Top Artists – Richard Thompson (also Linda Thompson)

Hokey Pokey – Album Background

More of the Music of Richard Thompson

This is one of R&L Thompson’s best albums, their second release, following the luminous I Want to See the Bright Lights Shine from a year earlier. Rich and full-bodied, with big bass and gobs of studio ambience, this is the way this music was meant to be heard.

Wikipedia on Hokey Pokey

Hokey Pokey is the second album by the British duo of singer Linda and singer/songwriter/guitarist Richard Thompson. It was recorded in the autumn of 1974 and released in 1975.

Listeners keen to try to find connections between the albums by the Thompsons and their personal lives may be confused by the delays between writing, recording and release of the early albums. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight was conceived and recorded prior to the Thompsons’ embracing of Islam, but the album’s release was substantially delayed. By the time that album was released the Thompsons were living in an Islamic commune in London.

In the meantime the Thompsons had toured as a trio with Fairport Convention guitarist Simon Nicol. Nicol recalls that period: (in Patrick Humphries’ biography of Richard Thompson)

We did the folk clubs as a trio … It was just after they got married, and it was lovely. I look back on that period with great affection … It was really powerful. You could hear a pin drop at most of those gigs. Rapt attention. Two acoustic guitars, and the bass pedals went through a little backline combo amp, we’d use house microphones … It was stuff from Bright Lights … and Hokey Pokey, in the process of creation, Hank Williams’ songs …

So much of the material on the Hokey Pokey album was written sometime before the album was recorded and even predates the conversion to Islam. To add to the confusion the release of the eventual album was again delayed and so the song and the themes of the album lagged behind the development of the Thompsons’s personal lives.

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Unhalfbricking – Simply Vinyl Reviewed

More of the Music of Richard Thompson

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Richard (and Linda) Thompson

Sonic Grade: B

One of the better Simply Vinyl recuts. We haven’t played a copy of it in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds.

Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

This 180 gram LP comes recommended, with very good English sound (smooth, rich) for this early Richard Thompson folk music, with the wonderful Sandy Denny on vocals. Happily, not your standard audiophile fare.

A 5 Star Rave Review in the All Music Guide!

Unhalfbricking was, if only in retrospect, a transitional album for the young Fairport Convention, in which the group shed its closest ties to its American folk-rock influences and started to edge toward a more traditional British folk-slanted sound. That shift wouldn’t be definitive until their next album, Liege & Lief. But the strongest link to the American folk-rock harmony approach left with the departure of Ian Matthews, who left shortly after the sessions for Unhalfbricking began. The mixture of obscure American folk-rock songs, original material, and traditional interpretations that had fallen into place with What We Did on Our Holidays earlier in the year was actually still intact, if not as balanced.

Sandy Denny’s two compositions, her famous “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” and the far less celebrated but magnetically brooding “Autopsy,” were among the record’s highlights. So too were the goofball French Cajun cover of Bob Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (here retitled “Si Tu Dois Partir,” and a British hit) and the magnificent reading of Dylan’s “Percy’s Song.

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