27. Your Roots are Showing
The fellowship of a table-tennis club in what Paul Roberson, my former guitar teacher and dear friend, recalls as a “colonial port city at the far flung edges of a dying empire” - Brisbane 1976 - would prove vital in allowing him to listen to the elusive Roy Harper.
“Very little information trickled down, and all music was tied up by local radio… it was almost Mafia-esqe,” Paul tells me over FaceTime on a Wednesday afternoon.
“If you didn’t see it on TV or read it in the newspaper, you had no way of finding out what was going on. The world was one big mystery.”
He dials in to our long-awaited chat from his home in the Currumbin hinterland – think humidity, condensation on outdoor tables, and carpet pythons – donning shorts and a light shirt, while I sit hunched over from the cold cradling a cup of scalding tea. We are only a two hour flight away, but as always, south-east Queensland feels a world away to Melbourne in weather and ideals.
Paul had initially come across Roy Harper when inspecting the sleeve of Led Zeppelin III and noticing the closing track ‘Hats off To (Roy Harper)’, but he didn’t see the name again until 1975 with the release of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. The band credits a seemingly unknown Roy Harper as the singer on the track ‘Have a Cigar’.
A curious Paul turned to a reliable and like-minded vessel of information concerning the world outside of Brisbane, his friend Glenn. Glenn’s father was a journalist and the press secretary for the Queensland Labor Party, so Glenn was surrounded by resources – such as the coveted New Musical Express magazine that he received via post from the United Kingdom – and possessed the ability to get such resources quickly, or as quickly as you could in 1975. Things moved slow; no one rushed, and you had to be on time. Now, I send my friends a link to a song, and it can accessed in under 10 seconds if they are quick enough.
“There was a guy in Glenn’s table-tennis club who owned a record store, and he would help out Glenn and find albums or artists he had read about,” Paul says.
“Glenn mentioned Roy Harper, and the owner ended up getting Roy’s record Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion imported for us from overseas.”
And it was around 40 years later, in a cramped and poorly ventilated music room at a private school in Terranora, on the northern boundary of New South Wales, that I stared down at the CD cover of Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion while it played through my laptop speakers. The cover features a photo of a laughing Roy in black and white, and he looks surprised and happy to see you, like he didn’t know you were attending a house party, but there you are, in all your glory.
* * *
My weekly guitar lessons with Paul during the last two years of my high school career involved half an hour of playing guitar, fifteen minutes of chatting about Trump, Philip K Dick, climate change, or cackling at clips of Tim the Enchanter on YouTube, and fifteen minutes of listening to a CD from Paul’s encyclopaedic collection.
I was already armed with a strong aversion to conservatism, tradition, and the patriarchy thanks to my Hunters-and-Collectors-listening staunch socialist and unionist of a father. Paul further galvanised my skepticism and discerning eye into action by introducing me to the power and passion and urgency of Punk and New Wave, fittingly the year Trump was first elected President. I first heard Echo and the Bunnymen, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, The Dead Kennedys, The Scientists, Stiff Little Fingers, Television, and many more artists through my tinny MacBook Pro speakers.
Roy Harper’s hallucinogenic music slowly commando crawled into my soul and stunned me right when I needed it. I hail from a curious border region snugly nestled between the Queensland state capital and the hippie Mecca of Australia. Growing up on the Tweed Coast comes back to me in a patchwork of iconography and experiences: unreliable public transport, the ubiquity of RSLs, Liberal Party promotional posters, groan-inducing Day Light Savings, narrow-mindedness, wide streets, and colour-coordinated activewear.
I now breathe a sigh of relief when I return home to the sun and salt and pandanus trees of my home town. I relish the endless summer and simplicity and safety, the humidity, unmistakable smell of Sex-Wax air freshener, and affordable fish and chips. The ocean water temperature is always tepid and no one wears puffa jackets. Perhaps small towns are too small when you’re seventeen, but feel right ten years later.
My adolescence saw me grapple with feelings of disenfranchisement. Eccentricity was not overly embraced on the Tweed, particularly at my high school: if you weren’t conventionally attractive, athletic, and apolitical, no one gave a shit. If you were a girl, body hair could only exist on your head. I was itching, crawling, yearning, desperate for something else and somewhere else, wherever that was, to excel academically and get away from the State of Origin paraphernalia and limp Australian flags hanging from car windows.
I sought refuge in devouring Spicks and Specks re-runs with my parents on week nights, in my misfit friendship group and our antics swimming in the beige-coloured and bull-shark invested canals at my friend Nat’s house while the rest of our grade was drinking Fat Lambs at a party we probably weren’t invited to, and with the music Paul gave me weekly.
* * *
I was particularly drawn to Roy Harper’s fifth album Stormcock, released in 1971. It is an existential and elongated wail on behalf of humanity, at the state of religion, warfare, and the impending ecological crisis, almost exclusively featuring his voice and a twelve string guitar. I had never heard ideas and musings like his before. His lyrics are slightly confounding and nonsensical but eloquent – “Space is just an ashtray, flesh is my best wheel, the atmosphere’s my highway and the landscape’s my next meal” he sings on ‘Me and My Woman’ – but far from verbose or patronising.
I wanted in on Roy’s secret and his way of thinking, which he once detailed in an interview as “a conversation in which nothing is governing me.” I mulled and turned over his lyrics, obsessed, fascinated, almost like I was trying to tie a knot from a cherry stem with my tongue. The opening line of ‘Me and My Woman’ from Stormcock became my Year 12 yearbook quote: “I never know what kind of day it is on my battlefield of ideals.”
I gobbled up his use of sibilance and alliteration and it reminded me of TS Eliot’s use of rhyme in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats, Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.”
“He spreads her a shelter / she takes the tall skies, as they helter skelter along the same sighs,” Roy shares on “Me and My Woman”. I didn’trealise language could morph and mould and meld this way. Roy seemed to take an idea and knead out half a dozen poignant descriptive words as if he was pulling and tugging Play Doh. His visual imagery and literary devices made me sit back in wonder. I searched up his lyrics, slightly confused by the meaning but wanting more, and I enjoyed this challenge.
His track ‘The Same Old Rock’, a lucid attack on organised religion and war, sees him recount the story of a “famous straggler” who “multiplied the mystery with utterance sublime / and crossed his heart for those who died insane.” He did not hold back in his tirade against the intergenerational trauma incited by war on ‘One Man Rock and Roll Band’, insinuating the cycle of abuse and assault that can stem from returned soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He rejects the paradoxical notion that from war comes peace. “And you tell me Grandad was a hero, and that he fought for peace… but think he must have changed his name to Nero / because every time he grunts he kills his sons.”
Roy Harper spoke so honestly and intriguingly about feeling like an outsider. His existential crises and fears about dogmatic religion, tradition, and conservatism mirrored my own rapidly racing thoughts as a frustrated seventeen year old angered by bigotry, sexism, micro-aggressions of racism towards my friends, and copping the label of a ‘man hater’ by peers for identifying as a feminist.
Perhaps I envisaged myself as a ‘straggler’ who sympathised with the ‘insane’ and misunderstood. I just remember thinking, ‘as lovely as the humidity and fine golden sand and pandanus trees are in this safe little town, there must be more out there.’
I listened enraptured to my parents’ stories of galavanting across the globe before having children, travelling to Lombok and South Africa and the Algarve and the Dingle Penninsula and Jackson Hole, among many other locations. My parents, now both retired, were shift workers (my Dad was a metropolitan firefighter, and my Mum was a domestic flight attendant for Qantas) who worked to travel; that was their purpose, their reason for being, it still is. My parents always made it very clear to my sister and I that home was permanent and everlasting, but encouraged us to travel and move away and explore, and never feel any obligation to call everyday, to call at all, or come home for Christmas.
‘Home is always here for you,’ my Mum still says to me.
There was never any doubt that I would move away. It was almost like how you know that you will be able to vote when you turn eighteen. I just knew it would happen. There was no other option. The trust my parents had in me to reject the lifestyles and choices of my peers (“But why do you really want to move to Melbourne? Can’t you just go to univeristy on the Gold Coast?” I remember one of my family friends asking me) and follow my nose elsewhere propelled me forward and perhaps made it all happen.
It was almost as if I knew that I just had to hang on, because I knew that I would be rewarded one day, by experiencing the emotions and feelings that come from sitting in an echoey auditorium at the University of Melbourne and hearing a professor discuss Women Writers and Modernism; that come from growing my leg and armpit hair long without having a Year Nine boy take a photo of your legs and share it on Snapchat; that come from sharing a bottle of wine on a Roman street with a lifelong friend; dancing on tables in Nice; feeling the heat rising off the Acropolis in early June, or watching new friends play in a band in an old pub.
And now, ironically, overseas travel and living in cosmopolitan Melbourne has changed my attitude towards my home town, as it has made me appreciate simplicity and calmness. I wanted to break away from the attitudes and morals, not the landscape and safety. I now recognise my desire to separate myself from my peers as frustration tinged with a healthy amount of snobbery and bias, I still remember the feeling of being airlifted to another epoch by music.
* * *
When I ask Paul what Roy Harper’s music first stirred inside him in the late 1970s, he references Brisbane’s repressed cultural and social life under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the longest serving Premier of Queensland.
“We all thought at the time that the real Punk scene was somewhere else… but in retrospect, Brisbane was the epicentre of the Punk movement even after it died down in London, because it was a reaction to our government at the time,” he says.
Known affectionately as the ‘Hillbilly Dictator’, Bjelke-Petersen was the premier of Queensland from 1968 until 1987 when he was ousted from government following exposure of widespread police corruption and electoral gerrymandering under his watch. He is mostly remembered for his maddening crackdown on dissent and protests, and in 1977, his government hastily amended The Traffic Act and banned street protests unless you could procure a rare permit from the police commissioner Terry Lewis, who was later imprisoned for corruption.
“The right-wing police state gave the young people something to propel them forward and protest,” Paul says. “Hot, sweaty, stinky, horrible Brisbane… it was full of angry young people.”
Roy Harper’s music emerged like a mirage to Paul as a portal to an ancient, hopeful, and peaceful world.
“I felt like I was a part of an older and greener world that was lush in comparison to peak heat in Brisbane,” he says.
Paul likens Harper’s narratives, both musically and lyrically, as akin to a ripple effect, or a loose thread you can’t help pulling out of curiosity.
“You follow his thread and unravel a story similar to classical music… it’s not an easy hook, you have to sit there and let it wash over you,” he says.
“His guitar work is unfathomable. I still can’t work out a lot of his stuff because he’s working in altered tunings, and frankly, I don’t want to figure it out. I just want to be absorbed by that sound.”
“I really don’t know of any other who can do what he does,” he finishes.
* * *
After a tumultuous early life packed with time spent in the Royal Air Force, a psychiatric hospital, and prison, alongside busking and hitchhiking in North Africa and Europe, Roy Harper had an industry start in London’s mid-1960s folk scene. He met Pink Floyd’s first manager, Peter Jenner, by playing free concerts in Hyde Park, and was soon signed to EMI’s purported ‘underground’ label, Harvest Records.
However, critics misunderstood Roy Harper’s unconventional and esoteric nature, his refusal to compromise, and critique of mass religion, war, and the genocide of First Nations people, particularly notable in his tracks ‘I Hate the White Man’ and ‘South Africa.’
In an interview with the former Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 1995, Roy Harper emphasised the power that unorthodox thinkers such as Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Jack Kerouac had over him and that if he had “not been inspired by people such as Percy Shelly when I was ten years old, I might have lived a very different life.” He credits the Beat poets for instilling him with the courage to prioritise lucid self expression. “The Beat poets hit me like a proverbial sledgehammer, and that was the direction I went off in,” he told author Alan Bisbort in an interview from 2005.
If I had not discovered Roy Harper, and many other artists such as Tom Verlaine, Brian Eno, TS Eliot and Bjork, and realised there were other things to do aside from drink Vodka Crusiers, stay on the Gold Coast, post on Instagram and listen to The DMA’s, I may have had a very different life.
Similarly to Roy Harper crediting the Beats for his perspective and aversion to authority, the media Paul gave made me realise the excitement and empathy and energy I craved did exist, and that there were people out there with similar ways of existing to myself. I envisaged this dream life occurring in a university lecture, or a dive bar in London, or someone’s living room in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne, and my seventeen year old self would be happy to know that I have existed in these three places, and felt an immeasurable feeling of peace. But at the time, six years of high school seemed like an awfully long time to wait before going to seize it.
* * *
Despite one critic applauding Stormcock’s “epic progressive acoustic” and introduction of a genre that “had no purveyors but Harper”, the album greatly displeased Harvest Records due to a lack of singles, and they refused to promote it. Peter Jenner, who classified Stormcock as an “unrecognised masterpiece,” lamented the hijacking of the album’s reception by Harvest as one of the “biggest disappointments in my career. It was Roy’s time… but they absolutely buried it.”
Punk and Roy Harper both aired anti-conservatism grievances, but the arrival of Punk and simultaneous death of the Hippie dream stifled appreciation of Roy Harper.
“His album Bullingamingvase came out in 1977, in the middle of Punk, and I think he was seen as a dinosaur from the past,” says Paul.
In 1986, Paul was lucky enough to see Roy Harper support The Saints at Queensland University. The enigmatic singer-songwriter butted heads with some local Punks, yet Paul says they eventually watched in wonder.
“Some punks were heckling Roy and calling him an ‘old hippie,’ even though Punk was just as anachronistic as the Hippies,” Paul says. “Halfway way through the show, they sat down and were enchanted like the rest of us.”
Although recording twenty-two albums across nearly fifty years and playing at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, the only person I know who is aware of Roy Harper is Paul. Roy Harper rubbed elbows with the most influential artists of the 20th century, but his albums achieved no success, apartfrom slight retroactive acclaim. In 2011, The Guardian's head rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis heralded Roy Harper as the most original and underrated singer-songwriter who followed the 1960s folk boom.
“He was just too deep, and most people haven’t got the patience to deal with it… they want something given to them quickly,” Paul offers when I ask why Roy Harper is virtually unknown yet his peers such as Bob Dylan are celebrated.
* * *
In a 1984 episode of The Old Grey Whistle Test, where Roy Harper plays guitar alongside Jimmy Page in a meadow on the borders of Langdale in North-West England, the show’s host, British journalist Mark Ellen, asks Roy why success took a wide birth around him.
“My idiosyncratic behaviour,” he whispers with a smile.
“I’m a sparrow in the gutter,’ says Roys which is a phrase appearing in TS Eliot’s ‘Preludes.’
“I’m always going to be able to make a living in what I do, so I don’t need to become an international multimillionaire,” he finishes.
Like Roy, I wouldn’t go back in time and change my disconnection from my peers, and idiosyncratic status. I find it hard to explain my upbringing to other people, and what was accepted in my town, and rejected. Sometimes, I do not necessarily reach to hide my roots, when someone is surprised that I was born in Queensland, a revelation that shows when I say ‘pool’ or ‘bubbler’ or appear to be the only one at the pub table who has begrudgingly watched a State of Origin game, or knows the name Campbell Newman.
Laney is a Naarm-based writer whose work has appeared in The Backbeat Podcast, Scenestr, Beat, Australian Design Review, Facility Management Media, and inside Magazine. She is interested in the intersection between music, culture, and history. She has a Masters of Journalism from the University of Melbourne.