Folk musicians are not always renowned for their sense of humour – unless Mumford and Sons were wearing those waistcoats as a joke. But there’s plenty of droll wit on display on Proxy Music , the latest album from reigning matriarch of the genre , Linda Thompson. The title is, of course, a play on Roxy Music – as is the eye-grabbing sleeve, which recreates the famous image of actress and model Kari-Ann Moller that graced the 1972 debut by Bryan Ferry’s raffish art-rockers.
Gazing up at the camera, eyes flashing with wry amusement, 76-year-old Thompson is a powerhouse of vigour and mischief. Yet if the packaging is playful, the songs within are anything but. Written by Thompson with the express intention of being sung by other artists, Proxy Music is an eerily melodic, often bleak meditation on the traumas of the ageing process and the spectre of mortality.
The sense of loss that runs through the LP is accentuated by Thompson’s absence from her own material. Following a decades-long struggle with spasmodic dysphonia – a neurological condition affecting the vocal cords – she has essentially lost the power to sing and thus is a ghostly presence haunting her own record. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Thompson was part of a generation of artists who gave British folk a fashionable makeover.
Working solo and with her husband of 10 years, Richard Thompson, she tapped into the ley lines that underpinned traditional music to create a body of work both beautiful and u.
