After the release of their third album, Pour Down Like Silver, in November 1975, Richard and Linda Thompson took an extended break from music. They spent much of the next three years living in sufi communes in London and Norfolk.
This prolonged sabbatical was punctuated by occasional session work by Richard Thompson and a short tour in 1977 in which the duo performed mostly new, overtly religious material and were backed by musicians who were also practitioners of the Sufi faith.
In 1978 Richard Thompson accepted an invitation from Joe Boyd to play on Julie Covington's eponymous solo debut album. The musicians hired for this album included highly regarded American session players Neil Larsen, Willie Weeks and Andy Newmark, who had also been working in the studio with George Harrison. According to Boyd the three Americans were hugely impressed by Thompson's playing and expressed a wish to work with him. Boyd also knew that Thompson had some new material and talked Thompson's manager Jo Lustig into taking advantage of the situation: "The material is there and these guys love Richard, they’re gonna kill to play with him. It would be great."
The resulting First Light was the fourth album by Richard and Linda Thompson and marked the resumption of their recording career. It is dominated by spiritual songs, some of them direct translations of sufi and Quranic texts. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Light_(Richard_and_Linda_Thompson_album)
