Rating: 4/5

There is an album being promoted on Richard Thompson’s tour and not untypically he managed simultaneously to pooh-pooh his latest work, Acoustic Rarities, and bring it to the audience’s attention. Thompson is the master of self-deprecation just as his 50 years as a professional musician has honed the guitar playing and songwriting talent he showed with Fairport Convention into something approaching live film direction.

On songs such as They Tore the Hippodrome Down Thompson is scriptwriter, narrator, soundtrack composer and six-string orchestrator, using words and guitar to establish senses of both era and place. With the flick of a wrist he sets up opener Gethsemane with film noir intrigue and on Valerie his guitar takes on Duke Ellington-like locomotion and horn interjections.

Thompson will tell you that he does two types of song: medium tempo miserable ones and slow miserable ones. Crocodile Tears, he reckons, is almost happy, although its cynicism is positively gleeful as a he skewers the man who’s taken his place in the affections of a former lover who’s “as warm as a reptile can be”.

Thompson’s is a rare talent and what makes it all the more valuable is his very personal presentation. Most of this audience will only know him through his records but they’ll have left feeling as if they’ve just spent the evening with an old mate.