Richard Thompson lets the rough edges show
At 77, Richard Thompson makes his twentieth solo album a live, brass-and-accordion run through thieves and lovers, with his guitar still sharp.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 20 2026 · 3 min readHippies, Thugs and Heroes is Richard Thompson's twentieth solo album, and it comes late in a long career: twelve songs, cut mostly live in Weehawken, New Jersey, with accordions, cornets, fiddle and Zara Phillips on backing vocals. The record is grim and often hard-rocking, and its best moments show a guitar that has not softened with age.
Thompson co-founded Fairport Convention in 1967 and left in 1971, then made his solo debut with Henry the Human Fly in 1972. The duo with Linda Thompson produced six albums, including I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights, and after it ended he returned to solo work with Hand of Kindness in 1983. Rumor and Sigh, You? Me? Us? and Dream Attic brought Grammy nominations, Still gave him a first UK Top Ten in 2015, and Beeswing was a memoir. Ship to Shore in 2024 was his first album of the 2020s. This is the second, and it is a band record.
“the side of the road under two feet of snow / Heaven was the last place he was expecting to go.”
James Frazee produced it, and it was recorded in Weehawken, New Jersey, for New West Records. The core players are Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums and David Mansfield on guitar and fiddle, with John Kirkpatrick and John Sherman on accordion and Steven Bernstein and Tony Kadleck on cornet. Most of it went down live, and you can hear it: the brass pushes against the strings instead of sitting politely behind them.
The sound is folk rock, with the folk mostly in the storytelling and the rock in the attack. Thompson's voice is a narrow, dry instrument, monochromatic the way a good raconteur is monochromatic: it holds a line and lets the words do the damage. Phillips adds depth, and on 'She Burns It All' something more unsettling, a second voice that shadows his like a malevolent twin. Accordions and cornets give the loud songs a pub-and-chapel texture and keep them out of generic bar rock. The cornet lines punch against the bass, and the accordions thicken the chords without sweetening them. The mix keeps the vocal forward and the band close, so the record sounds like a room.
The opener, 'Sorcerer's Apprentice', sets the tone: jangly and dark, a takedown of someone not quite compos mentis, Thompson's guitar flicking at the edges of the tune. 'Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking' is the preening strut, a road-tested song about an affair gone wrong that keeps its onstage swagger. 'Pauper's Grave' goes the other way: a eulogy for a stranger found at the side of the road under two feet of snow, a man who thought heaven was the last place he was headed.
'She Burns It All' turns the darkness inward, Phillips twisting a love song into something diabolical. 'Unsung Hero' is a paean to the unseen working-class hero, and it earns its plainness by keeping the arrangement close. 'Everybody's Stealing' takes the band to the Louisiana roadhouse, all brass and swagger. 'Stringer' is the folk ballad, the breath between louder cuts. The sequence moves between jangle and strut, then makes room for elegies and character sketches, so nothing settles into one tempo. Thompson's guitar is the through line, savage when it needs to be, never decorative.
This is for the listener who has kept up with Thompson's late run, and for anyone who finds folk rock too tidy. It sits next to the Fairport records, the Linda Thompson duo albums and the darker end of British songwriting that runs through Nick Drake and Sandy Denny. It will not convert anyone who wants Thompson to be a gentle acoustic institution. It is too loud and too fond of a cornet for that.
The flaw is 'Everybody's Stealing'. The brass-band treatment turns the greed idea into a bumper sticker, where 'Pauper's Grave' earns its grief through a specific body in the snow. One track does not sink the album, but it shows where the concept thins. When characters become types, the songs have to work harder to stay human.
A record built around hippies, thugs and heroes risks flattening the people into labels. Thompson mostly avoids it by keeping the music rough and the details hard. At 77, he sounds like a bandleader with another set to play. Call it a 4.0: strong, with one soft spot and a guitar that still bites.
