Roy Harper’s first record, released in the latter half of the 1960’s, was remarkable for the way that a matrix of complex and crystalline guitar compositions animated and framed intense, mischievous, intelligent, personal and poetic lyrics. His most recent release of new songs, at the start of this century, arranged thoughtful, honest, mischievous and insightful words in startling constructions of extraordinary guitar music. Between these two records - one on heavy vinyl the other on digital cd - lies a body of work that has expanded the possibilities of the acoustic guitar (he is one of the most thrilling players Britain has produced). For four decades the work has experimented with forms and arrangements of popular music, played with the dynamics of the classic rock band and investigated the colours and dynamics offered by classical orchestras and even the colliery brass band. He has pioneered and mapped the outer-limits of the complex symphonic acoustic song cycle. Harper has written some of the most romantic and affecting love songs of our time and delivered dense and blistering diatribes anatomizing the idiocies and accidents of human belief polity and society. He has also written critiques of catering at British road-side service stations and delivered jazzy celebrations of drug enhanced altered states. Roy Harper has been responsible for some of the most extraordinary music made over a period which itself has been extraordinary for the way in which music itself has expanded and developed. For about 65 years, from the end of second-world war, there was an explosion in the complexity and ambition of (non classical) music. The end result, which was well established by 1970, is that ‘popular music’ is no longer seen largely as a trivial entertainment or an ornament, and has become part of a vital and central thread of individual and cultural enquiry. Suddenly bands, songs and concerts were where imaginative possibilities and philosophical alternatives were being developed, modelled, (re)imagined and expressed. It became a uniting medium of the ‘counter culture’, and from there its sounds and fashions, approaches and ideas, resonated into the wider population. The central importance of music to the social imagination has now shifted or is at least becoming muted, as demographics change and audio technologies are overlaid by newer technologies and other media; but we still move through a world shaped by these former explorations and which still reverberates to the shock-waves they created. In this clamourous vortex Roy Harper and his work has played an inspirational and significant role. The poet Shelley famously wrote that ‘the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world’. This was not intended by him as an airy-fairy bedsit aspiration that a moral force was somehow generated through the mere act of writing: but that there was an essential link between poetry, political philosophy, and the active confrontation of illegitimate authority. Harper, who was first inspired by the romantic poets (including Shelley), and has described his career as ‘a non violent push towards more liberation’, has long carried forward this vital spark, this mission, into the realms of contemporary music. His songs explore ways that individual liberty may be understood and expressed, and they have described the ways that social, religious and cultural forces have worked against this drive. These concerns animate his work: the songs that illuminate and celebrate moments of tenderness or regret between two people at a certain lucid point, caught in the moment - to those compositions that delve deep into biology or the bronze-age, and which range across human history and myth to describe an index of survival and loss - all seek to understand the ways that we try to achieve freedom, and how this quest brings both victories and sorrows. This also shapes even the incidental songs about smoking, busking, Glastonbury and grown ups. On one level, the work is informed by a specific time when a significant minority - of youth, Bohemia, Alternative culture - sought new models through their optimistic experiments of living through free love, chemistry, communality and new forms of social and political organization. But they also work beyond the realms of documents or historically specific artifact, to work as a manifesto, a universal, an ideal. At the same time, there is a specificity to much of the work where the songs touch on the matters and images of England, both in their lyrics and the forms of music which often uses figures and tropes taken from non rock and roll traditions. They talk about dole offices or cricket: there are the frequent references to nature and bird life - the ‘stormcock’ (the mistle thrush), cuckoos, owls, flycatchers et al, and there are photographs of the artist with a knotted hanky on his head or walking away from the wicket. These references combine with images and themes drawn from the past, the stories and myths of the country and the culture. This is not a reactionary strategy (which these things often are, or at least become, where references to a lost heroic past are used solely to denigrate the present) but one that allows Harper to locate his themes and concerns for the preservation of freedom deep within the warp and weft of the history and legends of his native culture, and/or our native planet, and to reveal the radical antecedents of liberty within culture, along with their mythic dimension and weight. In seeking to outline these antecedents and explore their possibilities, his work joins and echoes other traditions of the English radical visionary non-conformist voice such as a Blake or a Milton albeit in Harper’s case, it has to be said, from a determinedly anti-theist position. His insistence on exploring ways of operation unfettered by normal constraints is also manifested in the consistent strand of anarchy and of humour, the sparks of wildness that illuminate his work and his approaches. This shapes the development of the songs and albums themselves as ambitious, expansive, hallucinatory, sometimes reckless, always passionate positions. They are driven to take risks and to follow their own logics and ambitions into new, occasionally difficult, areas. In his life and dealings with the music business he has insisted on freedom and privileged autonomy and integrity in the face of the contingencies and demands of the record labels and the market - all the qualifications demanded by the ‘real world’ - often with collateral damage in terms of career and record sales. His work and the way that he has conducted himself have remained deviant and independent, but informed by a strong ethical vision that helped shape many of the attitudes of the ‘underground’ culture as it developed. ‘Hats off to Harper’, on Led Zeppelin 3, is written in acknowledgement and celebration of the uncompromising way he followed the dictates of his conscience rather than the prerogatives of the music business. While the forces of the market, of capital and economic rationalism, would seem to have prevailed over the last thirty years or so, he has continued to maintain his unbending stance and maverick path, and has continued to write music that expresses an opposition to that which he sees as wrong-headed and corrupt, and to document and celebrate moments of transformation and transcendence. The current questioning of the dominant values of the market and parallel cultural re-assessments that are gaining momentum, reinforce the weight and import of his extraordinary, bloody-minded, beautiful, ambitious body of work. Harper’s visionary worldview, his honesty, his hard won freedoms, his commitment to his art, the manifest refusal to operate within whatever the ‘norm’ might be, exemplify approaches and models for free thought and operation which remain crucial in our quest to develop engaged and critical alternatives to mainstream constructions and in our continuing search for models of possibility, and finally, of the kind of liberty that may encourage that possibility. Biography Roy Harper was born in the Manchester suburb of Rusholme, England. His mother died a few weeks after his birth. He lived in Manchester for a few years before the family moved to Lytham St. Annes, where he was raised by parents whose religious beliefs eventually alienated him. His scepticism regarding religion would later become a familiar central theme in his music. At the age of 13, he began playing skiffle music with his younger brother, David Harper and became interested in blues, jazz and classical music. Leaving King Edward V11 School, Lytham, when he was 15, he joined the Royal Air Force but eventually came into conflict with its rigid discipline and quickly worked his ticket back to civilian life. He was briefly involved in the Poetry To Jazz movement of the early 60s with bassist Tony Febland. He then busked around Europe and North Africa until 1964, when he returned to England and gained a residency at the famous Les Cousins folk club in Soho. It was whilst playing at Les Cousins that he attracted the attention of Strike records who recorded his first album in early 1966, ‘The Sophisticated Beggar’ which featured his poetry sung over complex acoustic guitar arrangements utilising echoplex reverb and other effects. This record boasts the first known use of then embryonic electric guitar effects on an acoustic guitar. John Renbourn contributed to the record on the title track and ‘Legend’. In 1967, CBS Records hired producer Shel Talmy - who had previously worked with the Bachelors, the Kinks and the Who - to arrange his next record ‘Come out Fighting Genghis Smith’. This is notable for the 11 minute track ‘Circle’ which indicated Harper’s ambition to move beyond the conventions of the contemporary folk form. Bert Jansch wrote the sleeve notes. Unknown to Harper, CBS changed the intended cover picture of a new born child complete with umbilical cord to a less confrontational picture of the CBS artwork director’s baby. Harper and CBS parted company. Later reissues of the record carry the intended image. 1968’s ‘Folkjokeopus’ was recorded with United Artists. This featured a track dedicated to friend and avant garde Jazz tenor saxist Albert Ayler, ‘One For Al’, and included ‘McGooghan’s Blues’, a 17 and a half minute piece of music paying tribute to The Prisoner TV series. Increasingly the ambition and scale of Harpers compositions were running counter to the conventions of music made for mainstream radio play, which required artists to write 3 minute songs with a chorus arriving no later than 30 seconds in. Harper however continued to build an audience through regular appearances at free concerts including those in London’s Hyde Park and attracted a growing number of fans from the counterculture and alternative music scenes. 1969 saw Harper’s first tour of the United States and the release of ‘Flat Baroque and Berserk’, produced by Peter Jenner, who went on to manage Harper over the next few years. The record represented a marked move away from the pop and mainstream orientated stylings and sound of the previous two albums to focus instead on the particular qualities of his song writing, singing and guitar playing. The record marked the start of Harper’s relationship with EMI records, with 8 of his albums to be recorded at the Abbey Road Studios and released on EMI’s Harvest label, which was formed in 1969 to reflect the emergence of ‘underground’ or ‘progressive music’ as a cultural - and market - force. Harper was an increasingly significant figure in this arena and after the 1970 Bath Festival Led Zeppelin wrote ‘Hats off to (Roy) Harper’, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III, in celebration of his principled and individualistic stand and his refusal to bow to commercial pressures. A long-term relationship developed between Harper and the band, with individual members of Led Zeppelin involving themselves in Harpers’ music and Harper often attending their tours and live performances, appearing in the 1976 film ‘The Song remains the Same’ and contributing images to the cover of the ‘Physical Graffiti’ album.’ 1971 saw Harper releasing the critically acclaimed album ‘Stormcock’, which consisted of four long linked songs in dazzling and complex arrangements, one of which, ‘The Same Old Rock’, featured Jimmy Page on guitar (credited as ‘S. Flavius Mercurius’). ‘Me And My Woman’ was arranged for orchestra by composer David Bedford. Bedford was to become a regular collaborator over a number of releases. This record was to become a benchmark for his work. EMI were not keen to release the record, and gave Harper no advertising budget as they considered the songs to be too long. It’s comparative success was a precedent for other artists to expand beyond the constraints of the obligatory three minute ‘radio friendly’ single. In 1972, Harper acted in the role of Mike Preston - a fictional pop star - alongside Carol White in the John Mackenzie film ‘Made’. Parts of the soundtrack for this film appeared the following year on the record ‘Lifemask’. Written after a period of ill health it contains The Lords Prayer, a 22 minute long track that Harper has described as a ‘Last Will and Testament’. The song is built on a series of linking abstract concepts, most of which are preceded by the pronoun ‘who’. The album is also notable for the song ‘South Africa’, a love song which correctly predicted that the country of South Africa would shed apartheid by peaceful means rather than by war. His next album ‘Valentine’, an album of love oriented songs, was released on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1974 and also featured contributions from guitarist Jimmy Page and arrangements by David Bedford. Bedford went on to write a choral piece for ‘the Proms’ at The Royal Albert Hall based on the song ‘12 Hours Of Sunset’. A concert to mark the release of ‘Valentine’ was held at London’s Rainbow Theatre with Page, Bedford, Ronnie Lane on bass and Keith Moon on drums. The live album ‘Flashes From The Archives Of Oblivion’ soon followed. Between 1975 and 1978, Harper spent considerable time in the United States. Pink Floyd’s 1975 release ‘Wish You Were’ Here saw Harper as lead vocalist on the song ‘Have a Cigar’. Floyd’s David Gilmour appeared on Harper’s 1975 album, ‘HQ’, alongside Harper’s backing band Trigger comprising of Chris Spedding on guitar, Dave Cochran on bass guitar, Bill Bruford on drums and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. The single ‘When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease’, featuring the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, arranged by David Bedford, became Harper’s biggest selling single to date. Harper co-wrote the song, ‘Short and Sweet’ with Gilmour for Gilmour’s first solo record released in 1978. Bullinamingvase in 1977 featured ‘One of Those Days in England’, with backing vocals by the McCartneys and Wings, which was a Top 40 hit in the UK. The long version of the song is perhaps Harper’s most complete evocation of his deep interest in the history and culture of his native England. The first version of the album drew complaints from the owners of Watford Gap service station who objected to the description of ‘Watford Gap / A plate of Grease and a load of crap’. They insisted on its removal from future UK copies. Harper had wanted to fight this, but the owner of the Watford Gap service area on the M1 Motorway was also a member of the EMI board! ’Flat Baroque And Berserk’, ‘Lifemask’, ‘Valentine’, ‘Flashes from the Archives Of Oblivion’, ‘HQ’ and ‘Bullinamingvase’ all became top 20 albums. For much of the seventies, Harper co-produced his records with Peter Jenner, who was also his manager. The 1980 release, ‘The Unknown Soldier’, was Harper’s last album to be recorded at the Abbey Road Studios and featured David Gilmour on 4 tracks including Harper’s own version of ‘Short and Sweet’. Kate Bush also appeared on the album for a duet on the song ‘You’. In 1980, Harper sang backing vocals on her song ‘Breathing’, for the Kate Bush album ‘Never For Ever’. The fact that Harper and EMI had come to the end of a battle-weary relationship meant that ‘The Unknown Soldier’ received even less support than his previous albums and was relatively overlooked .| |The ‘Unknown Soldier’ album marked not only the end of Harper’s first relationship with EMI records, but the end of his management by Peter Jenner. The rest of the eighties were significant for Harper’s shifting and complex relationships with record labels, with Harper ploughing a lone furrow in an already shrinking record industry. The 1982 album, ‘Work of Heart’, marked Harpers first move into the independent sector with the formation of his own record label with Mark Thompson, (son of E.P. Thompson), entitled Public Records, and became Sunday Times ‘Record of the year’. Despite this Harper held that the ‘demo’ of this album, later released as ‘Born In Captivity’, was a better record. 1985’s collaboration with Jimmy Page, ‘Whatever Happened To Jugula’ was released on Beggars Banquet records. Harper wanted to change the original title, ‘Whatever happened to 1984?’ to ‘Jugula’, but the manufacture of the record had proceeded to a point where only one word of the title could be altered, so it became the enigmatic ‘Whatever happened to Jugula?’. Throughout 1984, Harper had toured the United Kingdom with Jimmy Page, performing a predominantly acoustic set at folk festivals, including the Cambridge Folk Festival, under various guises such as The MacGregors, and Themselves. The album features the 10 minute ‘1948ish’, which was the original release date of the George Orwell epic ‘1984’. The song revisits some of the principles of the book, 36 years on. Harper’s lifelong opposition to the death penalty is highlighted in the song ‘Hangman’. Also included are two poems, the spoken ‘Bad Speech’ in which he pictures the future of the planet, regardless of man’s effect on it, and the sung ‘Hope’, with music by David Gilmour, in which he addresses an imaginary future. In 1988 Harper briefly rejoined EMI for the release of the ‘Descendants Of Smith’ after which he and EMI again went their separate ways. The album develops the futuristic imagery initiated on the previous album with both the title track and ‘Pinches Of Salt’, while he says that the ‘rap’ poem, ‘Licorice Alltime’ revisits a style he developed in his early 60s Poetry To Jazz era. With its use of modern instrumentation, ‘Still Life’ further develops the theme of previous impressionistic songs such as ‘Another Day and ‘Frozen Moment’. Harper inherited the record and changed the title to ‘The Garden Of Uranium’, which had been informed by the Chernobyl disaster of the previous year. Photographer Marcel Tromps’ depiction of that song is a more restrained, futuristic and gently macabre cover image than the EMI original. In 1990 Harper released ‘Once’ which again featured David Gilmour and Kate Bush and contained the controversial song ‘Black Cloud of Islam’, a song that is in dialogue with its companion track ‘If’, both of which he says were directed at the extreme elements of Christianity and Islam, the malign influences of which he correctly predicted, in 1989, would become a world issue. ‘Once’, the title track, is a musical poem in a fairly strict metre, which he has said lends itself to the definition of the finite extent of all life. Quote, “The verse lines are all short four word abstract concepts, making up verses of approx sixteen words. The verses are written using the same preposition, (for), so that as a whole it’s quite a tight piece of grammar. I realized as I was writing it that this was going to help the overall theme, ‘Once’. An ongoing conviction, and a song I look back on with affection. It’s actually purposely written in waltz time, (3/4), and I always had Kate Bush in mind to sing it with me. So Kate and I danced an imaginary waltz. A treasured moment.” After the end of his marriage in 1992, Harper composed the melancholy ‘Death or Glory?’… As well as the striking ‘Waiting For Godot Part Z’, ‘One More Tomorrow’ and ‘On Summer Day’, there is the lengthy instrumental tribute to Miles Davis, ‘Miles Remains’, which became a Harper live standard over the following decade. ‘The War Came Home Tonight’ documented the critical social impact of the first real TV war, the Gulf War. ‘Duty’ faithfully reports Harper’s philosophical attitude to the way he proposes that humans are on a collision course with nature. A concern expanded on ‘Why’, ‘Cardboard City’, ‘The Fourth World’ and ‘The Tallest Tree”, a tribute to Amazonian environmentalist Chico Mendes, who paid with his life for opposing cattle ranching in Brazil. Harper’s spoken words can be heard on The Tea Party’s 1995 album ‘The Edges of Twilight’ and he sings on the track ‘Time’ from their 1996 multimedia CD, ‘Alhambra’. In 1998, Harper released ‘The Dream Society’. The album is set on a bigger musical stage than ‘Death Or Glory’, and was a return to the more band oriented dynamics of some of the earlier records as evinced on the songs that constitute the heart of the record, ‘Come The Revolution’, ‘Angel Of The Night’ and ‘The Dream Society’. ‘Dancing All The Night’ was the heartfelt longing look into the mirror in the hope of catching a glimpse of his mother. Jethro Tull’s singer Ian Anderson contributed flute to the song, ‘These Fifty Years’. Anderson is reported to have said that the only reason he originally left Blackpool was because Harper did. The 2000 album, ‘The Green Man’ was an entirely acoustic effort largely played and recorded by Harper himself but also featuring contributions from the Tea Party’s Jeff Martin on guitar, hurdy gurdy and other instruments. Written in 1999, ‘The Monster’ was often introduced on stage at the time as an attack on Tony Blair’s character and direction, and in particular his no substance - all image, pop star politics. ‘Rushing Camelot’ is also of note as an addition to Harper’s profoundly earthbound sentiments, and to his continued advocation of his long held and continuing journey away from simple superstition, while ‘All In All’ tips its hat to Aldous Huxley’s great little book, ‘The Doors Of Perception’. In June 2001, Harper celebrated his 60th birthday with a concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, featuring many guest artists including David Bedford, Jeff Martin, Nick Harper and John Renbourn. A recording of the concert was released as a double CD shortly afterwards. In 2002, ‘Today Is Yesterday’, a compilation of rare and previously unreleased material from 1964 - 1967, was released. In 2003, Harper published ‘The Passions of Great Fortune’, a large format book containing all the lyrics to his albums (and singles) to date, including a wealth of photographs and commentary on his songs. In April 2005, he released a lengthy CD single, ‘The Death of God’. This 13 minute song is a critique of the Iraq War and features guest guitarist Matt Churchill, who has also joined Harper on-stage at his live performances. May 2005 saw the release of Harper’s latest album ‘Counter Culture’, a double compilation album featuring songs from a 35 year song-writing period. It received five star reviews from Uncut and MOJO magazine. Early 2006, saw the release of Roy’s first DVD, Beyond The Door. The DVD is composed of De Barras Folk Club 2004 live footage along with images and footage to illustrate and compliment the songs… included is a 10 track audio cd of the songs. Beyond The Door has received 4 star reviews from Mojo Magazine, Uncut and Classic Rock, with the latter making it their DVD Of The Month. Harper has dedicated the last 4-5 years collecting and compiling his life’s work in various formats. One of his future projects is likely to be the making of a documentary DVD to round off this process. Currently he is working on songs for a new record. After an individualistic, uncompromising and influential recording career spanning 40 years, Harper was awarded the Mojo Hero Award by the staff of Mojo magazine on June 16th 2005 at the Porchester Hall, Central London. The award itself was presented by long time collaborator and friend, Jimmy Page.| |
|
 | ||||||||||||||
