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.
Search Roy Harper on Amazon.com.
Search Roy Harper on Amazon.co.uk.
Posted by Marc Librescu 
No one who has followed Catherine Wheel over the years will ever understand why they weren’t more popular. Maybe they were ahead of their time. Maybe there just aren’t that many people around anymore with good taste in music.
The Stranglers started out in the mid-1970′s as a pub-rock band, evolved into a not-quite-punk band, and then refined their sound until they produced “respectable” pop music. Along the way, they pushed the boundaries of rock music (listen to Outside Tokyo or Threatened off Black and White, The Raven, Dead Loss Angeles or Ice off The Raven, or just about anything off The Gospel According to the Meninblack.
Grant McLennan was a founding member of Australian band The Go-Betweens, along with Robert Forster. Grant died of a sudden heart attack in Brisbane in 2006.
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