Prog There are many ways to describe Roy Harper, but ‘conventional’ has never been one of them. He emerged from London’s boho folk circuit of the 60s as a singer-songwriter of alarming intensity, motored by a mistrust of authority and an inalienable belief in everyone’s basic right to individual freedom. While other folkies were protesting the Vietnam War, Harper was railing against deeper societal ills.
But then he was never really a folkie in any traditional sense. Shaped by a traumatic early life – a fanatically religious stepmother, homelessness, prison, a spell in a mental institution – his music avoided the easy route too. Harper’s early albums were hallucinogenic things that skittered between poetry, revox-blues and psychedelia, as much prone to spliffed-up lunacy as they were to chilling autobiography and 17-minute songs about Patrick McGoohan.
His underground status as a countercultural hero was finally seeping upwards by 1970, when his friendship with led to the touching tribute , which appeared on that October. He was by then managed by Peter Jenner, onetime custodian of (who themselves would later invite Harper to sing on the multi-platinum ). Jenner had produced Harper’s previous opus, 1970’s wonderful , at Abbey Road.
With the same studio again available, and a searing new set of compositions, Harper began making . For once in his five-year recording career, he was able to fully focus on the job at hand. The combined studio time of his first th.
