Underrated? Are you sure about that?

The OBE. How more rated can you get?

Richard Thompson, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and owner of many fine berets, is back on the road (when is he not?) and, once again, every journalist who writes a review or interviews him is reaching for the u word: underrated. And nobody breaks rank. Some even go the whole hog and prefix it with another word: criminally. Criminally underrated? By who exactly?

His fans? I don't think so. Thompson sells out wherever he plays. And he plays on most continents at sometime during the year. Has done for years - to a fan base most artists can only dream about.

His peers? Hardly - take a look at who covers his songs: Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, REM, Loudon Wainwright, David Gilmour, Graham Parker; the list is endless.

The critics? If you rounded up all the scribes writing for the music press, broadsheets, blogs and fanzines who have ever given Thompson anything less than a 4 star rating and then add to them all the movers and shakers in radio and music television who don't speak about him in gushing terms, you'll probably fit them all on the back seat of a taxi. With room to spare.

Another award for the criminally underrated Richard Thompson

Then there's the Ivor Novello awards, and the BBC Folk Awards: Thompson's part of the furniture at most of these shindigs. Oh, and don't forget all the guitar magazine polls he cleans up at. Nearly forgot the Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting by the Americana Music Association.

And if all that adulation and mantelpiece full of trinkets still isn't enough, there's always the OBE he was given by the Queen of England. That must count for something, surely?