Richard Thompson

Hear him live

At the Jeff Center, Roanoke

• Show details

IO Jukebox

Song samples

• 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (from "Rumor and Sigh")
• Shoot Out the Lights (Richard and Linda Thompson's "Shoot Out the Lights")

On the Web:

• www.richardthompson-music.com

Richard Thompson has good memories of Roanoke. No, he doesn’t remember when he was here or if he saw the Mill Mountain Star or dined on a dog at the Roanoke Weiner Stand, but he’ll never forget where he played.

“The Iroquois Club,” he recalled. “It had sort of a sleazy charm.”

It most certainly did. Thompson played there Jan. 29, 1989, and the memory has never left him. The Salem Avenue nightspot has been gone for years, but Thompson still makes music, records and tours — just like he’s done for nearly 40 years.

He comes to Roanoke on Sunday, this time to the plush confines of Jefferson Center’s Shaftman Performance Hall. He arrives armed only with an acoustic guitar and an oeuvre that actually stretches back a millennium.

Thompson, 57, is a bona fide British folk-rock legend, with more than 30 albums to his credit, starting with his days with Fairport Convention in the 1960s and continuing through a string of wonderful albums with then-wife Linda Thompson and a solo career now spanning 23 years.

An amazing musician who was ranked as the 19th greatest guitar player of all-time by Rolling Stone, Thompson is known equally for his songwriting, which has melded folk, rock, Celtic, blues and jazz influences. His fan base is in the bigger-than-cult, not-quite-mainstream category, with people entering the fan club at various points in his career, which makes cobbling together a set list a nightly challenge.

“I do consciously include a lot of decades in the set list,” he said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was recording songs for a new album. “I know there are people who go all the way back to the ’60s. I include stuff from all eras for fans who have clocked in at different times.”

“I am a conscientious performer,” he added cheekily.

Thompson has continued to make albums that marry folk music he first heard from his Scottish father with the rock ’n’ roll he has loved since his London youth.

He co-founded Fairport Convention as a teenager, when most of his peers were into acid rock. He wrote many of the group’s best-known songs before leaving in 1971 and eventually marrying a singer named Linda Peters.

The Thompsons released the terrific album “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” in 1974, but struggled to find commercial success. The couple moved to a commune in the mid-1970s and converted to the Sufi strain of Islam, which Thompson still practices.

The couple divorced after their 1982 classic, “Shoot Out the Lights,” an album that ranked No. 333 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all-time.

Richard Thompson’s songwriting has been darkened with repeated themes of death, kiss-offs and bitterness, yet these occasionally bleak songs are almost always set to jaunty, hummable melodies.

One of the best examples of this poppy darkness is “Wall of Death” off “Shoot Out the Lights.” The song’s melodic refrain — “Let me ride on the wall of death one more time, you can waste your time on the other rides, but this is the nearest to being alive” — never made cheating death sound so fun!

“Death affirms life,” he said. “It’s an end to this experience, but let’s celebrate life instead of allowing it to meander past. I’m not morbid. I’m about life, life, life. That’s the theme. [‘Wall of Death’] is like writing a memo to myself to take more risks, to live on the edge as an artist. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

He continues to take risks. Two years ago, he developed a tour called “1000 Years of Music” during which he performed songs beginning with 11th-century English folk ballads and races through the millennium through 17th century classics and the Beatles until the big finish: an acoustic reading of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again.”

“On the one hand, you could say that is a crass pop song,” Thompson said. “But if you take it in another direction, it is a well-structured song not dissimilar from a dance tune of the 1600s. Everything has been there before. The styles all go around and come around.

“Basically the pulse of dance music doesn’t vary that much. It’s a melody over a drone, which is amazingly consistent over the years. Bagpipes played the drone underneath with the melody on top with no harmony. Mozart … was doing pretty much the same thing. Rap does it. It’s a consistent thread.”

Thompson’s music is also a thread that binds musicians from different genres. His songs have become country and bluegrass hits when recorded by the likes of Jo-El Sonnier (“Tear Stained Letter”) and the Del McCoury Band (“1952 Vincent Black Lightning”), which doesn’t surprise him.

“I do get some covers from bluegrass fans,” he said. “Maybe I make bluegrass music. I’m creeping that way. Bluegrass has that Scots-Irish with blues influences, and I come out of the Scots-Irish school. It’s traditional storytelling. Many Appalachian ballads are 300 to 400 years old from Britain.”

Just a drop in a millennium.

“Common themes have been around a thousand years,” he said. “Love, political, social unrest … it’s all there.”