Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

Thompson’s line is a musician’s pressure valve: a quick, almost offhand way to puncture the self-seriousness that can creep into any “important” art scene. By leading with “first of all,” he sounds like he’s answering an interviewer’s inflated premise, yanking the conversation back to the most basic contract between performer and audience. It’s entertainment. People showed up, paid money, want to feel something. That grounding isn’t anti-art; it’s anti-pretension.

The subtext is a quiet critique of the rock tradition that loves to crown its own geniuses. Thompson came up in a British folk-rock world that prized craft, lineage, and lyrical depth, but also had to survive in clubs, on tour, in the blunt economy of attention. Calling it “entertainment” isn’t diminishing the work so much as protecting it from the ego-trap where sincerity turns into moral superiority. The phrase “great artists” is doing heavy lifting: it’s both an aspiration and a punchline, the kind of label that can fossilize a living practice into museum behavior.

There’s also a democratic streak here. “Entertainment” implies responsiveness, not pedestal-building; it forces the artist to remember the listener as a participant, not a congregation. Thompson’s intent, then, is discipline disguised as humility: keep the standards high, keep the self-image low, and keep the music from becoming a sermon with a backbeat.