ROY HARPER

ROY HARPER (Whelan's, Dublin)

“Now where was I ?,” asked Roy Harper as yet another anecdote went astray, only to be put out of its misery after a guided detour of the streams of Harper consciousness – not a pleasant trip, boys and girls.

However, his own trip must have been pretty good, as his constant references to his live itinerary as The Marijuana Lecture Tour left us in no doubt as to the nature of his herbal nutrition. Now I don’t begrudge him the odd spliff to get into the right mood but most of the show was performed in such a ‘relaxed’ manner that when he did try and get worked up over something, as on ‘Whiteman’ (his song about the guilt and shame he sometimes feels over his racial identity), he just couldn’t muster the emotional input necessary to carry such a highly charged cri de coeur .

While most people were there to see him perform songs from his vast, monumental body of work, he seemed more interested in cracking countless jokes about ‘our boys in green’ which had roughly the same effect on me as the prospect of having to shake hands with Longford’s top dogfood expert had on Comrade Yeltsin... and I hadn’t even a sniff of Smirnoff at the time!

However, my slumber was disturbed when Nick Harper (his father’s son!) joined him on stage and added a vitality that saved the day somewhat with some excellent classical-style guitar accompaniment. The audience reaction slowly metamorphosed too from a state of apathy to sympathy to eventual empathy as songs like ‘Same Old Rap’ and ‘Highway Blues’ breathed some life into the hitherto comatose atmosphere – which, for a while, had left Whelan’s in serious need of an ambulance as well as an ambience!

However, it must be said that Mr. Harper Snr., despite having worked with just about every Jurassic dinosuar in the history of English rock, from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin, and whose songs have been covered by the likes of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush and This Mortal Coil, remains a very personable and unpretentious species of folk hero and he should be preserved at all costs as these are a dying breed and are practically extinct around these parts, which recent readers of Hot Press will be all too aware.

In fact, for the last four years he has voluntarily chosen to live in Clonakilty ! (it’s all that ‘grass’ that attracts him, I suppose). Still, you’d need to be on something so I guess the fact that he made a bit of a hash of the whole thing is understandable under the circumstances.

• Nicholas G Kelly