ROY HARPER
Sophisticated Beggar/Folkjokeopus/ Whatever Happened To 1984 SCIENCE FRICTION
More songs of innocence and experience get a deluxe vinyl makeover.
There’s a pleasing symmetry about Roy Harper’s announcement that he will stop touring in 2019, and the latest batch of vinyl reissues includes his debut recording from 1966. Writing in the extensive sleevenotes accompanying Sophisticated Beggar, Harper suggests that he wasn’t initially keen to make an album fearing that he wasn’t then ready yet as an artist. However, the cocky swagger of youth and prodigious talent that had carried him busking around Europe took him to a room in Soho with a clutch of lively tunes painting vivid portraits. Inside the gatefold sleeve, gazing out from his passport photo, he looks impossibly young and his voice is that of an angel. There’s a charming wide-eyed naïveté present in the 25-year-old’s songs but there’s also substance and weight, a winning mixture of innocence and experience. His fingerpicking on Blackpool can barely keep pace with the improvisatory ideas tumbling from his head on a one-take, high-wire tension.
The mistakes we make in our youth can haunt us until our old age as Harper makes clear about the epic McGoohan’s Blues, inspired by the cult-TV show, The Prisoner from 1969’s Folkjokeopus. In the heat of the solo performance, Harper recalls he had sped up so that when, after some 13-plus minutes, the band enter, they do so but at the prearranged slower tempo making what should have been a triumphant moment awkward and leaden. Fifty years later, he’s gone back into the tapes and made the correction. To some this kind of post-event intervention is anathema. Harper argues this revisionism as a second edition and it works beautifully. The vocal acrobatics of McGoohan’s Blues and in particular the incandescent She’s The One remain shiver-inducing moments.
The Jimmy Page collaboration, 1985’s Whatever Happened To Jugula, now repackaged under its then-intended title, Whatever To Happened To 1984, adds some instrumental drive and firepower at a time when, by Harper’s own admission, his own creative engeries had been flagging. With Page’s supple electric and acoustic lines adding sparkle and lustre to the heavyweight history-as-prophecy themes revolving within Ninteen-Eighty-Fourish and Frozen Moment’s anguished waking dream, Harper’s acebric social commentary and roused, angered howl is given an enhanced counterpoint and articulation. With beautiful pressings, heavy-board gatefold sleeves containing photos, lyrics and Harper’s invaluable insights, these editions feel precious and rare, artefacts of an uncompromising and frequently brilliant catalogue.
MCGOOHAN’S BLUES AND SHE’S THE ONE REMAIN SHIVER-INDUCING.