"Loud 'n Rich" are Loudon Wainwright III and Richard Thompson (the joke, they say, is that they are not loud and certainly not rich). They have worked together irregularly over the years but this was, so far, their only gig in the UK. It was part of this year's Meltdown Festival. Each year the RFH invite some notably musician to be the curator and to set up a programme of music that shows their influences, their likes and other artists they admire. This year's curator: R Thompson.
With Wainwright, van dyke Parks, Elvis Costello and Thompson himself included in the festival lineup there was certainly a good helping of songwriting chops on display at this year's festival. For me Wainwright and Thompson are about top of the heap as regards songwriting over the last 20 years or so, so this double-header was hard to resist.
We didn't have good seats ☹ Did I get photos? I could hardly see the stage (in contrast to the show we went to earlier in the week and at which we got pretty good seats).
Wainwright was up first. For me what characterises his work are tenderness and biting wit, sometimes in the same song, and we got good measures of both. He's not a great guitar player, but in what he does the tunes are just there to convey the words and the words are the payload.
I have several of his CDs but am not familiar with his work in the detailed, nerdy way that I know Thompson's, so about 50% of the material was new to me. He did a hilarious song about having a guitar smashed. Very briefly he flies into Austin, sees his guitar being off-loaded with more than necessary vigour, has to borrow a guitar for that night's gig, then complains. THEN the rule book comes out, courtesy of the lady, "Suzy", who inflicted the damage in the first place and he gets told he's lucky they don't go after him for damages because what's he doing with a musical instrument on one of their planes anyway? So he has to Fedex the broken guitar home, fly to his next gig with no guitar and buy a new one when he gets there.
It had some lines that went something like this...
I'm not litigious and I'm not rude
Her name's not really Suzy, I don't want my ass sued
So I wonder how Angela's doing
One of the shows in Meltdown was a tribute to the late Kate McGarrigle, once Mrs Wainwright and beloved mother to Martha Wainwright and Rufus Wainwright who are both making waves in the UK. One might speculate as to why Loudon wasn't included in that show, but he delivered a very moving tribute to his ex with a lovely rendition of his song "Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder".
He played about an hour, doing some songs on piano, then called Thompson onto the stage. They did a couple of numbers together with Thompson providing vocal backing and excellent country-ish guitar accompaniament.
The second half was our curator himself. He did an interesting set, kicking off with one of his big guitar solo numbers, "When The Spell Is Broken" without giving himself time to get warmed up and in the groove. After more than 40 years as a pro musician maybe he doesn't need any of that stuff. He also played a couple of as yet unreleased songs and some less obvious selections from his extensive back catalog. However he still got in the two mandatory crowd pleasers, "Beeswing" and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."
He, of course, is a more than useful guitar player, and despite doing a solo set on acoustic guitar he got in a couple of big solos. He makes very good use of a combination of hybrid picking and open tuning - setting up bass patterns with the pick and soloing on top of that with the fingers.
He played a Lowden. Just one guitar on stage with him, and he put that through some stomp boxes - a univibe (or emulation thereof) and a slap reverb effect. It looked like a cedar top on the guitar.
Lots of chops on display in Thompson's set, though for the most part he's not about being a guitar hero, the guitar is there as a tool for delivering the song. Still, he's entitled to some fun and he got it (and so did we), especially with some great playing on "Crawl Back Under My Stone" (on which the audience made a total hash of the usual sing-along on the chorus - so badly that Thompson stopped playing and had a good laugh).
The two of them came back on together for the encores - one of Thompson's songs, a Dylan song and a couple of C&W covers. Again Thompson moved away from his signature style to lay down some superb country licks. Legend has it that he was invited to join The Eagles (before they were The Eagles, when they had just split up with Linda Ronstadt) and he certainly could have made a very good West Coast country-rock player if he wasn't busy becoming an outstanding English folk-rock player and songwriter.
As with the night we'd spent at the RFH a couple of nights earlier there was a free show in the lobby. This time it was The Fisherman's Friends who did a set of acapella sea-faring songs. Great stuff and they drew a considerable crowd actually. At least this time there wasn't a murder! On Thursday night we walked out of the RFH to find cops busy mopping up blood stains after a shooting.
