Roy Harper – Reissues

Reviewed:
Sophisticated Beggar
Flat Baroque and Berserk
Stormcock
Bullinamingvase

Bob Dylan’s not the only legendary songwriter to hit 70 this year. With some exceptions, Roy Harper‘s seventieth birthday in March wasn’t met with the kind of flood of media coverage the Duluth dynamo’s milestone in May understandably attracted. While the critical standing of folk-rooted contemporaries and kindred spirits such as John Martyn, Nick Drake and Richard Thompson has skyrocketed in recent years, Harper – now semi-retired – has remained a marginal figure. Ever since record companies decided that the boost to their credibility offered by having (relatively) short-selling visionary songwriters on their books wasn’t worth the comparatively miniscule losses promoting their unfashionable records accrued at some point in the early 80′s, Harper’s languished in near-obscurity: revered by a dedicated few, largely ignored by the masses. These days, he’s known best as a collaborator with stars such as Pink Floyd (that’s Roy crooning on 1975’s ‘Have a Cigar’) and Kate Bush, that famous Led Zeppelin tribute ‘Hats off to Harper’ (off Led Zeppelin III) and, at a push (and unfairly), as a totem to extreme far out-ness, a songwriter stuck in the utopian ethos of those long-gone days in the 60’s and early 70’s when he reigned supreme on the permanently ultra-stoned, ‘the man’-battering free festival circuit…if he’s known at all.

Following July’s outstanding compilation Songs of Love and Loss, and preceding a prestigious 70th birthday show at the Royal Festival Hall in November, this first instalment in Believe Digital’s comprehensive reissue campaign (which in typically contrarian style eschews chronology for some thematic coherence known best by Harper) should instantly reclaim Harper’s rightful place in the forefront of Brit-Folk luminaries. And there’s more to come. Previously available only on the songwriter’s own Science Friction label and web emporium, the maintenance of which has kept Harper away from the studio and, the odd gig aside, the concert stage for the past decade, Harper’s entire 20 album back catalogue will be placed on mainstream download stores over the next 12 months. As such, it will finally place Harper’s huge body of work within easy reach of new listeners keen to check out the wares of a songwriter who’s generated generous praise from modern odd-folk notables such as Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham.

Newcomers should probably keep a respectful distance to Harper’s 1966 debut Sophisticated Beggar, recorded in 1966 for the tiny Strike imprint. Drawing deep from Harper’s journeys as a globe-trotting hippie busker in the early 60’s, it’s by no means an embarrassment: the lovely ‘Forever’, for example, is a Harper evergreen, and the album as a whole mines a reach seam halfway between Bob Dylan and traditional British folk styles. However, elements of cuts like ‘China Girl’ (not the Bowie-Iggy joint) and the raga-hued title track haven’t dated at all well, the impressive fingerpicking athletics of ‘Blackpool’ find Harper in the rare position of taking his cues from others (Bert Jansch, Davey Graham), whilst the anaemic beat group jangle that disfigures the gallows humour of ‘Committed’, based on Harper’s first-hand experience of mental institutions, highlights the risks of recording on a shoestring budget.

There’s no such stumbling on Flat Baroque and Berserk (1970), a richly rewarding treasure trove of seemingly contrasting elements creating a more or less unified whole. Granted, the anti-authoritarian rants ‘I Hate the White Man’ and ‘Hell’s Angels’ are products of their time. You can’t argue with the passionate delivery and righteous anger of the former, a seething protest song inspired by Harper’s disgust at the apartheid policies of the South African government. The admiring glances the latter throws in the general direction of ‘straight’ life dodging motorcycle thugs, however, carry the distinctly musty pang of a product well past its sell-by date, a state of affairs not improved by the track’s slightly awkward band arrangement. Get past the odd, entirely enjoyable but admittedly lightweight sub-Dylan throwaway, though, and you’re faced with half an album of balladry of truly staggering beauty. From the exploration of England’s mythical past (possibly – as ever with Harper, getting any kind of consensus on the exact point of his poetic lyrics isn’t easily done) on the flute-decorated ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’ to the heavy-lidded resignation of the majestic ’Another Day’, the orchestral flourishes of which were to come to full fruition on Harper’s next album, not to overlook the spine-tingling, gentle loveliness of the fond mini-farewells ‘Davey’ and ‘Francesca’, the album’s absence from the roll call of British songwriter classics can’t surely be explained by any rational means.

After the encouraging success of Flat Baroque…, Harper’s label pushed for more of the same. Instead, he decamped to Abbey Road studios to cook up the experimental – occasionally just plain mental – Stormcock in collaboration with arranger David Bedford. Deservedly lauded as a bona fide masterpiece, this genuinely unclassifiable suite of four sprawling but tightly focused tracks sets a range of far-reaching inner space explorations on themes such as social unrest, human interaction, relationships, the counter culture, hypocrisy of organised religion and the power of nature to an embarrassment of melodic riches, catapulted to truly hypnotic heights by Harper’s totally convincing, stellar performance and Bedford’s sumptuous string arrangements, the combination of which make even the restlessly evolving mammoth-scale epic ‘Me and My Woman’ seem as averse to wasting a second as a two and a half minute hit single. Comparable only to Van Morrison’s equally loose and explorative Astral Weeks and, more recently, renowned Harper fan Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Stormcock’s a challenging, untamed beast yet also boundlessly rewarding, a genuine one-off that’s just as fresh today as it was on its release in 1971.

By 1977’s Bullinamingvase, Harper had ‘gone electric’. The state of the nation address ‘One of Those Days in England’ returns to the epic approach of Stormcock, but as impressively ambitious as the 19-minute (!) giant is, its occasional prog-flavoured excesses and at times barely linked movements don’t cohere to form the kind of intoxicating magic that abandoning both the stopwatch and the rulebook resulted in on Stormcock, the results occasionally highlighting just how narrow the gap between Harper at his verbosely preachy worst and ramblingly beautiful best can be. Even so, Harper’s ninth album’s another triumph, home to such gems as the woozily beautiful ‘These Last Days’ and the wounded roar of ‘Cherishing the Lonesome’. Even the jarringly jaunty hoe-down of ‘Watford Gap’ can’t disguise the acute topicality of Harper’s railing against injustice and growing inequality on ‘One of Those Days in England’, the track careering unpredictably from the dole queue to scenes of riotous upheaval (and many, many points in between). Sidelined at its time of release, Harper’s eloquence and bite being at odds with both the stark punk ethos and escapism of easy listening, the prevailing moods at the time, maybe time is finally ripe for Harper’s work to be properly appreciated. With albums the calibre of Valentine (1974), H.Q. (1975), The Unknown Soldier (1980) and Death or Glory (1992) yet to be reissued, the material’s certainly up to the
task.