An older friend of ours has an entire wall of his front room covered in shelving containing CDs carefully filed in alphabetical order. Beneath this is a cabinet that the hi-fi sits on with two massive drawers  - one containing bootlegs of every gig Bob Dylan has played for 30 years, one containing every gig Richard Thompson has done. Richard Thompson is the kind of artist where you either own every album he’s made, or none of them.

Live At The BBC is a bit like our friend Paul’s cabinet. 58 out of the 61 recordings here have never been officially released before and they are presented in chronological order from New Year’s Day 1973, two years after Richard had left folk rock pioneers Fairport Convention, right up to 2009.

The period he’s most critically lauded for, in partnership with his former wife Linda, is dispatched by halfway through CD1, although songs from those albums crop up later in different versions. Of these you could easily imagine A Heart Needs A Home or The Dimming Of The Day becoming an X Factor staple in the same way that Dylan’s To Make You Feel My Love has (note to X Factor contestants: you’re never going to do it better than Adele. Do one of these songs instead). Meanwhile, the most thrilling moments are when, newly divorced and living in America after spending some of the later 70s in a Sufi commune, RT discovers New Wave and lets rip on a particularly savage Shoot Out The Lights and She Twists The Knife Again. Thompson occupies a very rare position, shared perhaps only by Lindsay Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, of being a virtuoso guitarist able to solo endlessly without ever resorting to cliché but also being able to write incredible songs to put the solos in. Curiously, his later career peak of 1999s Mock Tudor album is neglected entirely in favour of songs from its follow up Old Kit Bag of which Outside Of The Inside (essentially a modern Muslim taking the piss out of the Taliban) is a particular standout.

The quality of some of the earliest sessions is a bit ropey, sounding like they’ve been transferred from a cassette stored in RT’s glove compartment for the last 35 years. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to hear an inveterate tinkerer rework the songs that appear multiple times such as the 15 year gap between the versions of Wall Of Death – a song covered by REM, and which forms the template for their entire early career (i.e. when they were good). Thompson received his OBE from the Queen last week, incidentally resulting in the first photo of the top of his head for about 20 years, after which he joked “she said she had all my albums”. I wonder if she has a special shelf for them?

Richard Thompson Live At The BBC, 4- Disc Boxed Set is out now.