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English bard Roy Harper was born a month after Bob Dylan, but didn't rise to prominence as a recording artist until the late 1960s. A series of distinctive albums, from 1970's Stormcock right up to 1992's Death or Glory?, set an uncompromising agenda of honesty at any price.
Harper's acoustic guitar playing is as distinctive as Roger McGuinn's Rickenbacker sound. Many of his projects are musically complex, and have occasionally been fleshed out with contributions from friends Jimmy Page, Dave Gilmour and Kate Bush. His lyrical technique of full frontal assault has earned him a sizable cult audience around the English speaking world, as well as providing ammunition for an increasingly hostile musical press in his native country.
Never one to suffer in silence, Roy lost no time telling the world when Jacqui, his wife of 10 years recently left him for a much publicized liaison with self-promoting violinist Nigel Kennedy. Death or Glory? certainly leaves the listener in little doubt as to what inspired it.
The previous album, Once, also turned a few heads for its strong political messages, concerning the crumbling Berlin Wall, the crushing of dissent in China, the much despised Poll Tax in Britain, and an old favorite target of Harper's: organized religion [Islam this time].
Today Harper is considered by many to be a particularly productive phase of his career, touring the U.K. regularly, playing live with his son Nick, and publically advertising for a new soul mate.
In this exclusive Dirty Linen interview, mostly conducted on a warm August afternoon lounging on an English lawn, Roy muses on who he is, how he got into the business, and why he sounds like he does. He also discusses playing with Nick, the controversial song "Black Cloud of Islam," his marriage breakup, and his strong desire to tour the U.S.A.
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To a North American reader, who is Roy Harper? Obviously you're not a new kid on the block and you're not simply a '60s relic.
That's a very difficult question to answer because I suspect it's going to differ hugely from Britain to North America. I think that in Britain the average age of my audience is 24. I'm twice their age. It's nothing that odd for me because, well, it's odd in so far as I've grown older and my audience has stayed the same age.
Audiences certainly at gigs, but do you think the record buying audience?
No, I think the record buying audience is different. I think there are mortgages and financial considerations and kids and what-not to take care of a lot of the potential audience. Also I think that once people reach the age of 35 loud music doesn't really interest them so much, they would rather have the record than... see the full horror!
To somebody who insisted on trying to pigeonhole you and say, what does Roy Harper play, rock or folk, what would you answer?
I think actually world music is a better title, I mean just seeing Dirty Linen here and it says Folk, Electric Folk, Traditional and World Music, and of those four I would probably have to put myself in the latter. Although I'm using all kinds of electronic stuff now and I would be considered by the Brits to be an old folkie, so the other one potentially there is electric folk, but it's electric folk in a solo capacity so it's kind of strange really.
So tell me about the North American touring possibilities.
Well, I'm going across to Canada mainly. It's not a money earning exercise at all, it won't be that, until we can get something proper together across there, but I like going across just to keep my hand in, on two levels; one in front of a completely new audience and two to sort of keep the name alive somewhere else.
I'd love to tour the USA, but no one there seems to want to handle me. I know there's a market out there for me because every time a record is put out it sells a decent amount of copies. I should develop some sort of kit for would be U.S. promoters of Roy Harper, to detail exactly how to put a gig on. That way we could get the fans out there to do it, instead of people who only think of artists in terms of money.
It's been 27 years since your first album came out, and there are very few that have survived that length without huge periods of inactivity and so-called comebacks, but you've been continually active basically, with very small gaps. Do you think of yourself as comparable in terms of longevity or your music to anyone else that's been around that long?
Possibly Neil Young, nobody else really.
What other North American artists do you admire?
Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, but I don't know why. Patti Smith. Prince when he's not promoting Godot. Many others. Hunter S. Thompson.
Are there any younger performers that you feel you see yourself in, in terms of what they're doing and what they're trying to do?
The only one that appeals to me really that I can think of is Kate Bush. She's got the same sort of attitude to her writing as I have, she's quite obsessive about it.
She's worked with you occasionally.
Yeah. I don't really see any of the younger... Ages come and ages go, and what I'm faced with now is listening to a whole lot of music on the radio and I can't help but feel that it's all a bit jaded, it's not original.
So what do you attribute your own survival to, considering that a lot of people, even 10 years younger than you, have effectively vanished from the scene after a few years of glory. You've never hit commercial highs but you've just maintained a steady course throughout the decades.
As one person put it a while ago, I'm the longest running underground act in the world, which is probably what I am; underground rather than world music or electric folk. But I think that what maintained me was the potency in the writing. I've always been fairly near the mark and I've always maintained a following that have not deserted me because they've become used to the standard set on the records. I'm not willing to relinquish that to drift off into pop music and big bucks. I think I'm probably the best at what I do.
And what do you do?
Put poems to music.
So you write the lyrics first?
Not necessarily, not always. These days it can be either. I can get a first line and it can then end up as the last line or it can end up as the first line of the chorus, or the last line of the chorus. Music very often repeats things, so you find yourself very often thinking about the chorus or the verse... I don't know what I do. But I know that there's nobody else doing it.
Does it take you long to write?
Some songs like, "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" took about a quarter hour to write, it just came out; it just sped out. I always remember I wrote it in green ink.
The tune and the words came out?
Hmm. And I wrote the thing in green ink, I thought "I'll have a look at that tomorrow. I've got the basic chords down for it, you know, I'll come back to it tomorrow and attack it fresh." I just had something to do at the time. I found the next day that it had been written, it was there. I had no need to do another thing to it, it was just there. Other things you spend months writing and you never get them right. It's like recording. It's no good trying to correct a track you don't like any longer. It's no good trying to correct it, to take something off it and put something else on it, or do the vocals again because you don't like it... you know, it's a waste of time. What you've got to do is throw it away and start again. That's true of writing as well. If you get stuck, then -- woosh -- away with it. Start it again.
So where do you get inspiration from? What makes you want to sit down and start writing a song?
Many things. Obviously the Russian coup thing in 1991 stirred things in me that have been there for quite a long time. The problem with writing songs that pertain to specific events that are topical is that the world is moving so fast that before you've had a chance to get a song into the market place (which is unfortunately the only place that it can exist. You cannot be a sponsored poet any more. We're not living in the age of Amadeus; we're living in a place where you don't live if you don't sell.), before you get it into that general influence, it's anachronistic, it's out of date, it's gone.
You've obviously put some historical songs on the Once album; "Berliners" for instance...
That was not so bad because it was obviously done after the event, as a sort of "In memorium" for a bad piece of architecture!
It also seems to be a bit apprehensive as it looks to the future.
Yeah, who wouldn't be? When I first started in music, when I was 14, I wanted to be a poet. I didn't want to be anything else; I wasn't interested in being anything else and that's all I saw. By the time I was 25 and beginning to get somewhere in music I thought that I could crack through, I thought I could break through the big eggshell and get inside, but as time went on it became increasingly obvious that someone like me with the material I've got that is too deep for normal consumption, for mass consumption, was never going to get through.
So instead of lightening up a bit and joining forces with someone like Al Stewart, someone that had a lighter thing, so that I could be the Lennon to his McCartney sort of thing, I went the other way, I went totally the other way. I went straight into Camus and Edgar Allen Poe, or whatever.
I guess that a lot of the audience that follow me recognize that. In fact I can't help doing that because my inspirations take me there. I can sit down and say to myself, "Fine. You can write a pop song now Roy. Go and write a pop song and earn a million dollars." And I'll sit down to write it and we'll have something great, I'll have something really good going, and then I'll write the words and it's all over, it's finished. As soon as the words get into gear they've got to mean something, they've got to stand on their own merit as a piece of social commentary or a peace of philosophical backchat or whatever, and they're just a bit too much for the Peter Gabriel fans, you know?
The critics have always focused on your lyrics, and reviewed you in that light. It seems to me that in print I've seen relatively little recognition for your musical accomplishments, and the compositional style, the sort of organic large scale works. Even if the large scale work is only five minutes, it's not just verse-chorus-verse for the most part. Do you feel that you've received the recognition you deserve on the musical side?
I don't know that I feel anything like that really. You see, if you aim for the marketplace 100%, like Jimmy Page did, or Robert Plant particularly did, if you aim for the marketplace 100% and you don't get it, then that's a failure of intelligence because you've got, say with Plant, you've got a pop talent that's massive there. He knows how to take an old blues song that been around for a hundred years, and turn it into something that's immediately AM radio for 18 year-olds. That's a huge pop talent. If you go for that and you fail, you fail because you haven't got it upstairs. That's to say, if you've got the amount of talent that he's got vocally, and as a stage performer. But mine... Jesus, I wouldn't think... you see, I'm such an oddball. The longer I live the more I know that I could never have got through, never...
More than many others you're obviously at home with the large scale composition, the large scale format. You've produced several long works that you've succeeded in recording, some I guess that you've played live long, but haven't been that long on record. Do you anticipate occasionally doing that in the future?
Yeah, the long ones appeal to me because it's a big canvas on which you can paint things in different ways. You can make a reference in the bottom left hand corner to something in the top right hand corner. People like those things. I love them, because it's the music with me. I don't like listening to myself once I've made the record. I'll always make a record so that it can be listened to at least 50 times and you can get something new out of it. I try to build something timeless into a poem so that it lasts beyond the age it's written in and it pertains to humanity generally.
With the music it's a slightly different thing. Very often I try and use mistakes, mistakes that I make on the original run-through or on the tape that we eventually take; I often use them as little side-issues, little musical jumps so that you don't get stuck into the sort of "Once, twice, three times a lady" groove you know. Which is again anti-commercial I suppose, but again, that's me.
I think to certainly American, possibly Canadian ears, the song "Black Cloud of Islam" may sound startling in its up front confrontational approach.
"Black Cloud" is a fierce tirade, and it is aimed at a minority.
What would you say to someone who took a superficial listen and accused you of being bigoted for pointing the finger at one specific group?
Well, it's all there in the last verse. It's there in black and white, I've written it. "You can put a lead bullet clean through this guitar, 'cause I'm not overjoyed at the story so far. Sharing the world with the nutters of god is as good as being six feet under the sod."
You know, I don't think it's bigoted so much as putting two fingers in the air and saying why can't we just throw all this crap away. All of it is just systems that we've done with now, surely. Some of those maxims and some of those old parables and proposals are still valid today but the more we progress in the modern world the less relevance they have. It's all a load of bollocks for Christ's sake! What I'm trying to say is that Christianity is every bit as bad as Islam and every bit as phony a system and anachronistic.
It's still being used by the incredible mass of people and they're practically useless as systems with which to correct the ongoing scientific problems that we've got now. We're so far in advance of those things that they are like reading "Now we are six." We've got to start thinking about how we can create sustained energy; re-usable energy, rather than be in our brother's pocket all the time. Your parents teach you, or they don't, about the moral issues. You soon learn that if you step out of line, you get punched and if you step that far out of line you get locked up. Most people are going to abide by that rule rather than one that has anything to do with God for it's a more immediate rule. We have an ethical responsibility to pass on elements of our culture and customs that are beneficial not only to our children but to the lifestyle of the tribal population, of the adult population. But we've got to be thinking about the issues that are more important because they are new discoveries. If we don't start to think about them, someone will blow the damn world up and he won't be thinking about God at the time.
So, after writing seven or eight songs that directly accuse Christianity of bigotry, I've turned on Islam with the same ferocity and the same full frontal, and I'm not bothered whether they come looking for me with guns or what, it doesn't matter. They are a load of prannies. You can see they're a load of prannies, you can see they're marching, it's left right, left right, left right, brainless, brainless, brainless.
Only the fundamentalists.
Not only the fundamentalists. I disagree with that. You've got Billy Graham, I wouldn't describe Billy Graham as a fundamentalist. But what he's doing is poisoning another generation, yet another generation.
You are not playing "Black Cloud" as regularly as you used to?
To sing it all the time would be to cast myself in the role of fringe provocateur and I think that I'm bigger than that. I have to stop and be loving again and turn my back on the madness and enjoy the earth.
What's the message of the song "Once?"
Hope, really.
Do it right the first time, we only have one chance?
Yeah, one chance. It's just that I'm finding different ways of pointing that thing out continually. You write the same song a lot of different times, you know, in different ways, in different nuances of the same song.
What sparks that particular lyric?
I began to think about, in the simplest possible terms, what humanity meant to me and what being human was. As you grow older you think more about that because you think that time is closing in on you. You're always younger than you think you are up until the day you die. You always think that you're older than you actually are. Whichever way you care to look at me, I'm still young. But I often think of myself as quite an old person. The things that I do and the things that I say belie that. I'm very interested in this sentiment; in this take care of it because you've only got it once. Anybody that has anything to say on the subject, I'll very often, invariably remember it. Like Winston Churchill said "yes, a very nice experience. Once."
What was he referring to?
Life.
Let me ask you about your guitar playing, a few licks on a live performance and it's unmistakable who's playing, what do you attribute that to, is the type of strings, the type of guitar, just your own style?
It's all of those. I was always determined never to learn to play formally because I always thought it would take something away... I always thought that part of anybody's individuality was obviously the things they did that were individual and the less you learnt of other people's technique, the more you were likely to be an original yourself, so I've never copied anybody. There were moments when I fancied copying Neil Young. There were moments when I fancied copying Bob Dylan, when we were both 21... That soon passed though. There were moments when I desperately wanted to copy Huddie Ledbetter, but I am a combination of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie really. They were in fact my two biggest influences as a kid, in the '50s.
But if somebody hands you a guitar you haven't played before, can you make it sound like that?
I can't make it sound any other way.
So it's not that you're tuning in any special way, or have special strings?
Oh, I do tune in a special way. I tune normally as everybody else, and I use a D tuning as well, three separate D tunings. The guy who does my album sleeves, the other day I started playing his guitar in his front room, and he started looking at me and he said, "God! So that's what you do! You're stopping everything. It sounds as if you've got distortion on it and you're not plugged into anything." I suddenly realized that I must be playing the guitar considerably differently to the way he's been playing it, and he's been trying to copy me because the guitar was tuned two tones lower than concert, it was tuned into where I normally tune it you know, his guitar. So he was getting a sort of free lesson in a way.
I understand that you have had occasional difficulties with your voice in recent years?
That's been going on for 15 years. As you get older you lose a tone at the top, and gain one at the bottom. Most people do anyway.
Your son Nick has been joining you on stage, on guitar, of late.
I really enjoy Nick and his playing. We are psychically linked, obviously, and getting better at it. I think he really enjoys playing with me because it gives him experience with an audience, how different songs can be delivered differently, what songs can really mean in a deep sense, i.e., the difference between shallow and potent. It's a good education.
Readers with access to electronic mail may wish to subscribe Stormcock, a Roy Harper mailing list, at owner-stormcock@steamradio.com
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Tour information: H.I.S./ c/o Acorn Ents./ Winterfold House/ 46 Woodfield Road/ Kings Heath, Birmingham B13 9UJ/ England
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