomplished progeny of folk royalty (Martin Carthy and the late Norma Waterson), weaves her voice and fiddle through the neo-traditional “That’s The Way The Polka Goes,” while Linda Thompson’s son Teddy, who co-produced the album, closes things out with a country waltz about the Thompson’s extended musical family that turns on the great sister trio The Roches — Suzzy Roche being the mother of Lucy Wainwright Roche, Martha and Rufus’ half-sister. Got that? “Those Damn Roches” (the album’s second-best pun) requires a damn family tree to chart it all.
All told, it’s as good a post-Fairport Convention compilation of English folk / folk-adjacent song as any I know — though to be precise The Proclaimers’ roots are Scottish, Dori Freeman’s are Appalachian, The Unthanks’ are distinctly Northumbrian, and John Grant is a Michigan-born polyglot based at last check in Iceland. The Rails are from London, a duo of Tami Thompson and James Walbourne (Pretenders, Pernice Brothers), whose weathered boy-girl harmonies recall prime Richard and Linda. And Richard Thompson even makes a low-key appearance himself, adding acoustic and subdued electric guitar to his ex-wife’s plaint “I Used To Be So Pretty,” sung handsomely by Salford-bred Ren Harvieu — who it must be said is quite pretty indeed and, far as I can tell, bears a distinct resemblance to a young Linda Thompson. “You used to love the bones of me/ When we danced so sweetly/ But now you’d deny me a bed,” sings Harvieu as Thompson’s doppelgänger, as her ex-, who once wrote a song titled “She Twists the Knife Again,” plays along. Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Dude didn’t know the half of it.
UPDATE: Linda joined Richard and their daughter Kami for “I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight” at the Royal Albert Hall for his 75th birthday concert on June 8. The elder Thompsons hugged it out afterwards. “We don’t often get you two onstage, not at the same time,” noted their daughter. “You’re telling me, kid!” said her dad.
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Here’s a deep-dive playlist (65 songs, 4+ hours of music) into the greatness of Linda Thompson as both singer and songwriter, with a helluva supporting cast, including Sandy Denny, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and Emmylou Harris, with a lot of scene-stealing by Richard Thompson and that absolutely stunning guitar.
Essential reads & streams:
Speaking of major English singer-songwriters, this remix of Charlie XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing” with her New Zealand bruh Lorde just posted this morning. It’s quite the friendship psychodrama; for now I’ll leave hot takes to my fellow writers.
NB: Zach Schonfeld explaining why so many big concert tours are tanking this year (hint: maybe fans are sick of price gouging?)
NB: Dan Charnas unravelling the DNA of Sabrina Carpenter’s summer hit “Espresso” (hint: ‘80s post-disco, boogie, electro, synth-funk, and Latin freestyle)
NB: You’ve likely seen it, but if you’ve ever loved R.E.M. (I sure did), this 40+ minute interview that accompanied their brief recent reunion will swell your heart (hint: listen to Bill Berry)
That’s it for now. Enjoy, and welcome,
Will
Great piece! Listening to Richard and Linda is like sinking into a warm and somehow comforting bath of pure despair.
Prolific creator!! Thanks for the write up. Sharing!