With the Thousand Years of Popular Music project, folk-rock legend Richard Thompson is adding yet more credibility to the argument that he is the most complete popular musician working today.

When he, along with other notable musicians, was asked by Playboy magazine to submit a list of the greatest songs of the millennium, Thompson headed straight back to the twelfth century and took it from there.

Needless to say, the publishers, anticipating nothing more antiquated than Elvis, declined the list.

Rather than let the idea go to waste, though, Thompson set about recording the tunes himself before taking them on the road.

The result is a remarkably audacious compendium of styles, ranging from 15th Century rural Italian folk songs to Elizabethan madrigals to music hall to Nelly Furtado (in Latin).

Ably supported by versatile musicians Debra Dobkin and Judith Owen, Thompson succeeds, during the first half, in taking a range of potentially unappealing material and making it not just palatable but thrilling.

Often with only percussion to reinforce the sound, and sometimes not even that, Thompson’s acoustic guitar skills are exhaustively tested by the complex and unfamiliar textures of the music.

It’s hard to imagine anyone else having the range of techniques needed to pull the experiment off, but Thompson makes the whole process seem like second nature. Even more impressively, while it always sounds authentically ancient, it always sounds unmistakably like him.

The second half of the show is almost anticlimactic. Having worked such magic on such difficult material in the first half, the band’s Beatles and Hank Williams covers toward the end sound rather safe, while Stick McGhee’s “Drinkin’ Wine Spodie-Odie” is about as well-established with pub bands as it gets. Indeed, there is a sense that by circumventing the obvious earlier in the show, Thompson is only adding to the magic.

He obviously feels the need to make a concession to the audience, rewarding them with an easy second half for their patience in the first. But it is a concession that seems unnecessary; whatever doubts he might have had about the appeal of the first half material, or his ability to pull it off, are quite unfounded.

The second half comes alive when it challenges the audience’s values.

The ABBA and Nelly Furtado covers, which subvert the long-standing division between the pop and folk worlds, are all the more effective for being the ghastly wedding disco fodder the audience would generally go out of their way to avoid.

This is, against all the odds, one of the most enchanting and accessible experiments to have graced the contemporary folk scene for many years; if it tours again, I would urge anyone, folk fan or otherwise, to go along.