Meltdown 2010: Richard Thompson’s 1,000 Years of Popular Music

I’m not going to dwell on this one, as it was agreed amongst all seven attendees in our party that it was at best a hit and miss affair.  I find the thesis of the show one of those terrific, “why has no-one done that before” sort of ideas: exploring the popular music of a whole millennium, not just the past 50 years.  However, there are distinct flaws in this initiative in practice, at least in this show: the main one for me is that the years up to 1590 are accounted for in just three songs, and the second half of the show is entirely given over to the twentieth century — I think this is a distinct cop-out on the avowed intention of the show, giving 10% of the years looked at a full 50% of the time.  Put another way, there was nothing for either the eleventh, thirteenth,  fifteenth or eighteenth centuries, as far as I recall, but two songs from the 1960s.  It is also a cop-out because the earlier music was far more interesting and suited Thompson’s style much better than the recent stuff; the second half felt a bit like a second-rate covers band, whereas the best parts of the first half were a bit other-worldly and strange, in a good way.

Thompson was accompanied by two women, one a vocalist and the other a drummer-singer.  The drummer was fairly mesmerising toward the end, but the vocalist, in spite of a lovely voice, properly annoyed everyone in our party at some point in the evening (my tipping point came in the second half with a truly diabolical rendering of “Night and Day”).  Her ability to deal with the show’s necessarily vast number of styles mitigated against her with some, who said that it just made her seem an inauthentic Jack of all trades, master of none.  An odd show.