Back in June I registered the excitement in half of the Holden household that, not only was Roy Harper playing Glastonbury, but he was touring again after a gap of several years. (See Let's Go To Glasto Again, 27 June).
So how did 84 year old Roy do?
We caught the gig at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall in late September. It's a large venue but was sold out. There would be warm receptions at all his shows on the tour but, as a son of Manchester, none warmer than this, I'm sure. It must be said the audience seemed, on average, even more rickety than the performer, though there were a reasonable number of younger folk there as Roy has picked up followers all the way through his 60 year performing career.
It was at least the tenth time I'd seen Roy perform. He played and sang well and was superbly supported by his son Nick on a mix of support and lead guitar.
He came on alone and started confidently with How Does It Feel, a song from his 1970 album Flat, Baroque and Berserk. If I've heard him play it before it would have been the first time I saw him, in early 1971. The song got a burst of publicity when it was used in an episode of the Netflix series The Handmaid's Tale in 2019 behind a powerful sequence in the story. The album includes several songs which are commonly mentioned as being among Roy's best, but this isn't normally regarded as one of them. It's a damned fine song, however and lyrics like these must have fitted the script very well:
How does it feel to be the master's right hand nose?
How does it feel to be lieutenant?
And how does it feel to be stood on someone's toes?
And how does it feel to be a voluntary heel?
When you say you want a bit more rank
You wanna be a big wheel
You can feel magnified if you hide in your pride
It's not real
As you can see the song is a bit of a 60s hippy rant against conventionality and the rat race, continuing:
And how does it feel with a white flag in your fist?
How does it feel to have two faces?
And how does it feel with your god strapped to your wrist?
And him leading you such a chase
These are all lyrics from the song but not necessarily in the right order here. I've edited and rearranged them to limit the complexity here since, while Roy has many musical influences including Lonnie Donovan and Miles Davis, his prime influence is Keats. So there are usually other layers of meanings in his songs, as there appear to be in the rest of this song, but they are beyond my ken to figure out. It occasionally makes me wish I'd paid more attention in English Lit lessons at school. Though, as I don't recall us studying romantic poets, it probably wouldn't have helped: the first world war 'protest' poems I do remember us studying all had a fairly clear, simple and singular meaning. But the idea that it could take a chapter to explain the meanings and inferences of a few lines of verse would probably have bemused me...
Roy sang with quite a light voice in 1970, but he made a very good fist of the song and it got the set off to a flier. You can hear the song and see how it was used in The Handmaid's Tale on youtube here.
In the second half of the set Roy included East of the Sun, another song from Flat, Baroque which I also hadn't seen him play since the 70s, if ever. It's a short and hauntingly beautiful lament for his first lover. I knew from Roy's book The Passions of Great Fortune, his compendium of song lyrics with some hints and explanations, that she was called Gillian and that her parents ended the relationship. She was 15. Roy would have been 18, which would be far more problematic now we seem to think 15 and 364 days is somehow meaningfully different from 16 and a day. For context when I met Mrs H I was 19 and she was 16, so only a few months different in each case.
Wonderfully Roy announced the song by saying that the now 81 year old lady it's about was in the audience. The song started well but unsurprisingly Roy struggled with the emotion of the occasion and stumbled over the lyrics. After the warm applause died down Roy told us that Nick had suggested he speak the words, which he did, effectively as a poem. There weren't many dry eyes in the house. You can hear the original studio version of the song here. On the night it was played with two guitars rather than guitar and harmonica which worked pretty well.
Naturally the show wasn't entirely smooth running - Harper shows just aren't. One fellow got chucked out for heckling too much. Engaging Roy in banter was de rigeur in the 70s but as he can't hear as well to respond and as venues now have curfews it's become irritating so most folk (Roy included) didn't have a problem with the ejection apart, of course, from the punter who remained noisy all the way out of the auditorium.
Roy did forget to move the capo between two songs. This is hardly unusual for Roy - forgetting to move the capo or an early line in the song or change guitar and having to restart a song for those or other reasons are pretty much standard in one of his shows over the decades and all part of the entertainment. It had an amusing side effect this time. As Roy's voice got lower and lower from trying to sing the song in the wrong key his son Nick strummed along staring whimsically at his dad until they made eye contact. Nick stopped playing, got his keys out at waggled them. Roy stopped playing and looked at the keys with complete bemusement until the penny dropped. He smiled and said "ah, wrong key!" He noted that he'd impressed himself by just how low he could sing now, but thought it better to have a go at performing his epic 60s I Hate The White Man, always requested at his gigs but generally not performed in recent years, in the right key.
I was going to call this one a rant to but it's much more powerful than that, more of a polemic. Of course Roy doesn't, as some Americans have claimed, hate his "own race", i.e. white people, though he recounted a story of a live interview he gave to a radio station in the southern part of the USA over 50 years ago. A redneck had called in threatening to come down and put Roy "out of his misery". Roy was somewhat discomfited when the station immediately went off air and everyone exited the building and left, telling him to make himself scarce. His classic late 60s song isn't about skin colour. It's concerns the empty culture, hypocrisy and arrogance of western society and its violence, avarice and inherent racism. It's a rant against the establishment and its lust for power and wealth that enslaves us, takes away our freedoms, creates wars and destroys the planet in the process*. It's a song born out of the civil rights movement era and it also appeared on Flat, Baroque and Berserk. It was recorded live at Les Cousins folk club as Roy didn't think he could ever get the feeling of the song right in the studio without an audience. In a spoken preamble to the song, which Roy included on the record because he knew that the title would be misunderstood, Roy noted the sort of white men he had a problem with: Ian Paisley for example. I'd suggest he would also have seen Richard Nixon, Ian Smith (prime minister of Rhodesia when it made its "universal declaration of independence") and - in the modern era - Trump and Xi Jinping as classic "white men" although in another live recording's preamble to the song he noted that there are plenty of black politicians who behave like "white men" saying "after all, they've had a lot of good teachers". I've often wondered if Roy deliberately turned around the now outmoded phrase "play the white man", which would be problematic now but was used back then to mean acting in a decent, fair and trustworthy manner, to mean the opposite. The song was as powerful as ever - and still as meaningful unfortunately. These extracts from the lyrics will give you a feel:
And where the crazy whiteman
with his teargas happiness
Lies dead and long since buried
By his own fantastic mess
For I hate the whiteman
and his plastic excuse
for I hate the whiteman
and the man who turned him loose...
and while the crazy whiteman
in the desert of his bones
lies as bleached as the paradise
he likes to think he owns...
For I hate the whiteman
in his doctrinaire abuse
oh I hate the whiteman
And the man who turned him loose
which Roy neatly turns around towards the end of the song, singing to the audience
and the man who turned you all loose.
But of course it would be much better to give the song a listen, for example here on youtube.
The other highlight of the evening - and definitely one of the main candidates for Roy's best song when Harper fans chew the cud - was The Same Old Rock, from his 1971 masterpiece album Stormcock. Another polemic, this time against organised religion, the recorded version features a stunning acoustic guitar solo by Jimmy Page. Nick Harper's rendition was superb and probably as least as good as Jimmy's own attempt when I saw him with Roy in 2011.
There were several other classics including Twelve Hours of Sunset, Another Day and When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. There were also two 'new' songs, Man in a Glass Cage and I've Loved My Life though we'd seen Roy perform both of them since his last album was released in 2013. He did promise a new album on one of those occasions. Will it happen? He said he needed to focus on it, blogging and gardening had got in the way. We can but hope.
Roy left the stage on an emotional high. Will there be a Final Tour part three? He said "Time is against me but I do hope to be back". Which Mrs H was not so thrilled to hear, given the price of gig tickets these days. Time, as Roy sang on his last album, is temporary but can also be final. Get that album done, Roy and I'll see you again by accident - or maybe I'll see you again. (Which Harper fans will recognise as lyric from I'll See You Again from the 1974 album Valentine).
Not a great picture below, but here are Roy and Nick on stage at the Bridgewater Hall:
* With acknowledgement to Roy's chronicler Opher Goodwin whose words I've blagged, with some editing and paraphrasing, from his excellent book called On Track... Roy Harper - every album, every song. A fairly self explanatory title! Sonic Bond publishing 2021.
