I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974)

I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974)

Leading up to 1974’s landmark I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, Richard Thompson had long been striving to co-mingle his dueling impulses toward adventurous rock and traditional folk. Here the job gets done, and the results are nothing less than revelatory. Beginning with the insistently strummed folk-rock opener “When I Get To The Border” and buttressed by the avant-tinged guitar freakout “Calvary Cross,” Thompson has established a new vernacular for traditional music, nearly as impressive in its way as the Velvets’ co-mingling of experimental composition and Tin Pan Alley craftsmanship. Juxtaposing the woe-begotten romance of tracks like “Does He Have A Friend For Me” and “Withered And Died” with the winsome, triumphal sing-along of title track and derelict’s roadmap “Down Where The Drunkards Roll,” Thompson accomplishes an extraordinary amount of world building here — populating his songs with the sort of indelible musical and literary textures that would later make the Pogues so transporting. As with an English winter, the darkness can verge on unsparing — addressing an infant on “The End Of The Rainbow,” Thompson proceeds through a litany of life’s miseries that the tyke can look forward to, beginning with the memorable opening couplet: “I feel for you, you little horror/ safe at your mother’s breast.” Closer “The Great Valerio” brings the curtain with an appropriately tense story of a tightrope walker tempting catastrophe, or perhaps asking for it: as good a metaphor as any for the high-wire act Thompson has pulled off in rendering this unique masterpiece.