Music: Songs of Sad Experience

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Two of Richard's older songs are translations of Arabic poetry, but the tone of Shoot Out the Lights is distinctly secular and its power very much of the immediate present. With a vengeance. "I am not pessimistic, I am not obsessed by death, I don't believe in fatalism," Thompson insists. "I am an outside observer, like a journalist." Nevertheless, these observations seem drawn from inside himself. The album's title cut, for example, is a bone-chilling evocation of metropolitan madness, a song full of abrupt violence and long shadows of empty city streets. It's Just the Motion is about drowning, literally and figuratively, slipping off from life at the bottom of the sea.

That song, quiet, terrifying and seductive, is like a lullaby of doom, but it has the flavor of an old ballad. Indeed, Thompson's apprenticeship as part of the seminal English folk-rock band Fairport Convention provides a kind of melodic continuity with the past. "Folk doesn't mean anything any more," he says. "Our strongest roots are in British and Celtic traditional music. In terms of song structure, we come out of the Scottish ballad form more than anything else. But what we play is rock and roll." Thompson, son of a Scotland Yard detective who played guitar in police bands ("He wasn't good. I'm sure he won't mind my saying that"), spent his boyhood listening to early rock coming from his sister's bedroom and from the cafe down the street. He met Linda more than a decade ago, through a mutual friend in Fairport Convention, the late Sandy Denny.

Linda, the daughter of a vaudevillian who billed herself "Vera Love, Specialty Dancer" ("I'd be scared to ask her what 'specialty dancer' meant; it may have been something risque," Linda says), had grown up outside Glasgow and had never had a singing lesson or any overriding interest in the musical life. "I'm one of those idiots who will do what the man I'm involved with does," she says. "If Richard had been a bricklayer, I would have been a fantastic bricklayer." No question, she is a fantastic singer. Not trained, not technical, she has a clear tone and a dramatic delivery that drives every song to the limit. Others may be more polished, but none can surpass her punch. Linda Thompson may be rock's best woman singer.

For the present, she will be a singer without a band. Richard is in California preparing for a September solo tour. Linda has gone back to London, where she has taken charge of the three children and has a singing role at the National Theater in a dramatization of Don Quixote starring Paul Scofield. Without benefit of acting lessons or experience, she should still be finding some familiar territory. The Don, after all, also knew about the weight of dreams.

—By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Denise Worrell/ New York

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