Music Arcades: Linda Thompson: Dreams Fly Away

One of the rather puerile ways you can identify yourself as one of the cognoscenti among music fans is to champion the performer who operates in the shadow of bigger 'stars'. Thus insiders rate Richard Lloyd's guitar playing in Television instead of Tom Verlaine. They insist that The Beatles would have got nowhere, or at least not nearly so far, without Ringo. And recently I've heard the theory that The Rolling Stones' best albums are the ones with Mick Taylor, rather than Brian Jones or Ronnie Wood.

Personally, I don't like Television, know less than most people about The Beatles, and the one experience of Mick Taylor that obliterates all my others is the way he soured our first Bob Dylan show with the numbing tedium of his solos. But a decade or so ago, around the time I picked up this compilation, second-hand, I would tell the few who would listen that Linda Thompson was more important than Richard Thompson.

In the years since I've got to know RT's music better, and tried to drop those striking-a-pose opinions from my makeup. And yet… maybe it was just my state of mind this morning, alone in the house on Sunday morning with a full mug of coffee and the volume up loud… still, I began to believe I might have been right.

There are some breathtaking recordings on this album. Just to take one example: a demo version of First Light that, whether despite or partly because of the tape hiss, gave me goosebumps as it began. An astoundingly characterful voice in a range of beautiful settings (plus a couple of slightly naff eighties ones).

I was flicking through the sleeve notes, thinking "these are good", when I jumped to the end and saw they were by Richard Williams and that made sense. Firstly because I think it was him who first introduced me to Richard and Linda. Secondly because he's such a great writer: did I tell you Lucy gave me his book about Kind of Blue, which looks like it's going to be a fascinating read?

One of the things that jumped out at me from Williams' account was Linda Thompson's sense of failure: he says she hankered after commercial rather cult status, and quotes her, "After ten years I stopped telling people I was a singer, because they'd expect to have heard of me. I mean, meeting Bob Dylan was wonderful, but I'd rather have been in the Bangles, really." This backed up in the canny wit of Linda's own brief notes about the songs. Of Sisters, she writes,

This is about a Muslim man who took a second wife [Richard and Linda converted to Islam, and he left her for another woman] — you have to be a big person to make that work. This guy was a creep. Update twelve years on, he dumped both of them for someone else: best bit of luck they ever had, and the women are still best friends. Singing with the McGarrigles really was heaven.

There are some compilations that feel about as inspiring, inspired, and digestible as the list of contents on flat-pack furniture. Then there are those like this one that show that hits and rarities can work together, that recordings of widely differing provenance and quality can sound coherent, and that compiling need not be constrained by chronology or "career narrative". As you probably guessed, this is one of the latter. Maybe it's just my mood and/or the timing, but this is going into my Top 50, and several of the songs are about to be ripped into my iTunes library.

All of which makes me sadder that I've never seen Linda perform this repertoire. Her headline billing on the Sunday of the 2003 Cambridge Folk Festival was one of the reasons I went, but it was announced on the Saturday that she'd had to withdraw (thanks to the dysphonia again, I think). Two years later I saw her leading a revue show of variety songs. That was the time Peter Blegvad commented on the magazine I was reading as he made his way to his seat. I'd heard a rumour that Brian Eno might be singing — since Linda is apparently an occasional member of his informal a capella group. But we didn't get any Eno. Neither did we get enough Linda.