For 175 days I’ve been playing a new band or artist every day. Today I thought I’d return to Roy Harper and give his first album a play. It’s one I’ve been enjoying for fifty-two years!! Still as good as ever!
Roy Harper – Incredibly rare TV footage from 1972 – North Country, Another Day, Feeling all the Saturday and South Africa – Fabulous!!
Roy Harper albums – my own ratings
Roy Harper albums – my own ratings
Before I start to indulge myself in assessing the merits of Roy’s output, which I fully recognise is a potential disaster from the very beginning (and would probably change day to day – or following another listening); I first need to clarify a few points.
These are my very own subjective judgements. I fully realise that everybody else has their own preferences, all equally valid.
I’m sure your own ratings are based on a number of factors – your personal preferences for genres of songs, the time when you first discovered Roy, relating periods in your life to sentiments in the songs, the musicality of a piece – and a host of other reasons.
With me, the songs that really matter are the ones that delve into social matters. I love poetry and the ideas. I love the epic songs (not to say that I do not rate the others as well).
The other point to note is that I do not believe there has been a bad album. I just like some more than others.
I just thought it would be fun to have a go and might stimulate everyone else to disagree. It might also get some of you delving into your collection for a replay. It did with me.
So let the fun begin:
| Album | Rating | Why |
| Sophisticated Beggar | 8 | A great album. Has a nice feel to it. Stand out tracks – Legend, Forever and China Girl. |
| Come out fighting Ghenghis Smith | 9 | As an eighteen year old in the midst of A-Levels I really related to this. The poetry and philosophy. Circle was great. |
| Folkjokeopus | 9 | Should have been a ten but for me the production let it down. McGoohan’s Blues, She’s the One and One for Al(l) are amazing. |
| Flat Baroque and Berserk | 10 | Fantastic album – I Hate the Whiteman and Another Day, Tom Tiddlers Ground and East of the Sun. |
| Stormcock | 10 | I’d give this one 11. Four superb masterpieces. Me and My Woman is incredible. |
| Lifemask | 10 | Has to be a 10 just for the brilliance of The Lord’s Prayer. But there is also All Ireland, Highway Blues and South Africa. – Brilliant |
| Valentine | 8 | Had some highlights such as Male Chauvinist Pig Blues, Commune. I’ll See You Again and Twelve Hours of Sunset but lacked a real epic song. |
| Flashes from the archives | 9 | I love Flashes – I was there at the gigs and it captures that for me. I wish he would do an up to date version of Kangaroo Blues. |
| HQ | 10 | A superb album – one of his best – The Game, The Spirit Lives, Hallucinating Light and Cricketer – sublime. |
| Bullinamingvase | 10 | One of those Days in England – another epic – plus These last Days, Naked Flame and Cherishing the Lonesome – Perfecto. |
| Unknown Soldier | 9 | Short and Sweet, The Fly Catcher and the Unknown Soldier – a great album |
| Born in Captivity | 8 | Love these acoustic versions of Work of Heart, Drawn to the Flames and No Woman is Safe |
| In between every line | 9 | I love this album – great live versions that capture the moment – I like the continuity too. |
| Whatever Happened to Jugula | 8 | Hangman, Elizabeth, Frozen Moment and Twentieth Century Man were great – but it did not quite work for me. I think I was expecting something more. |
| Work of Heart | 8 | Work of Heart almost makes it as a masterpiece but is not as strong for me as The Lord’s Prayer or Me and My Woman. Then you have Drawn to the Flames and I still care. |
| Descendants of Smith (Garden of Uranium) | 9 | Garden of Uranium, Desert Island, Pinches of Salt and Still Life – but lacks a real walloping song. |
| Loony on the Bus | 8 | Love that riff in Loony On The Bus. Then there’s Ten Years Ago, The Flycatcher and Sail Away. |
| Once | 8 | Once and Black Cloud of Islam make this for me. |
| Burn the World | 9 | A brilliant single – and we are burning the world. |
| Born in Captivity 2 (Unhinged) | 9 | Great Live album (missing Short and Sweet off the tape??) |
| Death or Glory | 8 | The Fourth World, The Tallest Tree, Miles Remains, On Summer’s Day – all great but lacking an epic. |
| Commercial Breaks | 8 | Interesting version of Ten Years Ago, Too Many Movies, The Fly Catcher and Sail Away. |
| Live at Les Cousins | 9 | A doorway into the Roy of 1969 – a little tentative but superb. A piece of history. |
| Heavy Crazy | 10 | Atmospheric live album with some great versions of old favourites. |
| BBC Tapes – 1-6 | 9-10 | Fabulous insight into Roy live in the studio from the 60s through to 78. |
| Poems, Speeches, Thoughts and Doodles | 8 | Roy the poet – loved these. |
| Dream Society | 8 | These Fifty Years, Broken Wing, Songs of Love and Drugs for everybody |
| Green Man | 8 | The Green Man is superb – then the Monster. |
| Royal Festival Hall | 8 | A great live album and memento of a superb evening. |
| Today is Yesterday | 8 | A compilation of outtakes from the first album and some singles and rarities. Interesting to me. |
| Beyond the Door | 8 | Good live material |
| Man and Myth | 8 | This won a lot of awards and is a great album – Time is Temporary, the Enemy and Cloud Cuckooland |
| Live at the Metropolis | 9 | A superb live album. More controlled. |
| Songs of Love and Loss | 9 | A collection of love songs. |
| East of the Sun | 9 | A great compilation of love songs |
| Counter Culture | 9 | Another great compilation |
| From Occident to Orient | 7 | A rip-off compilation (Can’t fault the music) |
| Hats off | 7 | A rip-off compilation |
The only ones dropping below an 8 are the two rip-off compilations that Roy had nothing to do with.
What an incredible catalogue of brilliance.
I wonder how you’d rate them?
Roy Harper – Another Day
One of the most beautiful love songs ever written with a perfect production. David Bedford’s strings are so brilliantly arranged that they really augment the performance.
I was twice privileged.
I was among the first to hear it performed. At that time I was going to every gig I could get to – and that was most of them – two or three a week. When he introduced it into his act I was there.
‘Another Day’ knocked me out the minute I heard it. He won’t like me saying but I remember thinking at the time that the warble in his voice sounded a bit Donovanish. The song instantly quietened the audience. They were rapt. Everyone recognised that it was special right from the off.
Those early gigs were such a range of contrasting songs. Roy had his rousing songs of anger and fury, like ‘Whiteman’, which he sang with great passion, he had his zany humorous pieces, like ‘Feeling all the Saturday’, which he peppered the gig with, he had instrumentals like ‘One for Al(l)’ and he had these haunting love songs like ‘Another Day’. Perfect.
He never used a setlist back then. He intuitively moved from one to another, with lengthy diatribes, discussions, observations, explanations and comments in-between, as the mood suited – altering the tempo and feel of the gig accordingly. Those gigs were often up to three hours long and sometimes a third of them would be Roy talking. I enjoyed the talking as much as the playing. Roy shared. It wasn’t your standard performance. If it came into his head it came out of his mouth. There were humour, wry observation and all manner of asides.
I was also there in Abbey Road studio when Roy recorded it. I remember watching him from the control room willing it to be perfect. It was. I don’t remember David Bedford and the strings though. That must have been added later.
‘Another Day’ is still one of my favourite songs these fifty years on.
I felt like I’d been fortunate enough to witness history being made.
She’s The One – Roy Harper
She’s The One – Roy Harper
This was one of the highlights of Roy’s live performances back in 1969. It was such a great song and he used to give it a lot of passion, so bursting with emotion.
It’s a sad song really, about the breakdown of his relationship with Mocy. It is based on a conversation with Andy Matheou, who ran Les Cousins. Roy was talking about splitting up with Mocy and Andy was telling him that he was a fool; she was a wonderful woman.
As usual, with Roy’s songs, he made this dialogue into a bit of an epic. He dissected the feelings and used the conversation to explore his own misgivings. In life, relationships are never black and white. They are always shades of grey. Making decisions about ending a long-term relationship, particularly one involving a child (Nick), was bound to be fraught with doubt and anxiety. Roy used the conversation to examine his own vacillations. He throws light on human relationships.
Back in 1969 I had been going to gigs for over a year and had met Mocy and Nick, so the song had some greater significance to me. I had played, studied and absorbed every note of the first two albums and Roy had told me the tracklisting for the new album. I was excited. The three tracks I really wanted to hear most were McGoohan’s Blues, One for Al(l) and She’s The One. All three were searing highlights of his live act. I felt like a child waiting for Christmas.
I do love that album but it was a disappointment for me. Maybe I had been building it up too much, but the album felt flawed, rushed and had fluffs in it. I so much wanted it to be perfect.
She’s The One felt to me as if it had lost something in the production. I actually prefer the one recorded for the BBC:
A superb song!
YOUTUBE.COM
Roy Harper – She’s The One (Top Gear at the BBC, June 3rd 1969)
This track is from the Top Gear/Peel Session at the BBC, June 1969. Nice, spare acoustic number with just Harper and guitar here. This track can be found in
Roy and the Epic Songs – Circle
Roy and the Epic Songs – Circle
For me, Roy is only fully realised in his epic songs. Even though I greatly appreciate his other songs; he has written some incredible love songs, for me it all comes together in the great epics. These are the songs where he has the scope to develop his ideas, his poetry and marry them to the music. The result is that they work on many levels.
I regard those epics in the same way I regard a concerto by one of the classical greats. The songs move through different movements where the music reflects moods and feelings. In addition, there are the poetic lyrics with their layers of meaning.
Each of these epic songs plays through a gamut of human experience. They work on so many levels. You can put your headphones on and lose yourself in the music, the melody and flow of the different movements or you can listen to the lyrics and dissect the nuance and understanding in the way one would with a great poem.
The epic song provides Roy with the scope to delve deeply into his subject and explore it. I like that. Very few other artists achieve that depth and complexity.
It started with his second album – Come Out Fighting Ghenghis Smith. Circle burrowed into his early life, the pressures, home, school and the system. It was the first attempt to explain his philosophy of life and rejection of the rat race. It combined a number of different musical melodies and timing, with poetic lyrics in different metering, along with spoken sections. It was a song like nobody else had ever created. Roy was using the music and poetry to explain his thinking and not merely creating a hit song. The essence was the meaning, what he was trying to explain. This wasn’t merely a song; it was a work of art.
Circle appeared in the early days just after I had first met him. I loved the first album but Circle took the experience into a different dimension. This was someone trying to communicate – not just making music. I was eighteen. I could relate to everything he was saying. I too had felt those pressures from home and school. I too had rejected that whole career, money-making, status-ridden lifestyle that I was being directed down. I was also rebelling against the hypocrisy of God, Queen and Country. I too was looking for something more meaningful, fulfilling and honest. I wanted to be allowed to be myself, to live life, experience it and avoid the pitfalls of a boring career, marriage and a slot in society. I wanted Jack Kerouac’s world of ‘Go’ and Roy was living it. So, I sat in my room and played it endlessly, absorbing and analysing the words until I had absorbed it all.
Roy had given me his phone number and I’d ring him up from a phone box, feeding threepenny bits into the machine, enthusiastically gabbling, asking, explaining what was in my head, and Roy put in his three penny-worth. Those were the days.
Circle was just the start – the toe in the water.
What followed were the other great epics – McGoohan’s Blues, I Hate The Whiteman, The Lord’s Prayer, Me and My Woman, The Game, Work of Heart, One of those Day’s in England, Burn the World.
So many gems.
These epics, to me, brought everything together into a full experience. They are so much more than songs. It is music and poetry in panorama – you get the full picture.
Roy Harper – The Unknown Soldier – Happy Birthday Roy!!
Today is Roy’s Birthday. Happy birthday Roy!!
He’s been an old soldier down through the years – always pushing barriers and taking on the establishment – that war-mongering, greed machine that runs the world. It has cost him dearly in many ways but he has stayed true to his principles.
This was released in 1980, in the Post-punk era. It was on the last album of the Harvest/EMI run – the end of his contract (though he went back to them later). The music press, which Roy had always had an uneasy relationship with, slagged it off – one particular review sending Roy apoplectic (calling Old Faces old faeces). But then these were the ‘hip’ punk journalists who despised anything to do with music from before punk. Roy, to them, represented the ‘old guard’. He was never going to get a fair hearing.
The album contained three songs reworked from the aborted album Commercial Breaks and half the album was a collaboration with Dave Gilmour. While it lacked an epic song, in the style of most of his albums, it had a number of excellent songs and certainly didn’t deserve a slagging.
Roy licked his wounds and set off into the wilderness to set up his own label and do his own thing without compromise.
This track, the title track, is one of my favourites off that great album. Roy has been an old soldier (and a year older today!), fighting his wars for what he believes to be right (musically, poetically and philosophically) without compromise. There’s never any doubt where he stands – he’s against the establishment and the game they are playing.
Happy Birthday Old Soldier!! Keep fighting!!
Unknown Soldier
I am an old soldier
I’ve been in the wars
Backwards and forwards
Creeping on all fours
And I travel the pulses
Unseen and alone
Dogfights in the cosmos
Feeling the unknown
And I laugh in my sleep
Sitting in the gutter
Picking dog-ends from the deep
I am an old soldier
I see in your face
Times repeating
Uniforms in space
Looking forward to Doomsday
Telepathy wars
Dogma daydreams
Imaginary doors
And I laugh in my sleep
Sitting in the gutter
Picking dog-ends from the deep
But in the night a little boy is dreaming mysteries
And looking after laughter with his sister climbing trees
And somewhere there’s a button and a silent satellite
And a bastard who would press it and an everlasting night
I’d hunt him like a tiger and I’d tear him to a shred
There’s nowhere you can hide man
Me and the kids we’d feed you to the dead
And I cry in my sleep
For all the hungry children
And the unbelieving sheep
Have a great day!
Roy Harper – Legend
I have always loved this song. I spent ages playing it through to try to get all the lyrics. It wasn’t until I finally sat down with Roy that we managed to work them all out.
It is hard to believe that this is Roy’s first album recorded in rather primitive conditions. It sounds so good. It is also hard to believe that people saw Roy as a Folk singer. The evidence of this album is of a complete mixture of styles from Rock and psychedelia to acoustic.
The other element is Roy’s poetry and social comment. It is evident in this song in spades. Right from the onset Roy tore into a society that he saw as hypocritical and tasteless with people leading pointless, meaningless lives and talking through their arse (false teeth in the colon). Mount Street is a Mayfair business centre. The line came into being from a throw away remark. When Roy spent a period of time at her Majesty’s pleasure one of the other inmates was a very well-to-do chap who was in for fraud. He asked Roy if he knew the way to Mount Street.
These businessmen knew how to make money but did not know what life was about.
The hollow men echoes back to TS Elliott.
History – the idea of history being a series of crimes as the robber barons war, rape and pillage – A theme that would crop up later.
Salt sodas are speed.
Ending with the classic philosophical comment ‘everything is just everything because everything just is’. There is no god.
What a great song!!
Roy Harper – Legend
I heard the song birds singing in the trees above my bed
In the valley of the shadow of the sea of living dead
I see the same old smells aboard my ship of shapelessness
Meandering suspended in amorphous tastelessness
I hear the happy people striking down their matchless road
The false teeth in the colon partly sharing half the load
I know I cannot ask them so I leave their eyes to say
I know the way to Mount Street, but I just don’t know the way
I see the hollow buildings hanging in the winter sun
Throwing empty shadows that hide the hollow men
The world just isn’t real it’s built on endless timeless time
On land marks in the desert wastes of multicoloured crime
The maps stuck in the tube trains will tell you where’re you going
They’ll also tell you practically everything worth knowing
So if anybody asks me I’d say “take a few salt sodas”
If you don’t you stand the dirty chance of dying stone cold sober
And as I hear you breathing life’s last distant compliment
I know I can’t have said much of what I really meant
The sky desolates the sky and the snowflakes face to face
And everything is just everything because everything just is
Roy Harper – On Summer Day
Nobody writes love songs like Roy. This is another sad, haunting love song from 1992’s Death Or Glory. A song of lost love.
The voice – such emotion.
Somehow I thought it was appropriate for this covid-ridden beautiful 1st of June – the start of Summer. It is such a gorgeous day but I think we’ve all lost something.
I thought I saw a swallow land
Upon my hand on summer day
I thought I saw my true love standing
In the sand
One old may day
I thought I hear the dolphins sing
‘You gotta bring her back
On summer day’
See her run along the tide line
Where the trade winds blow
Feel the breath of summer
In her hair, oh!
Underneath the shooting stars
I’ve wished and would you know
I thought I saw a swallow land
Upon my hand
On summer day
I thought I saw a swallow land
Upon my hand on summer day
But here in cold midwinter’s night
Another light has come to play
Steals across the misty sky
And bye and bye
She’ll maybe stay
Can there ever be again again
Another spring
Will the birds forever hold us
On the wing
Light the fire in our home of hearts
And hear me sing
I thought I saw a swallow land
Upon my hand on summer day
Today’s Roy Harper track – East of the Sun
This is one of Roy’s most beautiful love songs. A song about a youthful romance, making love in among the sand dunes on the beach at Lytham St Anne’s where he was growing up. It takes me straight back to the days of my own youth.
It has a haunting melody and is sung with such tenderness.
I remember him recording this in Abbey Road Studios. He was having great trouble with the harmonica. It kept going out of tune. He was getting very frustrated. They could not find a replacement in the right key anywhere in the entire studios. It was late at night so nowhere was open to purchase one. They tried soaking it in water.
Eventually they managed to get it to last for the duration of the song.
The relief was apparent. I remember Roy smashing the harmonica in the jamb of the heavy studio door.
I had taken this annoying American girl who was staying with us along with me and she dutifully picked up the mangled harmonica. I had it lying around the house for ages! Somehow it got lost down the years!
Aaaah – the memories!
The bumble bees stumble
The butterflies tumble
The birds on the water-line stare
The heavens have crowned her
The star grass grows round her
Her dreams fill the very still air
Just east of the sun
Where our loving was done
I can still see her breasts on the edge of the morning
I can still taste the salt in her hair
I thought I needed so beautiful memories to buoy me up in lockdown today!