Richard Thompson in Command

The great folk/rocker could not have rocked harder than he does right here, at a 1981 Fairport Convention reunion in whose closing song Thompson channels The Killer.

Yes, I realize that I wrote about Richard Thompson five posts below this one. What can you do when an individual is a musical force that plain refuses to be ignored? (I’ll note, sadly, that Thompson broke multiple ribs in a wretched accident a month ago— no joke when you’re 76). Still, it’s no sin, while wishing Rich godspeed with his recovery, to bring your attention to a great, under-listened-to piece of Thompsoniana. Richard Thompson left Fairport Convention in 1971. When the band itself fizzled out in 1979, its multiple alumni inaugurated an annual reunion concert, whose 1981 site was the medieval manor house Broughton Castle (the ancestral home of the Fiennes family) in Oxfordshire. The concert was recorded and issued in 1982 as Moat on the Ledge.

Fairport Convention’s contribution was to create a strain of rock & roll that owes more to 16th- and 17th-century English and Celtic balladry than to 1950s Memphian and New Orleanian R&B and rock. So it’s refreshing to hear the Fairports close Moat on the Ledge not with “Matty Groves” or some other hoary Child Ballad but with Jerry Lee Lewis’s 1958 Sun Records smash “High School Confidential,” Thompson all but setting his Stratocaster on fire. It’s a good bet that the Fairport crew’s “High School Confidential” is unrehearsed. It’s pure, spontaneous rock & roll at its best. “Come on over honey it’s your lover boy, me, that’s knockin….” ¹

1. While keeping the spotlight on RT & Co., it’s impossible to ignore the following astonishing sentence from Wikipedia’s entry on “High School Confidential”: “Lewis recorded a live version of the song with the British band The Nashville Teens on the 1964 album Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, recognized as the single greatest album in history.” Who writes these things?