Blog: Richard Thompson Live in Cape May, NJ

April 12, 2025

Richard Thompson: Kisses in the Rain

A relentless rain poured down outside Cape May’s Convention Hall on April 11 as a solo Richard Thompson returned to South Jersey for the first time since his electric band tour last fall. With a revamped set list and accompanied by his wife Zara Phillips for the second half of the show, Thompson regaled his followers with songs spanning his entire career from the 1960s to the present.

Audience favorites like “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” and “Wall of Death” were mingled with rarer selections and new, unrecorded material to create a wide range of styles and subject matter, all shepherded by vocal performances sympathetic to the content and narrators of each tale and exquisite guitar playing that continues to elicit amazement.

For anyone familiar with the singer/guitarist’s catalogue, new renderings of “The Great Valerio” and “She Twists the Knife Again” still managed to resurrect the originals by Thompson and then-wife Linda and the 1980s Thompson Band, which featured backing vocals by Christine Collister, respectively, as if phantom performances of old couldn’t help but accompany the live versions of today. The brand new tunes, in the form of a comedic, time-traveling ditty and a passionate plea, fit as comfortably in Thompson’s set as they do in his songbook.

About one-third of the material performed in Cape May was retained from the electric tour, albeit in altered arrangements. “Withered and Died” has returned to its folk feel after last year’s country-ish rendering, and “Turning of the Tide” relinquished its ‘punkish’ feel in favor of its standard acoustic offering. The sole representation from Ship to Shore, RT’s latest album, was “The Old Pack Mule,” which still carried a punch even without a rhythm section.

Most of the audience consisted of long-time faithfuls, but one woman confessed this was her first time seeing Thompson on the suggestion of a friend. By the end of the concert, she was sufficiently impressed and spoke of how much enjoyed the show before setting off for a return trip to Delaware in the still pouring rain.

Set List

Turning of the Tide

The Ghost of You Walks

Walking on a Wire

Beeswing

If I Could Live My Life Again

I Love You Like It’s 1969*

Walking the Long Miles Home

1952 Vincent Black Lightning

The Great Valerio

Hokey Pokey

Singapore Sadie

Pipe Dreams*

She Twists the Knife Again

Withered and Died

The Old Pack Mule

If Love Whispers Your Name

Wall of Death

Encores:

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

The Rattle Within

Tinker’s Rhapsody

*new song

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About Me

As an educator, musician and author of Road to Infinity: Marvel’s Multimedia Journey, Nothing to Turn Off: The Films and Video of Bob Dylan and Before the Wind: Charles K. Landis and Early Vineland as well as fifteen-years of articles for the SNJ Today newspaper, I am using Epistrophe as a platform for posting new writings, article reprints, book excerpts and original music.