Another shows him looking up at Linda’s picture with a bemused expression that’s difficult to read but is connected rather than alienated. Of the alternate photos from the same cover shoot that appear in the booklet to the 2020 Hard Luck Stories box, one shows Richard clutching his head between his hands in what looks like frustration or despair. To me, though, it’s more ambiguous than that. It may well be, as Nigel Schofield calls it in the booklet accompanying the 2006 RT box set, “a disquieting grin” that gives off an “inevitable sense of alienation”. For instance, Richard is dressed neatly, right down to his shiny wristwatch. So much so that I was surprised to only recently notice that despite the creepy punk vibe of the cover, the LP doesn’t truly fit the unhinged violence you’d anticipate from a cursory glance at its look or lyrics. Whenever it was that gave me the good fortune of encountering this treasure trove of records, I know them exceedingly well by now. From there, the pair would put out six albums together-four of them nearly perfect-between I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight in 1974 and Shoot out the Lights in 1982. His legendarily poor-selling but enduring first album, Henry the Human Fly, was released in 1972 and featured Linda (then with the surname of Peters).
Of course, that was before he went solo and soon hooked up with Linda. I can’t remember exactly when I finally first listened to it or when it dawned on me that Richard Thompson was one of the reasons why I’d always loved the early years of Fairport Convention (1968 to 1970). But my sister was probably thinking about the lyrics, which would have gone well over my head emotionally back then. The three songs from Shoot out the Lights that showed up on Beat the Retreat (the 1994 tribute album to Richard Thompson) were covered by X, David Byrne, and R.E.M. That was during my first year of college, when I was mostly into punk and what would later be called post-punk- The Clash, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Television, X, etc.-so I probably would have liked it just fine. It was in the apartment that my older sister shared with her partner, and she told me I wouldn’t like it.
Like many LPs back in the pre-streaming days, I knew Shoot out the Lights from its cover long before I heard the album.
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