Roy Harper

After releasing his masterpiece, Stormcock, in 1971, Roy Harper became seriously ill with Osler-Weber-Rendu disease. Though this is genetic, Harper’s publicist told the papers that he’d become ill after giving a sheep the kiss of life.

"That same day, it was headline news in Australia and New Zealand. A big story there, given that the sheep outnumber the people about four to one. Then it hits the broadsheets here. The next thing I know, I've been kissing a sheep. Then I'm president of the north-west Lancashire sheep shaggers' association."

The illness was hardly a laughing matter, though. At first he was given seven years to live. However, “the doctor came back to my bedside a fortnight later and said ‘I think I'm wrong’. It's been that sort of situation ever since.”

It stopped Harper recording for four years, and his music was never as good afterwards. Sales were poor, and, after some bad business deals, Harper “ended up owing my house to the bank. Barclays bank, Hayes, Middlesex, to be exact.”

Harper was born in Manchester on June 12, 1941, and his mother died a few weeks later. He was raised by his father and stepmother, a keen Jehova’s Witness. Harper grew to hate organised religion, and authority figures in general, becoming a beatnik teen: “When I was 15 I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.”

It may be hard to imagine, but at 15 this hippyish character joined the RAF. He hated the rigid discipline, and suffered a nervous breakdown, claiming insanity to get early release.

Harper was then committed to a mental institution, where he was given electric shock treatment. He managed to escape, in his pyjamas, and was homeless for a while before being put in prison for ‘trying to climb the clock tower at St. Pancras Station and sundry other misadventures’.

After prison, he spent a year busking around Europe and North Africa. Back in England in the mid-60s, he played on the folk club circuit, where, he says, ''I spent most of my time being thrown out of folk clubs for not being Nana Mouskouri."

He was picked up by indie label Strike in 1966, and for the next five years, he released a string of his best albums, culminating in Stormcock.

That album’s shortest song is 7 minutes 23 seconds. His record company, EMI, was ‘really angry’ about the completely un-commercial record; ‘they dismissed it out of hand’. Harper has said:

I’ll never ever forget the meeting with the marketing guy, and we walked in, into the meeting and the first thing he said was, “Before I begin, I’d just like to say that there is no money left in the marketing budget for this album.”

“I was absolutely distraught” he later said: “I knew that I'd made something really special and it was completely trashed, totally ignored.” EMI didn’t even bother releasing the album in the US.

Even with good marketing, Stormcock probably wouldn’t have sold that well. Harper’s ‘epic progressive acoustic’ sound is not for everyone, and he has always refused to be pushed in more commercial directions. One can only imagine what EMI thought when they first heard his song I Hate the White Man. The cover of his 1975 album HQ is a fairly blasphemous image of him walking on water; EMI said the cover would seriously harm American sales, but he ‘refused point blank’ to change it.

Unsurprisingly, Harper has never had a hit single, and has spent only ten weeks on the British album charts during his 33-album, 44-year career. As The Rough Guide to Rock explains: “both studio and stage often saw him spliffed to the gills or in willfully anti-commercial mode, and he’s never progressed much beyond a cult following.”

Most people who have vaguely heard of Harper know him as the subject of the Led Zeppelin song Hats off to (Roy) Harper, or as the singer of Pink Floyd’s Have a Cigar, though his own music is well worth exploring.

What to hear... Stormcock, Counter Culture

Why... As one critic said, he’s the only musician in the genre of epic acoustic prog.