Watching the Dark

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Watching the Dark
Compilation album by Richard Thompson
Released	1993
Genre	Rock
Length	2:04:11
Label	Hannibal
Producer	Edward Haber
Richard Thompson chronology
Rumor And Sigh (1991) Watching the Dark (1993) Mirror Blue (1994)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[1]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[2]

Watching the Dark is an album by Richard Thompson released in 1993. The three-CD retrospective set was compiled with Thompson's co-operation and consent. It runs from 1969, when Thompson was a member of Fairport Convention, through to 1992. However, it is not sequenced in chronological order.

Thompson had been reluctant to look backwards at his career and dig through the archives, but he decided that someone was bound to assemble such a set, so he might as well collaborate with them if possible. He had right of veto over the selections and recorded one track ("Poor Wee Jockey Clark") especially for the project. About a third of the selections are live, and five had never been included in any official Thompson release. Some of the material was donated by collectors of Thompson recordings.

Notable inclusions are

• A live version of "Can't Win" with an extended guitar solo
• "From Galway to Graceland", a Thompson song that had never made it onto a commercial Thompson release
• A live version of "A Heart Needs a Home" from 1975
• Solo, live versions of "Jennie" and "Devonside"
• An unreleased recording, thought to have been lost, of "A Sailor's Life" by Fairport Convention
• Three tracks from the unreleased, Gerry Rafferty-produced version of the Shoot Out the Lights album

The set includes a booklet with details of each recording, some rare photographs and essays by Greil Marcus and Leslie Berman.