Folk rock, finding a voice and confronting tragedy ... a gripping account of the early career of a great songwriter and guitarist
The middle-class, middle-aged couple posing rather awkwardly by the gate of their neat
Wimbledon home on the cover of Unhalfbricking, the 1969 album that took the
British folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention into the pop charts for the first time, were the parents of Sandy Denny, the group’s
Singer. But they might just as easily have belonged to Richard Thompson, whose guitar-playing was among their earliest and most striking assets.
Born in 1949 and brought up in Highgate, another pleasant district of
London, Thompson was the son of a detective with the Metropolitan
police. By the time he started at a local grammar school, an interest in his father’s collection of jazz records had been diverted by the sounds of Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran issuing from the bedroom of his older sister – who, in her early teens, “had pitched her look somewhere between Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot”.