Waltzing’s For Dreamers

There is a leader in The Grauniad, praising Richard Thompson, to which I’ve added the following comment:

By your mid-teens - if you have any intelligence and soul - you are already heartily sick of the twee banality of pop music. So you move on to rock, then by your mid-twenties at the latest you ought to have realised that rock's pompous self-aggrandising cod-Romanticism is just as hollow as the pop you left behind....

Except....

There are a bare handful of true artists who sit - often uncomfortably - almost within touching distance of that pile of detritus. People like Van Morrison, Dylan, Springsteen, Zevon and a few others like Richard Thompson. Most of them operate around the edges; get called a cult and a well-kept secret and so on.

You would like them to get more success, get the rewards they undoubtedly deserve, but then you see what happens to those that get the success - are they made bland by the success, or are they successful because they are bland?

I remember reading somewhere that only the mediocre can have true mass appeal - and it is obviously true when you think about it - and one thing Richard Thompson could never be is mediocre.