1000 Years of Popular Music [CD & DVD] by Richard Thompson (CD, Jun-2006, 2 Discs, Cooking Vinyl Records USA)

Come on, RICHARD THOMPSON singing "Oops I did it again"? On DVD AND CD?

How can you go wrong?

According to popular legend, PLAYBOY magazine asked Richard Thompson (among others) in 1999 to name his favorite pop songs of the millenium. Rather than doing what they wanted and reaching way back to, say 1955, he produced a list that carefully included the last 1000 years. This concert recording is the audio-visual version of his response.

Mr. Thompson deftly straddles that line between Folk and Rock and this either puts him square in the middle of your favorite radio station's format or leaves him completely out in the cold. His "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (NOT on this recording) is said to be the most often requested (or most often played) song on Public Radio's World Cafe. Anyone who has heard it more than once can tell you why. The man plays guitar like Jesus's baby brother and weaves stories of romance, machines, and doom.

And, arguably, until about 1800 or so, that would be the very nature of popular music, now generally called folk music. Richard and Linda Thompson and Fairport Convention probably made more people familiar with traditional folk music than all of the campfires in all of the Celtic World. And, just in case you weren't born then, either, he has given it another shot in this collection. Except he makes no real distinction between "Summer is Icumen In" and Cole Porter's "Night and Day". In the hands of Mr. Thompson, it's all Pop and, yes, It's All Very Good.

For those of us who remember vinyl as the Standard, instead of as some cute alternative, the concept of the "buried single" is familiar. Before picking which song to play was a question of clicking, you actually had to CUE the needle and many an album was planned to force you to listen to a few other tunes on your way to the one you wanted. I must confess, I was tempted to skip over the first few hundred years of this project to get to the sublime oddity of Britney Spears and Squeeze coming from the king of the guitar, not to mention Bowling For Soup's wonderful "1985".

And I will probably listen to the second disc more often than the first. But there is much to enjoy in the folky first half. With the help of Judith Owen (keyboards and vocals) and Debra Dobkin (percussion and vocals) Thompson offers madrigals, ballads and shanties, as well as a number from Gilbert & Sullivan's MIKADO and a song "from the great days of the British Music Hall". The first disc ends with The Ink Spots' JAVA JIVE.

But even Richard Thompson recognizes that there has been a lot of great pop music in the last 50 years or so and he gives the whole of the second disc over to more or less Post World War II material. The second disc is mostly radio hits and, yes, that includes "Oops I did it again".

This is a phenomenon not to be missed. As Thompson himself says in the liner notes (in a nice little book format, by the way) "Climb aboard our magic steamroller of music, and hold on very tight, please."