Dressed in black, from the nipple of his beret to the tips of his shoes, Richard Thompson, half-hearted beard and all, bears more than a passing resemblance to Citizen Smith. Yet for all his bumbling attempts at humour ("The 1970s. Weren't they great? Brotherhood of Man, Pickettywitch..."), for the most part his is a stern Old Testament (or his beloved Koran) presence. That he is playing in a deconsecrated chapel, acoustic difficulties notwithstanding, simply adds to the aura of catharsis.
Without the leavening effects of a light show or an accompanying band, but with his guitar as loud as an army, Thompson completely solo is a stark affair. He has the songs to match the mood: Shoot Out The Lights remains extraordinarily bleak, as frightening as a mere song can be. Thompson delivers it with a loneliness of spirit undimmed over its 19-year lifespan, while the newer and appositely lachrymose Dry My Tears & Move On is cut from the same cloth of poetic despair, and the evening's heartbreaking closer, I Misunderstood, contains the career-defining couplet "I thought she was saying 'good luck'; she was saying 'goodbye'", a lyric as good as literate pop music can offer.
Peaks, however, mean attendant troughs. The Great Valero was dull in 1974 and it remains dull in 2001, and 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is a dreary motor-bike eulogy dressed as something more substantial. More troubling is Thompson's unwarranted streak of bitterness, and not just in throwaway lines such as "I feel so good I'm gonna break somebody's heart tonight" as delivered by the freed-prisoner narrator of I Feel So Good.
To see a man of Thompson's gifts, and with his self- evident love of language, bashing out an unpleasant anti-Madonna ditty barely worthy of a Pulp soundcheck is demeaning to both himself and his audience.
Still, for all his blurring of the line between misery and resentment, Thompson is a wonderfully inventive guitarist who would have thrived in any era on instrumental skills alone, and he does a wickedly droll Mick Jagger impersonation. Persuasion is deceptively sweet-natured, Turning of the Tide is as neat as ever, Crawl Back (Under My Stone) is comedically self-absorbed and, as with all flexible troubadours, he takes requests and even dips into Fairport Convention, a whole other life ago, on a stately Genesis Hall. What a charmer he can be.
Richard Thompson plays Sheffield City Hall (0114-278 9789), tonight and Cambridge folk festival (01223 411765), tomorrow.
