I saw Roy Harper play live at the Half Moon in London on August 19, 1991. Since he rarely played in the United States, I was grateful for the opportunity to finally see him.
The show was kind of a disaster. Roy came onstage in what can only be described as a severely altered state. “I’m not ripped—I’m shredded,” were his first words to the audience. Things went downhill from there. He forgot the words to some of the songs. He changed songs before finishing the one he was playing. He rambled and at one point made chicken noises into the microphone. To make matters worse, there was a drunken heckler at the front of the stage that yelled out nonsense throughout the show, at one point attempting to knock over the speakers at the side of the stage. Apparently, the club didn’t believe in bouncers.
At the end of the set, Roy told the audience that there would be some improvement during the following two nights. That was little consolation to me—I was catching a flight back to the States the next day.
Still, I don’t hold it against him. I heard that he’d had some personal problems that night. Besides, it’s Roy Harper.
If you don’t think you’ve heard Roy Harper, you probably have. He sang the lead vocals on the Pink Floyd song Have a Cigar. In addition to Pink Floyd, he’s worked with a myriad of rock luminaries, including Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Ronnie Lane, Keith Moon, David Gilmour, Paul and Linda McCartney, Keith Emerson, and Kate Bush.
“I was never really a bone fide member of the folk scene. I was too much of a modernist, really. Just too modern for what was going on in the folk clubs. I wanted to modernize music, but more than that to completely modernize people’s attitudes towards life in general. I was involved in trying to bring meat to the folk music, which is a big mistake anyway.”
Roy recorded 21 studio albums, plus a number of live albums and compilations. The featured track, Another Day, is from the 1970 album Flat Baroque and Berserk. The first version is the album track. The second is a video by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, which I added because it complements the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush video from my last post.
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Posted by Marc Librescu 
When I interviewed Paul Kelly in Adelaide, Australia in 1992, I asked him what bands he was listening to. In his response, he mentioned Died Pretty, along with The Go-Betweens and The Triffids. When I got back to the U.S., I made an effort to check them out. I’m glad I did, because it exposed me to a musical avenue that I barely knew existed at the time.
By the time I heard of House of Love, they had just broken up. I was in a CD store in Brookline, MA back when I was living in Boston. There was music playing in the store, something wonderful that I’d never heard before. I asked the guy at the counter what it was. He told me it was House of Love. I don’t remember which album it was, maybe A Spy in the House of Love. The copy they were playing was for sale so I bought it. Then I hunted down the rest of the band’s CDs.
Lloyd Cole flew under my radar. I’d heard of him, but I wasn’t all that familiar with his music until sometime last year when I bought a couple of his albums, 1984-1989, and Music in a Foreign Language. How’d I miss him? I mean, I currently have 15,122 songs on my hard drive, which works about to about 1,260 albums if you allow for 12 songs on an album. Dunno, I guess it’s just one of those things.
Paul Kelly has received much recognition in his native Australia—he was inducted into the the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 1997. He remains less well-known in the United States, where the current top 20 includes albums by Lady GaGa, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and the rap “musicians” du jour.
You may remember Colin Hay from his days with Men at Work, the pop music darlings of the 80′s. They saw meteoric success, massive overplay, and like a meteor, they crashed and burned.
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