Mojo gives Richard Thompson's Hippies, Thugs And Heroes five stars

Mojo has awarded Richard Thompson's new album Hippies, Thugs And Heroes a five-star review, with critic Jim Wirth describing it as one of the bleakest and best records of the guitarist's career. The verdicts reported here are Mojo's and Wirth's.

The album is released on New West Records on 16 October. According to Mojo, it is Thompson's first since 2024's Ship To Shore.

What Mojo says about the album

Wirth describes the record as a kind of short story collection in which a line-up of innocents meet their fate. He writes that it was put together briskly by Thompson's American band, with help from his wife Zara Phillips and accordionist John Kirkpatrick, and that it offers little in the way of light relief.

The review judges it one of Thompson's darkest and bleakest albums. It adds that, depending on a listener's outlook, it could be his best since Mock Tudor (1999), his best since Pour Down Like Silver (1975), or his best outright.

The songs singled out

Wirth opens with Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which he hears Thompson confronting evil and finding a lack of reason. Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking, which he says follows a chemically assisted dalliance between a "Kings Road hippie" and a thug, is driven by a riff he likens in scale to Jethro Tull.

She Burns It All is described as one of Thompson's most unusual songs: a duet with Phillips, set in a psychiatric ward, that the reviewer says echoes Nico and Kevin Ayers in the early 1970s. Stringer imagines the reality behind heroic outlaw ballads through a toxic thug the public nonetheless embraces, while the Cajun-spiced Everybody's Stealing turns to thieves and tycoons.

Pauper's Grave, about a dead drunk, includes what Wirth calls a mournful strathspey guitar solo. Unsung Hero is described as a funky lament for overlooked working people. The Big Smoke, which Wirth says echoes The Smiths' London, treats a move to a new town as no escape from misery, and the album closes on Siren.

Thompson's long run of dark songwriting

The review notes that Thompson is 77 and has made solo records for well over 55 years, beginning with his 1972 debut Henry The Human Fly. It traces a line from that album's opening track, Roll Over Vaughan Williams, and its refrain "Live in fear, live in fear", to the new material. It also points to Grey Walls, from 1991's Rumor And Sigh, as an earlier visit to a psychiatric ward.

Wirth concedes the album is "a bit of a downer", but argues that listeners who know Thompson's songs will recognise how intoxicating his gloom can be. He says Thompson, like Ray Davies, still leaves a small glimmer of hope in the darkness, whether a clumsy half joke or a sudden flash of guitar.

Mojo's review of Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is by Jim Wirth and was updated on 15 October 2026.