A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2021
"Thompson is a master showman . . . [Beeswing is] everything you'd
hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It's both major and
minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch."
--The Wall Street Journal
Now Featuring an Interview with Elvis Costello
In this moving, immersive, and long-awaited memoir, beloved
international music legend Richard Thompson recreates the spirit of his
early years, where he found, and then lost, and then found his way
again. Considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, Thompson
also belongs in the songwriting pantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul
Simon, and Randy Newman. Here the British folk musician takes us back to
the late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity for both him and
the world at large.
During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, just as he was discovering his
passion for music, he formed the band Fairport Convention with some
schoolmates and helped establish the genre of British folk rock. It was
a thrilling period of massive tours, where Thompson was on the road in
both the UK and the US, crossing paths with the likes of Led Zeppelin,
Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a time of heady and explosive
creativity for Thompson, who wrote some of his most famous songs during
this time. But as Thompson reveals, those eight years were also marked
by upheaval and tragedy. Honest, moving, and compelling, Beeswing
vividly captures the life of a remarkable man and musician during a
period of artistic intensity, in a world on the cusp of change.
"An absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs
should be." --Los Angeles Review of Books
