Shoot Out the Lights
Studio album by Richard & Linda Thompson
Released March 15, 1982
Recorded November 1981 at Olympic Studios, London
Genre Folk Rock
Length 38:16
Label Hannibal
Producer Joe Boyd
Shoot Out the Lights is the sixth and final album by British husband-and-wife folk rock duo Richard and Linda Thompson. A critically acclaimed work, it was produced by Joe Boyd and released in 1982 on his Hannibal label.
History
After their 1979 album Sunnyvista had sold poorly, Richard and Linda Thompson found themselves without a record deal. In the spring of 1980 they toured as the support act for Gerry Rafferty and in June of that year they recorded some demo tracks at Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire.
Later that same year and with the Thompsons still without a contract, Rafferty stepped in and offered to finance and produce a new Richard and Linda Thompson album and then use his contacts in the industry and the finished album to secure a new contract with the Thompsons. This album was recorded during September and October 1980 at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire.
As the project proceeded there was increasing tension between Richard Thompson and Rafferty. Thompson preferred a spontaneous approach to recording and found Rafferty's time-consuming and perfectionist approach hard to cope with. He also felt increasingly frozen out of the project: "When he got to the mixing, I just didnÕt bother to turn up . . . because if I said something it was totally ignored and I thought 'hey, whose record is this anyway?'"
However the album was completed, but Rafferty was unable to interest any record companies and lost in the region of thirty thousand pounds on the project. Copies of the tapes of the Rafferty-sponsored sessions have subsequently become available as a bootleg.
Finally, in the summer of 1981 Joe Boyd signed the Thompsons to his small Hannibal label, and in November of that year the Thompsons went back into the studio and recorded a new album. Boyd's proposal, which the Thompsons accepted, was that the album be recorded in a matter of days so that money could be put aside for a tour of the USA. The resulting Shoot Out the Lights included six songs that had been recorded during the Rafferty-sponsored sessions and two newer songs. Linda Thompson was several months pregnant when the album was recorded and so there was no prospect of an immediate release or supporting tour. By the time the album was released Richard and Linda ThompsonÕs marriage was over.
Ironically, the album that was recorded when the Thompsons' career seemed all but over and which turned out to be their last album together was their best selling album and acclaimed as one of their greatest artistic achievements. Shoot Out the Lights and the May 1982 tour were crucial in re-launching Richard Thompson's career and in restoring his reputation as a songwriter and guitar player.
Critical Response
For a release on an independent label, Shoot Out the Lights had a significant critical impact. Robert Christgau made it a pick hit saying "these are powerfully double-edged metaphors for the marriage struggle". At the end of 1982, many critics placed the album on their year-end "best of" lists, for example, placing it at #2 on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. It has continued to be highly regarded. Allmusic praises it as "a meditation on love and loss in which beauty, passion, and heady joy can still be found in defeat".[1] And the Rolling Stone Album Guide called the album "absolutely perfect" and cited it for its "vividly emotional writing and the stirringly impassioned playing".
In 1987, Shoot Out the Lights was ranked #24 on Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years" and in 1989 it was ranked #9 on Rolling Stone's list of the The 100 Best Albums of the Eighties. In 2003, the album was ranked number 333 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In March 2005, Q magazine placed the title song at number 99 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks.
Release History
In 1991, Hannibal released Shoot Out the Lights on CD with the b-side "Living in Luxury" as a bonus track on the first run. This song is not included on any subsequent editions of the album. In 1993, Rykodisc released it as part of their AU20 Mastering Gold CD series. Dr. Toby Mountain of Northeastern Digital Recording, Inc., in Southborough, Massachusetts using Sony's proprietary Super Bit Mapping (SBM) mastering process to reduce the digital master from 20-bit to 16-bit required for the Red Book compact disc standard. Dr. Toby Mountain again remastered the album in 2004 for release on Super Audio CD (SACD) on Rykodisc. In 2005 the album was reissued on 180 gram vinyl by the 4 Men With Beards label. In October 2010, Rhino Handmade issued a deluxe 2CD edition of the album with 11 live bonus tracks and a 40 page booklet.
Professional ratings:
allmusic 5/5 stars
Robert Christgau A
Rolling Stone 5/5 stars
Review by Mark Deming of allmusic:
Richard & Linda Thompson's marriage was crumbling as they were recording Shoot Out the Lights in 1982, and many critics have read the album as a chronicle of the couple's divorce. In truth, most of the album's songs had been written two years earlier (when the Thompsons were getting along fine) for an abandoned project produced by Gerry Rafferty, and tales of busted relationships and domestic discord were always prominent in their songbook. But there is a palpable tension to Shoot Out The Lights which gives songs like "Don't Renege On Our Love" and "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed" an edgy bite different from the Thompsons' other albums together; there's a subtle, unmistakable undertow of anger and dread in this music that cuts straight down to the bone. Joe Boyd's clean, uncluttered production was the ideal match for these songs and their Spartan arrangements, and Richard Thompson's wiry guitar work was remarkable, displaying a blazing technical skill that never interfered with his melodic sensibilities. Individually, all eight of the album's songs are striking (especially the sonic fireworks of the title cut, the beautiful drift of "Just The Motion," and the bitter reminiscence of "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed"), and as a whole they were far more than the sum of their parts, a meditation on love and loss in which beauty, passion, and heady joy can still be found in defeat. It's ironic that Richard & Linda Thompson enjoyed their breakthrough in the United States with the album that ended their career together, but Shoot Out The Lights found them rallying their strengths to the bitter end; it's often been cited as Richard Thompson's greatest work, and it's difficult for anyone who has heard his body of work to argue the point.
Review by Robert Christgau:
News of the wife's solitary return to England brings this relationship-in-crisis album home--including the husband's "bearded lady" warning in "The Wall of Death," ostensibly a synthesis of his thanatotic urge and lowlife tic. If poor Richard's merely "A Man in Need," I'm an ayatollah, but I have to give him credit--these are powerfully double-edged metaphors for the marriage struggle, and "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" is as damning an answer song as Linda could wish.
Review by Michael Azerrad and Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone:
"Even in the best days of our marriage, Richard and I didn't communicate with each other fabulously well," says Linda Thompson. "I think that the reason the music was good was that we tended to save it for work." Perhaps that explains why Shoot Out the Lights is both the best and last album Richard and Linda Thompson made together.
For a change of pace, the Thompsons had decided to record an album with producer Gerry Rafferty, who as an artist had scored a hit with "Baker Street." But Rafferty's slick, elaborate style was at odds with the straightforward way the Thompsons usually recorded, and the kindest thing Richard can say today about the abortive Rafferty record is "I don't think it was wholly successful." Linda, who still has the master tapes in her attic, is more explicit: "Richard hated it."
Enter Richard's friend, producer Joe Boyd, who brought the Thompsons into the studio to cut a quick, low-budget album for his small independent label, Hannibal Records. Richard found himself in more familiar surroundings Ñ he and Boyd had worked together twelve years before, when Richard was the lead guitarist with the pioneering folk-rock group Fairport Convention. Recording was done at Olympic Studios, an old Fairport haunt, with a band that included the Fairport rhythm section of drummer Dave Mattacks, bassist Dave Pegg and guitarist Simon Nicol. Three days into the sessions they had the basic tracks for Shoot Out the Lights.
The record turned out to be the soundtrack to what Boyd calls "an elaborate soap opera." Richard's lyrics are crystal-clear portraits of dissolving relationships, cast with wronged or dissatisfied lovers on the one hand and riveting tales of death and violence on the other. There's no concealing the genuine desperation of "Man in Need," in which a man walks out on his family at dawn. Shortly after the record was completed, Richard left Linda, who was pregnant at the time, for another woman.
Richard dismisses the idea that the lyrics presaged what was to happen to their ten-year-old marriage. "The theorists can theorize," he says, "and they may be right, but from a practical point of view, for myself, it was just the stuff I was writing, and it didn't bear any relationship to life as I could see it at the time."
"Do you buy that?" is Linda's disbelieving response. "There was a cohesion to all those songs that was part of what was going on at the time," she says. "We gravitated to that kind of subject matter. There was a kind of common denominator in those songs Ñ they fit together, and we weeded them out that way."
According to Linda, that common denominator was "utter misery. It was kind of a subliminal thing, but that was definitely it," she says. "I think we both were miserable and didn't quite know how to get it out Ñ I think that's why the album is so good. We couldn't talk to each other, so we just did it on the record."
The tension took its toll on Linda's voice. A victim of "studio fever," she developed a nervous tic that made her lose breath, making it difficult for her to keep her voice at full strength for more than a couple of lines at a time. As a result, Boyd was forced to painstakingly stitch together complete vocals from several takes. But for all the studio trickery, the performances have a real cohesion and showcase Linda's achingly beautiful voice.
The poignancy of English folk music is evident in songs like Linda's heartbreaking "Walking on a Wire" and Richard's caustic "Back Street Slide." The latter, the album's hardest rocker, modifies an Anglo-Irish folk melody with an odd-metered, almost Zeppelinesque riff pinched from a tune the guitarist had heard on Algerian radio.
The album's masterpiece, though, is its title track. A slow, dissonant rocker about a psychotic killer, it was, according to Richard, originally about the Russians in Afghanistan. "Somehow it developed into this urban melodrama," he says. "I can't understand how that happened."
On Shoot Out the Lights, Richard reclaimed what he calls his "license to rip" and came up with his most inspired and unrestrained guitar playing since the glory days of Fairport Convention. Nowhere is Richard's renaissance more apparent than on the masterful second solo of "Shoot Out the Lights": alternately soaring and twitching, Thompson's guitar echoes a psychopath's flitting emotions, ending on a tantalizingly unresolved note.
The song nearly didn't make it onto the record. If Richard had had his way, the light pop tune "Living in Luxury" would have been there instead. "It's Richard at his most frivolous," Boyd says of "Living in Luxury." The song was left off the record. (It now appears as a bonus track on the Shoot Out the Lights CD.)
At the end of each side is respite Ñ a calm in the eye of the storm. The gentle ballad "Just the Motion" "was an attempt, deliberate or unconscious, to write something that was a bit restful," says Richard. To close the record, the Thompsons duet on the perversely joyous "Wall of Death," ostensibly about an amusement-park ride. "You can waste your time on the other rides." they sing, "but this is the nearest to being alive."
The ensuing tour was understandably tense and marked by screaming matches both on and off the stage. "I felt like I really sang great for the first time in years on that tour," says Linda. "It was a release, literally and figuratively."
Despite the string of excellent records that preceded it, Shoot Out the Lights remains the Thompsons' most commercially successful effort, even though it never made the pop charts. With more than a trace of bitterness, Richard acknowledges that part of its appeal is the couple's split. "I think it may have helped sales," he says. "It's a great promotional ploy Ñ I recommend it."
And he still doesn't think it's the best thing he and Linda ever did. "I don't understand why people like it particularly. Well, I think the songs are good. But I don't think the performances are outstanding. And we still get complaints about the drum sound, especially from the drummer."
On the other hand, Linda considers Shoot Out the Lights to be the couple's best work. "People are often really horrified to hear me say, 'I do wish in a way that I was going through that again,'" she says. "They say, 'But you were mad and demented and ill!' And I say, 'Yeah, but I really could sing good.' So there's always an upswing, even in that darkest moment."
LP track listing
All songs written by Richard Thompson except as noted.
Side One
1. "Don't Renege on Our Love" Ð 4:19
2. "Walking on a Wire" Ð 5:29
3. "Man in Need" Ð 3:36
4. "Just the Motion" Ð 6:19
Side Two
5. "Shoot Out the Lights" Ð 5:24
6. "Back Street Slide" Ð 4:33
7. "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?" (Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson) Ð 4:52
8. "Wall of Death" Ð 3:43
Personnel
* Richard Thompson Ð vocals, lead guitar, accordion, hammered dulcimer
* Linda Thompson Ð vocals
* Simon Nicol Ð rhythm guitar
* Dave Pegg Ð bass on 3 6 7 8
* Pete Zorn Ð bass on 1 2 4 5, backing vocals
* David Mattacks Ð drums
Additional personnel
* The Watersons (Norma, Mike, Lal, and Martin Carthy) Ð backing vocals
* Clive Gregson Ð backing vocals
* Stephen Corbett Ð cornet
* Brian Jones Ð cornet
* Phil Goodwin Ð tuba
* Stephen Barnett Ð trombone
* Mark Cutts Ð trombone