Not the Thompson brothers and definitely not the Thompson Twins, Richard and Danny are two stalwarts of British contemporary folk, the former an intense, often excoriating chronicler of affairs of the heart, the latter a brooding stand-up bass player.
They've played together and recorded together, and their sense of humour, instinct and empathy are clear. Yet while Danny Thompson provides a jazzy backdrop to many of the songs, filling in the spaces with plucky aplomb and a furrowed brow, it's Richard Thompson most of the audience has come to see.
He has played Dublin about three times in the past 18 months, each gig a different format, each performance providing a slew of surprises. His onstage shtick remains the same: an essentially stiff-upper-lip, mannerly British comedian.
What differed here was the mix of easy humour, stark poignancy and viciously intense material. From Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed, Al Bowlly's In Heaven and Valerie to Waltzing's For Dreamers and 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, Thompson invested the material with determination and a will to deconstruct.
Of all the erstwhile members of the British folk boom of the 1960s, Thompson appears to have left little of his early talent or self-belief behind. Add a mickey-take trad-arr song about Madonna's wedding in Scotland (with some excruciating rhyme schemes) and you have a rounded, typically perverse performance. What he'll do next is, thankfully, never made clear.
