Folk might now be mass-marketed as the Tory rock-lite of Mumford & Sons, but 40 years ago Roy Harper made a record that was ambitious in arrangement and ferocious in sentiment
Listen to Hors D'Oeuvres
A new year brings with it a whole new list of anniversaries, so let's play the game and get in there quick. The media will be full, as is right, of Dylan (70) and The Queen Is Dead (25) and grunge (20) among many others, but 2011 also marks two major landmarks in the life of a great living Englishman. So I'd like to celebrate Roy Harper (70) and his greatest album, Stormcock, released 40 years ago.
Now that folk is mass-marketed as the Tory rock-lite of Mumford & Sons, it's hard to remember that at one time it was the province of outcasts both real and self-styled, that it was more underground than any acid-rock group, that it was as upstart as any punk, as freighted with the cares of the world as any goth. In 1964 and 65 folk was heavy, and it carried the pop world before it in ways that would enrich the musical culture of the next decades.
There was a window into this world thanks to the recent programme Folk Britannia. This showed extracts from an extraordinary 1966 BBC documentary, called Meeting Point: Outcasts and Outsiders, which aimed to cover Soho low-life and the pastoral work of that area. As part of the remit it focused on the scene around Les Cousins, the premier Soho folk club that had opened the previous year, in April 1965.
Located at 49 Greek Street, Les Cousins was not the start of the British folk revival: that had a long, long history ? much of which is delineated in Colin Harper's excellent biography of Bert Jansch: Dazzling Stranger. But it was where folk music intersected with youth culture and transatlantic influences, just at the point when ? partly thanks to Bob Dylan ? the wider marketplace was ready for something new, something deeper.
The clips from Meeting Point show a basement space with a deadbeat, all-night crash-pad ambience, but two brief performances set the mood: a brief clip of Jackson C Frank ? the most haunted of all mid-60s folkies ? and then a young Al Stewart, singing the cautionary rent-boy tale, Pretty Golden Hair. Also interviewed is the outreach worker Judith Piepe, who befriended Paul Simon and many other club habitu�s.
In his memoir of the 60s drug scene, Keep the Faith Baby, the pastor Kenneth Leech remembered that songs about "loneliness, rejection, brotherhood, inhumanity, were sung around the Soho folk cellars in 1965 and 66". He felt that this folk scene "mirrored the problems of the world". This was a new kind of romanticism, anti-pop (although soon to become so), weighed down with the cares of the world yet soon to trip into inner space.
A quick scan through the repertoire of those who played at Les Cousins reveals few topics unturned: male prostitution (the aforementioned Pretty Golden Hair), drug addiction (Bert Jansch's Needle of Death, Donovan's version of Codine), mediated alienation (Paul Simon's The Sound of Silence), as well as the haunting visions ("cloud dreams all") of Jackson C Frank's Carnival and soon-to-be-classic Blues Run the Game.
Roy Harper played Les Cousins ? he even recorded an album there in 1969 ? and his first album, Sophisticated Beggar, drank deep from the same well. It included Big Fat Silver Aeroplane, a spacey rant with six verses, each delineating the effect of a different drug, as well as a song about Jackson C Frank, My Friend. It concluded with Committed, an aptly hysterical account of his brief time in a "mental institution".
Three albums for three different labels followed, all of which added rock instrumentation to the basic folk sound: Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith had Freak Street, Ageing Raver, and the infamous You Don't Need Money. Produced by Shel Talmy (the Kinks, the Who), Folkjokeopus included the heartfelt She's the One, a song for Albert Ayler, One for All, and the 17-minute McGoohan's Blues, inspired by The Prisoner.
During 1969 Harper began a fruitful association with producer Peter Jenner, who had also worked with Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett. Flat Baroque and Berserk was a step up, with enduring songs such as I Hate the White Man and Hell's Angels and added instrumentation provided by David Bedford and Harper himself (electric guitar). On the sleeve note, he thanked "Cousins where it all began ?"
If Flat Baroque and Beserk saw the first successful integration of sound and production with Harper's highly idiosyncratic lyrical and vocal approach ? part ranter, part mystic, with an unusually direct and earthy line in invective ? then 1971's Stormcock saw its full flowering. Containing only four tracks ? ranging between seven and 13 minutes ? it resolutely and uncompromisingly creates its own world.
As an opener, Hors D'Oeuvres takes no prisoners. It begins with descending standard first-position folk chords. We're immediately pitched into a courtroom drama: the images pile up line over line (13 in all) before you get near a chorus. The effect ? apart from the spleen: you know the minds of this jury are closed and will never open ? is suspended and suspenseful: cueing up the first chorus at nearly three minutes.
Harper's singing is subtle and serpentine: some times he stretches out syllables in complex patterns, at others he fires them out like a bullet. The second verse develops the idea of being judged into a splendid anti-critic rant that transcends every other effort in this crowded genre. In the early version recorded at Les Cousins in 1969, Harper pointed out a Melody Maker journalist as the target: "He said that I didn't offer any panaceas for the world's troubles."
The ferocity of the sentiments in both verses ? Harper wrote the song "thinking of Carl Chessman, fighting for his life in his death cell" ? are enhanced by a brilliant arrangement. The instrumentation slowly builds after the first verse: adding an organ, and then a Leslie'd guitar, as the backing vocals become more complex. For the last two minutes, these different elements weave around each other in a joyous exploration of pure melody.
By the time Stormcock was released, Harper was a counterculture icon ? name-checked by Led Zeppelin in the song Hats Off to Roy Harper, and Jimmy Page provided uncredited electric guitar on The Same Old Rock. The album's artistic success makes it a pinnacle of a particularly English kind of folk-rock at the same time as it powerfully restates the outsider position of the original 60s Soho scene.
Listening to Stormcock, you can also hear a great British singer. Like Syd Barrett, Harper had experienced madness, but he was a northern boy, tougher and more acerbic. You can also hear his influence on Hunky Dory era David Bowie, who would also return the favour, covering Harper's Highway Blues (from The Lord's Prayer) with the Astronettes in 1973. Then there was the matter of Pink Floyd and Have a Cigar, which featured Harper on lead vocals.
Best of all, Roy Harper is still performing. I saw him in 1990, on the night that Margaret Thatcher was deposed, at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road, and it was the perfect way to celebrate the moment. He played a small hall in Anglesey, a few years ago, in an autumn storm, and was equally as good. On 2 April this year, he is playing a special show, to be filmed at Metropolis Studios in London: for more information, visit royharper.co.uk.
Camilla Belle Blu Cantrell Jaime King Lokelani McMichael Freida Pinto
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