poetry

It’s hard to describe the early concerts in those two years as they weren’t really concerts like people were used to. They were events, gatherings, exchanges, sharings.

A concert was a performance. A singer/band would take the stage, present their songs, the audience would applaud, they’d introduce the next number and the musical performance would be appreciated. Roy’s gigs were not like that.

Roy would arrive with his battered guitar case, having hitch-hiked or arrived by train, (depending on where he was coming from and going to), set up on a stool, take his guitar out and begin. He used the house PA. There were no sound checks. No introductions. No appearing out of the wings (there usually weren’t any wings in those little clubs). No showbiz performance to build up tension or expectation. Roy was just Roy.

When he’s got himself together, played about with the tuning, he’d look up to take in the small gathering. He never treated them like an audience, never approach it like a professional performance. Roy would usually start with a little maniacal laugh and then proceed into some tale about an event that had happened on the way to the gig or something that had caught his attention, with an occasional strum and giggle.

Yes, there was a musician on a stage, and an audience, usually seated on uncomfortable wooden chairs in a small drab hall, but this wasn’t exactly a recital. Sometimes he would be performing at an intimate club like Les Cousins, at other times the back room of a pub, or folk club, a college venue or dreary, austere room. Most nights of the week he’d be on somewhere. Where-ever they would have him.

Where-ever it was, Roy treated all his venues as if they were his front room and his audiences as if they were a bunch of friends who had just dropped in. He talked to us as if we were sitting around a table together, whatever came into his head. He explained his poems, talked about current events, thoughts and feelings. Then he’d play a song. Even once he’d started he might stop partway in to share a thought that had come floating into his consciousness demanding to exit via his tongue.

That’s not to say that the songs and music were not valued. They obviously were. He crafted those songs and filled them with the seething emotions and thoughts that filled the inner turmoil of his skull. They were distillations of what he was thinking and feeling as well as being musical creations of great depth and skill. It’s just that he was consumed with communicating the full extent of everything; to explain and share what was going on in his head at the time, as it manifested itself, what was the grist for the poetry; what had stimulated his mind in that very moment. There was no holding back; no filter system. Consumed by a compulsion to fully share everything, it came tumbling out, often mid-song, sometimes in a torrent, an aside or an anecdote. He shared. It might be a relevant insight into the writing of the song or the circumstances that had led to its creation or it could be a completely novel idea or thought that had come into his head while he was singing. There was no knowing. Reality intruded. Roy was prone to distractions. These asides were often humorous, loaded with social insight, and often straying into areas that others might be wary of, pushing the bounds of the acceptable.

Some found this approach frustrating. They had come for the songs, not to hear Roy waffle on. They wanted a more professional performance. They did not appreciate the flow of a song being interrupted by one of Roy’s thoughts, no matter how meaningful or pertinent. The songs were brilliant. They just wanted to hear the songs. They felt they had paid for a performance. They found the interruptions infuriating.

But for me, and the others like me, who cottoned on to the whole unique experience, this was gold dust. Roy’s mind, his thoughts and feelings were every bit as fascinating and insightful as the songs. His ramblings and incisive dissections shone a searchlight of the songs and the events, feelings and thoughts that had led to the creation of the poetry. He was analysing and illuminating society and life in a way that nobody else had ever attempted. Mind blowing. There was nobody like this. Nobody did this. Roy was the Lenny Bruce of his day. He transcended the limitations of his chosen field. As with Lenny, who regularly exceeded the boundaries of comedy, taking his ‘performances’ beyond the realm of political satire into an exploration of reality, Roy was pushing back those barriers. This was not so much a performance as an expedition into the workings of a mind and exploration into the world in which he found himself. Roy was shining a searchlight into his mind and the society in which he found himself marooned as a horrified spectator. The songs were only one part of the experience.

This had a profound effect on the crazy rebellious youth I was at the time. I too felt myself to be a horrified outsider trying to make sense of an insane world. Roy was illuminating thoughts and ideas that had been floating around in my own head. It felt like he was clarifying and solidifying my own inner world. Nobody else had done that.

The ideas and exchanges not only explained the poems, and gave greater meaning and importance to the lyrics, but they sent tendrils of thought out into all aspects of the world around us. His mind was electric and electrifying. Roy’s mind was on fire, flitting here and there, dissecting, expanding and questioning.

No two concerts were ever the same. They depended on his mood. Sometimes there was more banter than song, other times more of a performance.

A Roy Harper gig was more of a sharing than a gig; an insight into a unique mind, a mind-expanding illumination of the social experiment we were prisoners in.

I think a number of us lived in dread that he’d ‘be discovered’ or become ‘famous’. If some promoter/manager took him on board and tidied the act up, removing the banter and making it ‘more professional’, we lose that relaxed sharing.

Not to say that the musical performances were not intense and incredible; they were.

I remember sitting in awe as Roy performed McGoohan’s Blues for the first time. It was an awesome slab of epic social commentary to the most rousing musical energy. It blew us away. The power and intensity; the sheer scale.

Dylan was the only one who came close (I always saw It’s Alright Ma,(I’m Only Bleeding) as being the only song that was similar in scope and impact). And how Roy railed against Dylan. He detested the way the music business clumsily put all the singer-songwriters into the same bracket as if they were Dylan protest clones. Roy had totally different roots, extending back to the Beat poets with shades of jazz, classical and English folk. He was not to be brushed off as a Dylan clone.

But those early renditions of the majestically powerful McGoohan’s Blues were spine-chilling and alone was surely worth the entrance fee? How could anyone complain?

For me, the St Pancras Town Hall gig in early 1969 felt like the end of that era. Roy had become much more successful. The queues went around the block. The venues were bigger. It had become increasingly difficult to maintain that informal intimacy. Though Roy did not change, the nature of the events, size of the audience, and distances involved between Roy and the audience, created more of a ‘performance’ element. Roy had graduated into a performer, not by choice, by sheer popularity.

Things changed.

Sadly, I’ve never heard any recordings from those early two years. No bootlegs surfaced. They reside in my memory. And, of course, our memories are imperfect, constantly reinvented, inaccurate and prone to subjectivity. In my mind those early gigs were monsters that shook me through to the core. There was no choice. I had to get to know this mad demon.