Roy's Missive


At the Clonakilty Gathering, Roy handed out a few copies of a letter to us all. I hope he won't mind but I have copied it out here since I am sure you'll all be interested in what he has to say. I used OCR software on this, any errors are my own.

Paul.



BACK AT THE RANCH. PART 1

Before we start, remember this.. and try to keep it in your mind. Roy Harper is an enterprise comprising two people. Him Outdoors and Her Indoors. Sometimes the roles are reversed, but not often. It probably looks, from where you're sitting, that things on the Roy front have been moving very slowly this last 5 years. Be assured this is not the case. The last 5 years have been years of consolidation. The advent of burgeoning computer and information technology have given us opportunities to establish a base, and consolidate a profile that was hitherto unimaginable. We've taken these opportunities insofar as they've presented themselves, we've expanded, and we have a daily fight on our hands to maintain. It's easier now than it was a couple of years ago, but it's still hand to mouth.

Having said that, it's been incredibly rewarding to have been able to put ourselves on the map again. There are choices you make in life. Some are mandatory, others volitive. First on the list of mandatory for me has always been to keep my work alive. And somewhere not too far down that same list has been the maintenance of the ability to do so.

So that the last 5 years has been spent in tying up loose ends. The Book, (The Passions Of Great Fortune) took between 2 and 3 years to get together from conception to delivery, towards the end of which I was stranded in China for a couple of weeks. It was very intensive and very hard work. Long hours spent searching for things that you knew existed but you didn't know where to look, or who to ask next. For instance, there's a picture in existence of myself, Robert Plant and Groucho Marx, which I would love to have used, and I even know who took the picture.. Robert Ellis.. but could I find him.. even with the Internet up and running.. not a chance. Sometimes the time spent was disproportionate to the value obtained.

The book was really necessary for the simple reason that it tied everything together in the ways in which I'd always seen them. In reading the book I would have hoped that the unfamiliar reader would be able to grasp more than a little of the general gist of the messages, and the person behind them. On the shoestring I've operated on for most of my life a book was the only answer to containing the work in one place. Multimedia video and documentary have always been financially out of my league. No one with the wherewithal was willing to give me the time of day. And they're still not.

After the book, the next thing to try to accomplish was some kind of a dvd. The Summer gigs in Clonakilty, Ireland, in 2004 became a focus for an attempt at getting this together. You would think that it would be easy enough to just film a couple of gigs and get the result out to the market within the next couple of weeks. Not the case. People go missing, get busy, disappear to different parts of the world.. become unobtainable. It eventually becomes impossible to get everyone together again. Life takes over. It's organic. You forget where you were, mainly because you never knew in the first place; because the gigs were recorded in your absence. You were on stage at the time.. and gradually it becomes obvious that the only person who can mix the tapes is you.. yourself.. me.

Meanwhile life has gone on and there have been at least three different focuses on varying distractions every week. Enough to entirely destroy the concentration of the average dinosaur. Excuses excuses... well.. maybe what I should do is give you a minute by minute run down of a week in progress. Maybe you'd then have to decide upon which bits of real life you needed to use to enhance your appreciation of your own part in the world.

There's something like 151 hours of video tape to go through.. and make decisions about. which angle.. which guitar.. what other footage.. which order.. . At least 9 different parameters to think about all the time.. and we've just got started.. and it's June 2005. The problem is that royworld has been buzzing for at least 5 months on the trot here. There have been requirements and deadlines to be met for at least that amount of time which have demanded all hands on the pumps. You would think that a simple ad would just take a day to get together, but by the time it's delivered to the press, it's probably bitten a couple of hours out of ten successive days. This kind of thing ends up with creative logjam. There are just not enough hours in the day. It's now 1.51 am and I've got round to needing to send you this message. I'll be here till 4am at least. Last night was the same.. for very different reasons... It's not as though we never have time for any fun, it's just crammed.

My inclusion in Patti Smiths Meltdown thingy at the festival hall took up most of my time for most of a month. Before that it was a frantic couple of weeks trying to find the right combination of songs to comprise a collection of songs to present to harper newcomers in the light of being presented with a Mojo award and consequently feeling the need to try to simplify things for new listeners. A very necessary task. I agonised over what to include.. there's so much.. and then with the dynamic. I find that my delivery is always emotional, and each set is different.. there were things I didn't want to leave off, there were things that I couldn't, but there was always the consideration of the dynamic. Some songs that are very close to me just didn't make it. It was a month of a strange torture.

Before that, from February onwards, I was engaged in getting the mammoth single together. We did the filming in December and January. What you will not know until this point is that The Death Of God is the soundtrack to 13 odd minutes of video which was in the can in February. I delayed working on the video when I realised that the election was going to catch me without adding my voice to the criticism directed at Blair. I needed to stand up and be counted at that point.. and to make sure that any statement made was going to be valid a Ion time after the 2005 election. Personally, I have to think that the collection of voices against Blair were sufficient enough to have significantly reduced his popularity to a point at which he is now seriously weakened.. and the whole idea of the `new labour' state as he saw it is now under serious scrutiny by whole masses of population who only a short time ago would have given such a shifty charlatan carte blanche.

The last six months have flown by. And they've something of a torture.. trying to get the compilation out to meet its adverts in the magazines. Things went wrong in the production and we had one hell of a job to try to get to the release to happen on time. Such is life in the seemingly quiet lane. I can already hear pressure for the next studio album. I only wish I had the time to get started. I've got bits and pieces of course.. I always had that.. but there are the 2005 Clonakilty gigs, (a big commitment, in terms of rehearsal), quickly followed by the Autumn tour. There's even some talk of gigs in Australia , then there's the consideration of a possible 100 club event in January, and there are definitely some Canadian gigs in 2006. And I've also been invited to play in Hungary in 2006.. and I wanted to do the Festival Hall again, `cept it's closed for refurbishment.

But then.... there are other things going on in my life. My own personal environment has always been very important to me. My life here in Ireland has rather been coloured by taking on a house that perhaps I should never have even looked at. But fifteen years ago, I did. It was a ruin.. and I moved in. Soon afterwards I found myself emotionally stranded for about 5 years, but that's another story. Those memories are now largely expunged and I'm living in a strange paradise which needs more than constant upkeep. Admittedly, I give myself horrendous tasks in relation to the house, and essentially it's enabled and crippled me in the same breath. I've become the curator of a few rambling acres of rocky hillside which is in the process of slowly becoming a park. Manual labour.. and difficult. I fiddle with it in my spare time! This last month there's been a push to finish a pond I started 2 or 3 years ago.. from scratch. Where there was once just bracken infested barren hillside, there is now a plantation of trees, some of them forty feet high, and a pond roughly 28 feet by 26 feet, and over five feet in depth at its deepest. It should be finished this Summer. I would like to have sticklebacks, frogs, eels and roach in there by the end of the year, and then see how we go from there.

It's now a couple of weeks later and my commitments in London have been dealt with. The Mojo thing was great fun. Everyone was really friendly, the vibe was good, and I met a lot of music people who I will now know a little better, and feel a little better about when next I see their names in lights. I've variously seen in written criticism that my speech was "Three hours long..." "Unintelligible" and "A Harper moment". People are ridiculous.. and I fear for them (sometimes!). They're so distracted and dysfunctional. So bloody unfocused and scarily unintelligent.

The other event, Patti Smiths Meltdown UK-US Folk Connections night turned out much better than I thought it might. When I saw the size of the bill, I wondered how it was all going to fit.. in one night. But it did. It was eclectic.. I was in the audience for most of it and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. It was a bit messy at times, but even that was enjoyable. There wasn't a single person on the bill I didn't enjoy. Of course, I already knew a lot of the people involved. Privately, I would be critical of where one or two people have taken their art to... or not, but not even my close friends will get me to further articulate that kind of a thought.

I thought that Bert was wonderful, as usual; I really enjoyed Johnny Marr, Martin Stevenson, Neil Finn, Shirley Collins, Spider Stacey et al and I thought that Patti was lovely and Lenny's obviously a great support, very good player and a great guy. Robin Williamson is a great harpist who should have found a better place in the scheme of things. Robyn Hitchcock was brilliant, both in his choice of set and his delivery, and I have to say I like him a lot. Like him I suspect, I was contracted for half an hour, so it was with the usual scepticism that I read things which appear on line such as...

`Bad Speech, even perfectly delivered, should segue into Hope, preferably with Jimmy Page on guitar, for if not, the battle between credibility and cringe-inducing cliché can go the wrong way.' (Since when did Jimmy play on `Hope'.. that was Nick Harper. Someone's not been paying attention). and.... ` (after a tedious and over-long set from Roy Harper).' (4 songs, a joke and a very short speech. During which tried to hold the same line I think Guthrie would have held to, ie., being at the factory gate as a member of the union to tell it in exactly the way he saw it).

And other mealy mouthed stuff.... and plenty of it.. and I wonder whether I was at the same event. I have to say I had a fantastic time and that the event far and away exceeded my expectations for it. I thought that I played the best set that I've ever played in the truly public domain. EVER. I achieved about 90% of my goals for the night. What I attempted to do was to present the British side of the relationship to all the Americans in the audience and on stage. In a thoughtful way.. so as to engage them.. to bring them into an understanding of my own take on the UK/US folk connection. To point to landmarks in the relationship, and finally to implore for continued understanding.. I have to say that all the Americans who spoke to me afterwards did so with a degree of warmth which went a long way to confirming my belief that I'd chosen the right course. In fact, there was no other course available to me. Regardless of the amateurish moments, and perhaps sometimes because of them, I thought that the night was a fantastic success.

To anyone who was in any way cynically critical of anything we did at the RFH on June 24th I would have to say, in all honesty, where the hell is your heart? Are you with us? Or d'you want to continue to nit-pick? And never truly see another heart for what it really is.

Posted: Wed - August 3, 2005 at 02:36 PM          

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