Roy Harper-- The Spirit Lives
A recent e-mail from Traci, now Roy Harper's wife (congrats and all that), informs the anxious public that preorders for the 2 cd live recording of the RFH gig on Roy's 60th birthday will commence on September 10th. Traci also reports that a new tour dates page has been put into place. A few snips from The Spirit Lives remind me why I empathize with Harper so much:
"Well, Johnny Rotten was a fan of mine at one stage. And although punk felt like the same thing happening again that had happened a generation earlier, when you're booted out there's very little you can do about it," he says now, looking back.
While lots of pre-punk tendencies have been reaccepted, from wah-wahs to flares to prog, one thing that never has been is the strong sense of pastoralism and Wordsworthian romanticisation of the countryside, always prevalent in Harper's music . . ."I do pay a decent amount of homage to my roots" he agrees. "I try, the majority of times I pick up a pen, to refer to the whole of me and that includes those references, which I couldn't throw out."
"I have an emotional being which is huge," he acknowledges. This could be a boast, but it might be an affliction.
At 60, Harper is aware that his roving, angry, inquiring spirit has meant that he's been too large to harness for mass consumption.
"With me, it's the material," he says. "A 20-minute song is unplayable on radio. Most people don't have the attention span to get through even a quarter of that. So you need a certain dedication to approach my stuff - which cuts out 90 percent of the population to begin with.
I've been wondering about the attention span thing. I surfed randomly into Write the Web to find an interview with one of the creators of Blogger. Evan Williams states that his notions about the blogging "concept" are Frequency, Brevity, and Personality. I've seen lots of one word, or one sentence fragment, logs. I don't like them much. But then, maybe I've just missed the boat. There is brevity, and then there is shallowness. I like things that are long, rambling, and deep. Can't you tell? I must, because I love Roy Harper.
