According to Richard Thompson, he loves having Sandy Dillon on tour with him because she "makes me sound cheerful". Dillon is strange, to say the least. With her straight dark hair, pharaoh make-up and thin, elongated body, she looks as if she haunts grave yards at the witching hour, looking for buried inspiration. Her songs are dark and heavy, not least Too Rough, a cacophony of random noise and ironic rock'n'roll postures. When she sings, her voice swoops unnervingly between Betty Boop and John Lee Hooker.
Despite his veteran status, Richard Thompson can still surprise and unsettle too. Armed only with his acoustic guitar, with a fetishistic Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle parked onstage beside him for dramatic effect, he ripped through a potent selection from his bottomless back catalogue.
Dressed in a baggy dark suit and black beret, Thompson bantered matily with the audience, mocking his own meagre record sales and joking facetiously about his lack of superstar status. But when he sings, a deeper, stranger Thompson emerges. His guitar playing is deft and decisive, whether he's piling on the powerchord-strum of Feel So Good or fingerpicking his way with bleak precision through Cold Kisses. Where his speaking voice is diffident and throwaway, he sings with a stridency and power which make you wonder why he ever felt he needed a backing band. In I Misunderstood, he managed to sound both wounded and vengeful; in Shoot Out the Lights, the force of his performance made him seem two feet taller.
He has always stuck fast to his roots in classic folk music, and he has become a gripping story-teller. He apologised for adding new biker-friendly verses to his Vincent Black Lightning saga, a classic tale of love, death and loyalty. In God Loves a Drunk, a dirge in 3/4 time, he shone a redemptive light on the squalid details of his tale. And if that's not enough, Thompson is the only performer I've ever seen who can change a broken guitar string while ad libbing his way through Twist and Shout. That's worth a Grammy, at least.
Richard Thompson plays the Playhouse, Oxford (01865 798600), tomorrow.
