Linda Thompson: Scenes From a Rock & Roll Marriage

Love is strange. As a kid, Linda Thompson gave up a career as an actress to pursue her love of music. Then, as a musician, she subsumed her artistic identity in the encompassing vision of the man she loved and later married, Richard Thompson. And when Richard was drawn toward the austere Sufi Islamic sect, Linda —– hardly a sackcloth-and-ashes type —– dutifully followed. At one point, in the spirit of such undertakings, the couple gave away most of their material possessions: clothes, guitars, furniture, jewelry. “Everything went,” Linda says.

All this for love. And then, in 1982, when Linda was pregnant with the Thompsons’ third child, Richard returned from a short solo tour in the States and announced that he’d fallen in love with an American woman and that the marriage was over. So there she was, left with —– what?

Some answers can be found on One Clear Moment, Linda’s first solo album, in which she’s taken the obvious subject at hand – the aching sense of betrayal attendant upon a marital breakup – and fashioned it into a series of sometimes shimmeringly beautiful pop songs. The album was recorded last year, and now that some healing time has passed, Linda seems not so bitter as some of the songs sound.

“Richard and I see each other,” she says, sampling the last of the season’s new Beaujolais in a sleek midtown-Manhattan wine bar. “Yeah, we see each other, and we’re okay.” She seems very lapsed-Sufi in her fine fur coat and new punk-fluff hairdo, and she harbors few regrets. Even when she and Richard divested themselves of all their possessions, she says, “that wasn’t so bad. There’s a tremendous freedom in getting rid of things, especially things you like. But I gave away my heart, you know? My being. And that was bad.” Now she’d like to get some of it back.

The world seemed a lot less complicated back in the late Sixties, when a disenchanted teenage actress who called herself Linda Peters was just getting into folk music. She had been born Linda Pettifer, in London. Her father, Harry Pettifer, was a vaudevillian – magician, song-and-dance man – and her Scottish mother performed as Vera Love, Speciality Dancer. (“I don’t know what that meant exactly,” Linda says. “I’ve always been afraid to ask.”)

Linda was raised in Glasgow, where the music she listened to was predominantly black and American. “In depressed areas,” she says, “everybody listens to black music. Nobody listened to ‘folk,’ or Peter, Paul and Mary. We listened to, you know, Rufus Thomas and B.B. King. That’s what I thought music was. I had no idea there was such a thing as British music. I thought music was American.”

Linda’s showbiz parents sent her to drama school, and she subsequently worked as a child actress in television (most notably on the original edition of The Avengers). But she never really enjoyed acting, and by seventeen she had drifted away from it. One night around that time, she went to a London folk club called the Troubador, where she heard a celebrated trio of traditional singers called the Watersons. Linda was knocked out –— so much so that she got up onstage herself a week later, sang an unaccompanied folk song and “got a really good response.” Among those responding was a local folk singer named Paul McNeil, who, according to Linda, “was so good looking. He said, ‘You’re a smashing singer.’ And I thought, This is definitely the life, you know: men come up and say how wonderful you are. And I started singing with him. It must have been 1969 —– eons ago.”

The conflation of folk and rock in London at that time had produced a burgeoning underground scene, much of it centered on UFO, a club run by entrepreneur Joe Boyd. UFO played host to the nascent Pink Floyd, to American interlopers such as the Grateful Dead and to Fairport Convention, a band that Boyd produced. Linda fell in with the Fairporters, who included among their number an extraordinary guitarist and songwriter called Richard Thompson. Linda did not connect immediately with the mercurial Thompson (in fact, one of her first boyfriends in that period was another of Boyd’s protégés, the doomed guitarist and songwriter Nick Drake, who subsequently died of a drug overdose).

“Richard was unbelievably introverted then,” Linda says. “Basically, he went out with women who picked him up, put him over their shoulder and took him home. I like men like that, ’cause I’m quite forward.” As she recalls it, their initial attraction to each other may have been due not so much to mutual artistry as to simple sexual chemistry. “I think he saw me in a low-cut dress or something,” Linda says with a laugh.

Richard and Linda married in 1972 and honeymooned in Corsica. “It rained the whole time,” she remembers. “I should have known then.”

Given the spiritual cast of many of his lyrics, Richard’s subsequent attraction to Islam seemed very much in character. “He was already the most unworldly person that you could imagine,” says Linda. “I mean, people would pay him, give him checks, and he’d put them in his pocket and never cash them. So he met some people who’d become Muslims and he liked what they were and he became a Muslim.”

And so did Linda. Sufism, she explains, is essentially about “oneness, about going toward your higher self, as opposed to your lower self. One of the sort of maxims is that if you turn to the world, it’ll run away from you, and if you turn your back on it, it’ll come to you. There’s certainly something to be said for renouncing; I’m just not sure that we did it in the right spirit, you know? We did it in a very Christian way, which was natural, because we came from that kind of background. So we went to it in a very punishing way: no laughing, no drinking, no talking, no loving – nothing, you know? We denied ourselves everything, hoping that outer contraction would cause inner expansion. I went into it with the thought that it was like cough medicine – that it hurt me so much that it had to be good for me. Which is stupid. Stupid.”