Teddy Thompson loves country music. As a child, he imbibed Everly Brothers songs that his father, Richard Thompson, slotted into the car’s cassette player.

By Miles Salter

He loved the playful lyrics. ‘I was amazed by songs that were funny and clever and had wry twists and turns of phrase,’ he says. The songs appealed to Thompson’s English sense of humour. ‘A bit of irony, a bit of sarcasm.’

This kind of approach has marked Thompson’s own writing. His latest album is Never Be The Same, his 11th release since 2000. His critically acclaimed albums have mined the joys and, more usually, frustrations of love, a subject that Thompson has personal experience of. His marriage to singer Kelly Jones (they made an album together) ended badly.

He was born into a musically prestigious family. Richard Thompson is the acclaimed folk-rock singer and songwriter (and mean guitar player). His mother is Linda Thompson, another respected singer, who knew the leaders of the folk-rock movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. She had a brief dalliance with the now legendary Nick Drake.

Linda and Richard had an unusual lifestyle. Richard had an interest in Islam which led to the couple living in a Sufi community in Norfolk where, ironically, Richard was not permitted to play music. Linda does not have happy memories of that time. Women were not treated well. ‘We weren’t allowed to go shopping because you weren’t allowed to look a man in the eye,’ she told The Guardian.

The couple released one of the ‘70s best singer-songwriter albums, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, but split, acrimoniously, when Teddy was six years old. The Guardian observed that Linda sang ‘like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway.’

The same might be said of her son. One senses that echoes of his parents’ painful split have provided a backdrop for Teddy’s persona and song. Following the split, he saw little of his father for some years. ‘I cry on the inside’ he sang on Altered State, and his songs tend to dwell in melancholy, often containing dark recesses. He wrote a barbed break-up tune in I Wish It Was Over, from the 2006 album Separate Ways. The chords gave it the optimism of Here Comes The Sun but the words were vicious: ‘I don’t even like you, or can’t you tell.’

There are allusions to unfortunate choices in his songs. ‘I’ve been drinking so much I can’t sing straight’ infer the lyrics on Can’t Sing Straight. The track appeared on his fourth outing, A Piece Of What You Need, one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the last twenty-five years. On the new album there’s another reference to drinking (and stopping drinking) on Worst Two Weeks Of My Life.

In conversation, Thompson comes across as thoughtful but guarded. In his songs he wears his heart on his sleeve, but when he talks, he’s far more protective. It’s a slightly perplexing mixture, if an understandably defensive one. You can’t be emotional all the time. But he is thoughtful about the substance and source of songs.

‘Songwriters are writing about the same thing all the time,’ he reflects. ‘99 per cent of songs are about love in some way. It’s not because people lack emotion, it’s because it’s the most powerful emotion they can summon.’

Thompson explains that he writes about ‘different kinds of love’, but they are ‘couched within a traditional love song. I have written songs about love for my parents, or frustration with friends, but have written it to sound like a love song.’

Some years ago, he took part in a concert that celebrated the songs of Leonard Cohen. (On Thompson’s Spotify page, one of his top tracks is Cohen’s Tonight Will Be Fine.) Both songwriters dwell in the land of longing, a sort of unrequited wish for things to be better. When I put this to Teddy, he gets it straight away. ‘Longing is a good way of putting it,’ he agrees. ‘I do feel that way, and I relate to it. It’s something that I have always been drawn to and related to.’ He mentions Hank Williams, who wrote songs with ‘lonesome’ in the lyrics.

Read critics on Thompson and sometimes the word ‘restraint’ comes up. He doesn’t overplay his hand and understands, as many great artists do, the value of ‘less is more’. ‘I think I’ve always leaned that way,’ he says. ‘Taste, to me, would be knowing how to do everything and then not doing it. Choosing carefully. Good musicians know how to play all the notes, but they know how to hold back. What makes them great is not playing too much. In the age of “max flavour” I crave less more and more.’ He is keen to credit producer David Mansfield who helped to keep things uncomplicated.

Time marches on, and, at the start of his 50s, Teddy is conscious of the passage of time. ‘Now that I am starting to crack a bit… you realise these wrinkles are never going to go. The upside is that you become more grateful for everything. The downside is you look a bit crappier doing it all. People ask how I am doing. I say “sore but happy. Tired… but grateful”.’

Teddy Thompson plays Pocklington All Saints Church on Saturday 6 June. Never Be The Same is out now.

Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. He fronts the band Miles and The Chain Gang.