Richard Thompson & Band

Hippies, Thugs and Heros Tour w/ Clayton Linthicum & Quinn Bachand

We Are In The Future Presents

Richard Thompson was a teenager in 1967 when he co-founded Fairport Convention and helped forge British folk rock out of ancient ballads and electric amplifiers. He walked away from the band at 21, cut a run of stark, brilliant records with Linda Thompson through the ‘70s and early ‘80s, then built a solo career that has never stopped producing. Five decades on, the songs still cut deep and the guitar still bites.

His catalogue is crowded with characters: motorcycle outlaws, drunkards, broken lovers and doomed romantics. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning landed on TIME‘s list of the greatest songs since 1923, and Rolling Stone ranks him among the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Robert Plant, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., Los Lobos and Sleater-Kinney have all recorded his material. The honours pile up too: an OBE in 2011, an Ivor Novello Award, and lifetime achievement awards for songwriting from BBC Radio 2 and the Americana Music Association. He scored Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man along the way.