Back in the saddle
Folk-rock elder Roy Harper talks about upturning conventions and late-stage comebacks
Roy Harper has spent the past five decades crafting some of the most vivid, ravishingly beautiful music of our times. He’s 72 now, one of British folk-rock’s venerated elders, yet Harper has only just discovered something.
“I’ve never said this before, but I have serious attention deficit,” says Harper, discussing his new album, Man and Myth, a glorious return to the studio after 13 years of silence.
“At school I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It’s like therapy for me, because it exposes what I’m really thinking.
“At last I kind of consciously understand myself in a way I’ve not done before.”
Given Harper’s early life, therapy is an apposite term. He was raised near Blackpool, northern England, by a cold Jehovah’s Witness stepmother, and the experience fuelled his lifelong hatred of religion. He was a teenage runaway, feigned madness to escape the Royal Air Force (resulting in electroconvulsive treatment in a psychiatric ward) and spent time in prison for petty theft.
Music and poetry offered him an outlet. After graduating from the folk dens of 1960s Soho, he emerged as one of Britain’s most distinctive talents, his songs burning with both the vivid romanticism of heroes such as Keats and Shelley and a raging aversion to authority.
Harper was never a conventional folkie. Not for him the confines of acoustic guitar and traditional song. He preferred instead to pull in all directions — blues, rock, avantjazz — to create existential works that could be yearning and delicate one moment, savagely polemical the next.
Harper was never likely to be a household name. The A-listers may have adored him — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney and Kate Bush have all collaborated — but his truculent nature and refusal to compromise his art gave him a reputation within the industry.
As the 1970s pushed on, EMI didn’t know how to handle him. Thus, magnificent albums such as Stormcock, Lifemask and HQ received little or no promotional shove. Just what do you do with someone prone to grand historical visions such as The Lord’s Prayer or the eco-warrior epic Me and My Woman?
Harper still looks very much the hippie sage. The shoulder-length hair and whiskery beard are essentially as they were decades ago, if whitish grey and a mite thinner. And though his eyes carry an intense flame, age appears to have softened him a little. He’s intense, but also quick to laugh.
That humour has been tested at key points in his life, especially during the 1980s when his Herefordshire farm was repossessed after he fell prey to an unscrupulous management deal. It was hardly high times in the music business either. “The ’80s were an awful time,” he reflects, “because I was completely out of fashion.”
By the early 1990s he’d turned his back on his home country and set up home on the south coast of Ireland. It’s a theme alluded to in one of Man and Myth’s most captivating songs, The Exile. There’s a certain desolation about cities, he says — “an alienation that we all experience” — and it forms the double meaning behind the song. “It relates to me as well. I am exiled. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s my default position. Everybody is ostracized at some point or other.”
Harper hasn’t exactly been idle since his last record, 2000’s The Green Man. but most of his efforts have gone into tending his hefty back catalogue.
But, unlike his prolific songwriting son Nick, who’s steadily been issuing LPs since the mid-1990s, Harper had no plans to record. At least until four years ago. During his exile from the creative realm, a new breed of left-field folk-fanciers had started to discover his music, particularly in the U.S.
All this patronage had taken him aback. “You never think that you’re going to live beyond your first spate of notoriety,” he says, “but now there are three or four ‘re-lifes,’ which is quite disconcerting. It’s not as though you have to reinvent yourself, it’s just that the age, perception and intelligence is different. And luckily, the songs are still meaningful.”
The first fresh tune to appear was The Stranger. Written in 2009, it’s freighted with the classic Harper themes of regret and lost love. “It’s such an emotive, deep, angst-ridden heap of a song about breakup and all that sort of thing, that it actually powered me up again. Then I saw Jonathan (Wilson), and he said, ‘Why don’t you come over to L.A. and do some tracks?’ So that was the beginning of it.”
The Stranger became one of four songs recorded in Laurel Canyon, using Wilson’s full band. Longtime admirer Pete Townshend added guitar to Cloud Cuckooland, a rock treatise that posits a less than hopeful view of society, one condemned to repeat the same mistakes from “ovary to hearse.”
January Man, meanwhile, is loaded with echoes of the past, Harper picking at the bones of a long-broken love affair with a mixture of sorrow and yearning. “I’m in the winter of my life. And you can’t go round falling in love with 25-year-old women anymore. It’s a warning shot across my own bows, but it’s also part of what it means to grow older. You can relive the best moments in your life, the most loving moments.”
Harper will be touring Man and Myth later this year. It’s the first time he’s hit the road in many a moon and this time, he says, there won’t be any starry guests: “These gigs will present me in the way I want. I’m serious about this record, because it says a lot about me.
“And right now I’d love to write another. I’m suddenly back in the saddle.”