There is a man from Rusholme on stage. He is 73 years old.
At the behest of some joker from the audience, he shows us his bus pass to prove it.
Almost 2000 people, from Rusholme and across the country (this is one of only three much-anticipated national shows) have made their way through biblically rainy streets tonight to hear this bona-fide pensioner explore a 23 album back catalogue with the zest and vitaility of a man less than half his age.
There’s a good chance if you’re also half his age, you may not have heard of Roy Harper.
He has alluded to himself as the ‘loony on the bus’ of British popular music – a significant ghost who would, I’m sure, baulk at the phrase National Treasure. If that has ever meant anything at all, it surely applies to him.
Revered as a master of his expansive craft, this erudite and often gritty counter-cultural hero emerged from the early sixties British folk scene. He has run so very far in many different musical directions since then, settling latterly into further exploring a distinctly autumnal and wistfully evocative Englishness – also ingrained in the work of former contemporaries like Nick Drake, Bill Fay and Bert Jansch.
Harper counts Pete Townsend, Joanna Newsom, Johnny Marr, Paul McCartney and Kate Bush among admirers, and has worked extensively with Jimmy Page. Led Zeppelin wrote (or adapted to be precise) a song about him in Hats Off To Roy Harper, and he sang Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here? highlight, Have a Cigar.
Tonight he majors on songs from his recently released Man And Myth LP (his first proper release for 13 years) assisted with skilful empathy on vocals and various stringed things by Californian, Jonathan Wilson. A String and Brass section deftly under- not over- score numerous moving moments. They assist Harper in elevating parts of his longer, more impressionistic, song-based meditations into near blissful beauty.
Some new songs like The Enemy harp back to his grittier, more bitingly cynical origins. But on the drifting Heaven Is Here, he is as breathtakinly good as he ever was on definingly ambitious albums like Valentine, HQ and the much revered Stormcock– a record Johnny Marr referred to as a ‘secret weapon’ – up there with Bowie’s Hunky Dory.
From that we hear a take on Me And My Woman which elicits some of the loudest cheers from a fully appreciative audience of die-hards. It reminds that his voice is an incredible thing- capable of thriling falsetto flights, warm whispering delicacy and judiciously deployed, prowlingly dismissive clout.
His age makes these things remarkable. It has also, perhaps surprisingly, gifted him with a lightness of touch and muscal dexterity (his guitar playing is the stuff of a whole other review) that helps him revisit these songs in rewarding new ways.
A take on Dylan’s Girl From The North Country is a moment of nostalgic reverie which, in paying homage to his folk origins, serves to underline just how far he did run with ideas which became warm woolly-jumpered cliches for others with less courage, vision, skill and bloody-minded individuality.
I’d take Twelve Hours Of Sunset, his shimmering ode to flight (Harper spent time in the Royal Air Force before feigning mental illness to be released from military service) as his masterpiece. it’s rendered here with the skilful sensitivity.
It speaks musically of his interest in the jazz of the more reflective Miles, Sibelius and a passion for the Romantic poets. Subtle use of echo effects fade him to a faint, sibilant impression of a jet engine. It’s a discrete world of sound that makes it plain he is a unique imprint and effectively a genre of one.
When An Old Cricketer Leave The Crease, that much-loved meditation on the game itself, mortality and the almost indefinable English melancholy Harper has come closer to embodying than almost any other musicians from this Sceptic Isle, closes the show with a colliery evoking swell.
He seems genuinely disarmed in saying his goodbyes, and tells us his home town nerves threw him on occasion – the result being a few missing lines here and there.
These days we make too many excuses for older musicians who really should give up the unconvincing ghost and send us back to their finest achivements – where we can remember them at their brilliant best. Hello, Mr McCartney.
Harper, however, shows it can and should be a level playing field. Here is a man some 50 odd years into a career who is clearly at his very best. He promises to return, ‘if the scales balance again’ – a typically honest reference to his age.
He looks and sounds sharp enough to stare down at least another score. Be seeing you soon, hopefully, Mr Harper. And hats off, once again.
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