RICHARD THOMPSON: Interview: Cheerful man with an ‘inner Brontë’

From the archives ....

As Richard Thompson prepares to tour the UK for new album Electric, the 63-year-old tells Martin Chilton why music still excites him.

Richard Thompson splits his time between homes in Los Angeles and London but his mordant songs still spring from a very English imagination. "I'm not that affected by surroundings when I write music," the 63-year-old told me. "There is an inner landscape that you draw on, a sort of inner Brontë. It's a bleakness in which I always see songs happening. It's a fictional world. Maybe it doesn't even exist." Despite the emotional desolation of some of his songs, there is a wit and jollity to the music of someone who describes himself as "a very positive, optimistic person".

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