1,000 Years of Popular Music

In 2001, guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson was asked to pick his favorite songs from the millennium for Playboy. He obligingly submitted a list that included medieval madrigals and bawdy folk songs as well as pop gems by Pete Townshend and Cole Porter. The list wasn't printed but it did give birth to the 1000 Years of Popular Music concerts, an occasional series of Thompson presentations lovingly documented on this new DVD/CD set, recorded in San Francisco in 2005 (an earlier 1000 Years show with a different set list is available through Thompson's Web site. Thompson, accompanied by singer Judith Owen and percussionist Debra Dobkin, takes listeners from a 13th-century abbey for Summer Is Icumen In, to TRL with a sinister cover of Britney Spears' Oops . . . I Did It Again, complete with a baroque coda. Along the way he deconstructs Gilbert and Sullivan on the acoustic guitar and pulls out some cool tunes from the '60s, including the obscure Kinks classic See My Friends and the Easybeats' Friday on My Mind. Thompson shows plenty of humility by not including any of his own compositions in the show, even if several of his tunes are as strong as some of the offerings included. Of course, he might have just been avoiding his own songs because of the word "popular" in the title.