Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Over at our Facebook group, Linda Thompson is our Artist of the Week, partly to mark her recent release of Proxy Music. The songs are co-written by Thompson with a range of partners, including her son Teddy, former husband Richard, and son in law James Walbourne.

Because of her longstanding spasmodic dysphoria, a rare condition which has affected her voice for decades (as Colin explained in a post a few months ago), the songs are sung by a whole range of other singers, such as the Proclaimers, the Unthanks, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Eliza Carthy, and her daughter Kami Thompson, as well as Teddy.

As I wrote on the Facebook group, the last song on the record, The Damn Roches, should make any folk fan smile.

As well as the Roches, who “go to Hammond but keep coming back”, she namechecks the families of her contributors—the McGarrigle/Wainwrights, the Waterson-Carthys, and the Thompsons—and also pays her respects to the Copper family.

For some reason it brings Lal Waterstone’s song Some Old Salty to mind, perhaps because of the large number of backing vocalists and the sense of a musical history. But The Damn Roches is much more personal, because quite a lot of the folk families mentioned in the song were actually in the studio when it was being recorded. Teddy Thompson sings the lead.