As Britain’s most venerable folk-rock veteran, Roy Harper was ready to bow out in 2013, before being called back onstage by international applause. That year – at the age of 71 – he told Prog about his new album (and most recent to date) Man & Myth, and what else he wanted to achieve.
It was a good theory: road-weary and happily settled in County Cork, Roy Harper had decided to retire. However, he hadn’t bargained on being championed by an army of admirers from Johnny Marr in Manchester via Joanna Newsom in California to Fleet Foxes in Washington, prompting his discovery by yet another generation of disciples, and his first studio album for 13 years.
We have all of them to thank for Man & Myth, the sonorous new entry in one of the great progressive singer-songwriter canons, recorded by the learned septuagenarian in Calfornia and Ireland. Late October brings three live shows to accompany the release. It nearly didn’t happen – but it’s hats off to Harper once again.
“I did go on what I thought was the last tour; I think it was 2007,” he says. “I’d come to the end of it. There were other things to do. All of the mess with Science Friction [the label he set up in 1993 years ago to reissue his catalogue] – it was such hard work getting all that together, because the records needed to be refurbished.
“Not only had they been ignored sound-wise and come from generation to next generation and lost quality, but they had no sleeve notes – nothing had travelled with them. All the photography lost, everything. You realise this is the way people die, because record companies do not care about that. Anyway, I got interested in doing that, and there were all kinds of other things that kept me busy.
“I started to build a garden here – it was good for my mind to do that. I diarised the tour and came off wanting to write a book. It’s a good book, but so far I’ve not got round to it. But that was the year that all the stuff with Joanna blew up.”
Newsom insisted on Harper guesting with her at the Royal Albert Hall in 2007. In 2011 he took to the Royal Festival Hall stage for a 70th birthday party, with onstage guests including his son Nick, Newsom, Jonathan Wilson (subsequently a co-producer on the new record) and Jimmy Page. Harper may have had other plans, but there was no stopping the renaissance.
“The older fans would have come back anyway, but of course each year the numbers thin,” he says. “Having a younger generation involved – a very much younger generation, like grandchildren almost – it probably alerted their parents to the fact that there was something going on.
“People like Johnny Marr are very vocal in support, and he’s a member of the generation in between, so it’s kind of been reseeded. There’s almost a certain amount of chagrin there, like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m retired!’ ‘No, you’re not!’ ‘Yes I am!’ It’s kind of like it was 40 years ago: being empowered by interest in you. You’re not playing to no one any more. You’ve been refuelled.”
Had he sensed the downward spiral before that? “Absolutely. That’s why I was just intent on saving the records. I knew some of them were really good and needed to be packaged in the right way for posterity. But I’ve been interrupted by myself again.”
It must be a nice problem. “It is; it’s very good. ‘What the hell? When’s my writing going to happen? Am I going to live into my 90s? No, I’m not!’ I’m very enthusiastic at the moment.”
Still, Harper has no qualms about saying goodbye to the road. “I desperately want to give up gigging – I really do,” he admits, “because it’s taking away from what I could write. Rehearsal is like a whole song and dance, literally. “I’m thinking now that I’ll do these dates I’ve got in the next year, and then I’m going to give it a break until I’m 75 or something, and see if I’m still up to it at that stage. If I am, I’ll have another go, maybe, but it’ll depend on a record. I think my heart’s in writing, really.”
Marc Bolan and I used to take the piss out of each other relentlessly; he was set on one course and I was set on another, and we both knew it
That’s patently clear from the mellifluous and mystical Man & Myth, on which his driving melodic structures and unique lyrical mixture of the everyday and the transcendental is revitalised. “Jonathan Wilson was the trigger that started it,” says Harper. “I didn’t know him from Adam, but then I found out he’d been trying to get his American friends to record a Roy Harper song and make a tribute record in California. We’ve become good friends – we’re really alike; we have a lot in common.
“We only actually recorded at his studio for a very short time, but in that time a lot was done. I had to bring it back here to Ireland to get it finished. I recorded the whole of one side and another track from the other side here, and the other four tracks on the first side were started in California. So it’s really kind of a transatlantic record.”
Harper has rarely made his lyrics transparent – in fact, he has often constructed his work in a literary style to avoid it becoming too easily accessible. “The dichotomy is that you want things to be heard, and yet I never wanted to jump onto the commercial bandwagon,” he says.
“I avoided it scrupulously. I wrote even longer and more difficult things to encourage myself to concentrate, because I was a prime candidate to do what my friends had done. Marc Bolan, for instance: we used to take the piss out of each other relentlessly, he and I, because he was set on one course and I was set on another, and we both knew it.”
He recalls the occasions when he almost crossed into the mainstream with his rare ‘songs for crowds.’ There was an early one, the Shel Talmy production Life Goes By, then 1977’s Bullinamingvase album offered both the singalong Watford Gap and the bucolic One Of Those Days In England, of which then-manager Peter Jenner encouraged him to make a single edit. Capital Radio airplay followed in London, and Harper was close to securing a Top Of The Pops performance until the track missed its chart target.
The internet creates mythology, and everybody has their own mythology. Even a baby!
All of which seems a long way from Harper’s customised metaphysical approach, historically influenced by Keats, Shelley, Burroughs and Kerouac, as much as by Lead Belly. “When I was 15 to 18 my heroes were all in their 50s and 60s, and some were in their 70s and 80s; they were legends in the true sense of the word. So you fed from those people.”
The individual song subjects of Man & Myth are always philosophical and often academic, informed by Harper’s keen eye on the world outside his window and on his computer screen. “At my sort of stage,” he muses, “you’re alarmed in some small way by the progress of the human beast. It’s there, ready and waiting in the ether – this great, multi-headed beast – and in some ways the album is influenced by that.
“The phrase ‘man and myth’ is something that’s perhaps been with me for at least 60 years. The internet creates mythology, and everybody has their own mythology. Even a baby! Humans, with their brains and tongues alike, create myth all the time, and the distance between man and myth, or woman and myth, is ethereal. You could describe all the songs as being part of man and myth.”
On Cloud Cuckooland, his attention turns to more prosaic themes. “It’s a song about today, really. It’s an everyday phrase in British-Irish life. For me, I see the whole damn thing as cloud cuckooland, right from The X Factor to the Olympics.
I’m interested in what’s going to happen with my guitar and pen… there are problems I’ve set myself that I’ve got to find answers to
“It needed a commentary,” he adds, quoting his own lyrics. “‘The bankers slide their stethoscopes into the public purse/To track genetic foreclosure from coitus to delivery/From ovary to hearse.’ That goes on now every day: the lawyers trying to scrape around for people to come forward to claim for the last lot that went on.”
Lead guitar was later added, at Harper’s request, by Pete Townshend. “It’s kind of related to Won’t Get Fooled Again – that’s why I asked him to do it. It’s the other side of the coin. ‘We won’t get fooled again!’… Yes we will!’ This is Cloud Cuckooland. So they’re heads and tails of the same coin.”
Re-enthused, Harper can’t wait to see what happens next. “With the next record, I’m interested in what’s going to happen with my guitar and pen. Because there are things to work out, and the problems I’ve set myself that I’ve got to find the answers to. So I’ve got a whole vista, a whole panorama opening up to me of new ideas.”
