Roy Harper (singer)

Roy Harper (born 12 June 1941) is an English folk rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

Harper was born in 1941 in Rusholme, a suburb of Manchester.

His mother, Muriel, died three weeks after he was born.

From the age of 6, he lived in St Annes-on-Sea, a place he described as being "like a cemetery with bus stops".

Harper was educated at King Edward VII School, Lytham St Annes, then a grammar school, and left at the age of 15 (1956) to join the Royal Air Force to follow an ambition to be a pilot.

After two years Harper rejected the rigid discipline and feigned madness to obtain a military discharge, as a result receiving an electroconvulsive therapy treatment at Princess Mary's RAF Hospital, Wendover.

After being discharged from there, he spent one day inside the former Lancaster Moor Mental Institute before escaping.

These experiences would be recalled in "Committed", a song on Harper's debut album, Sophisticated Beggar.

Harper played his first paid performance at a poetry reading in Newcastle in 1960.

From around 1961 he busked around North Africa, Europe and London for a few years.

Musically, Harper's earliest influences were American blues musician Lead Belly and folk singer Woody Guthrie and, in his teens, jazz musician Miles Davis.

Of the blues musicians Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and Josh White, Harper said they made music which "...seemed to be from a different planet ...We'd never heard anything like it. It changed our world overnight, a Sledge Hammer of a cultural change ...an equivalent would be to suddenly hear music from outer space".

Harper was also exposed to classical music in his childhood and has pointed to the influence of Jean Sibelius's Karelia Suite.

Returning to the UK in 1963 or 1964, Harper started to write more songs than poetry.

He obtained a residency at London's famous Soho folk music club Les Cousins in 1965, having been introduced to it by Peter Bellamy of The Young Tradition.

Harper's first advertised performance was on 5 October 1965.

Within his first week Harper saw John Renbourn, Alexis Korner, Paul Simon, Alex Campbell, and Bert Jansch play, and he would play and associate with other artists later, including John Martyn, Joni Mitchell, and Nick Drake.

He has released 22 studio albums (and 10 live ones) across a career that stretches back to 1966.

As a musician, Harper is known for his distinctive fingerstyle playing and lengthy, lyrical, complex compositions, reflecting his love of jazz and the poet John Keats.

He was also the lead vocalist on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar.”

His influence has been acknowledged by Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Pete Townshend, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, who said Harper was his "...primary influence as an acoustic guitarist and songwriter."

Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph described him as "one of Britain's most complex and eloquent lyricists and genuinely original songwriters... much admired by his peers".

Across the Atlantic, his influence has been acknowledged by Seattle-based acoustic band Fleet Foxes, American musician and producer Jonathan Wilson, and Californian harpist Joanna Newsom, with whom he has also toured.

Harper's first album, Sophisticated Beggar, was recorded in 1966 after he was spotted at Les Cousins and signed to Strike Records.

The album consisted of Harper's songs and poetry backed by acoustic guitar, recorded with a Revox tape machine by Pierre Tubbs and with contributions from English guitarist Paul Brett.

Columbia Records recognised Harper's potential and hired American producer Shel Talmy to produce Harper's second album, Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith, which was released in 1968.

The 11-minute track "Circle", "a soundscape of Harper's difficult youth", was notable for marking a widening of his musical style away from the more traditional side of contemporary folk music heard at the time.

Harper had an interest in traditional folk but did not consider himself a bona fide member of the folk scene.

He later explained:"I was too much of a modernist, really. Just too modern for what was going on in the folk clubs. I wanted to modernise music, but more than that to completely modernise people's attitudes towards life in general. I was involved in trying to bring (more) meat to the (contemporary) folk music...(of the time)."

He was brought up by his father and stepmother, with whom he became disillusioned because of her religious beliefs (although they reconciled in 1980, just before her death).

His anti-religious views would later become a familiar theme within his music.

Harper began writing poems when he was 12.

At the age of 13.

he began playing skiffle music with his younger brother David ("Davey" on the album Flat Baroque and Berserk), as well as becoming influenced by blues music.

At 14 he formed his first group (De Boys) with his brothers David and Harry.

In 2005, Harper was awarded the MOJO Hero Award, and in 2013 a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

His most recent album, Man and Myth, was released in 2013.

In 2016, Harper celebrated his 75th birthday by performing concerts in Clonakilty, Birmingham, Manchester, London, and Edinburgh.

Lyrical influences include the 19th century Romantics, especially Shelley, and Keats's poem "Endymion".

Harper has also cited the Beat poets as being highly influential, particularly Jack Kerouac.