A great overview and interview with Roy Harper popped up recently. I can't say I'd recommend buying Hat's Off, since it doesn't have anything new on it— if you like Roy, you'll want to get them all. The array of starting points mentioned in the article leaves off several of my favorites, my vote would be for Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion if I had to pick just one to start out. Harper was born within days of Bob Dylan, but he's different. I place him much higher in my pantheon than Dylan. Roy's explanation of the difference between them in this interview really highlights the reason why:
Well, I was more attracted to poetry during the time that he was making his name in folk music. I think there's a crucial difference between us in that I've maintained...what I first set out to do. He was fundamentally attached to the folk scene at the beginning of his life in music. He was attached to people like, say, Woody Guthrie.Those damn Romantics & Beats just keep popping up everywhere.
Yes, he made that connection very much a part of his public identity.
Whereas I was much more attached to Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets. So although I'm sort of a Brit—and I say that guardedly because I am also of the world these days—I seriously thought the answer to modern social problems was to be found in how Jack Kerouac dealt with the world in those days. Not that he dealt with it with any particular success, ultimately...in fact, he was dead by the age of 47...drink mainly. But he and the other Beats gave me such an inspiration at the time inside which to work. From an early age, I was attached to the English romantic poets.
Shelley and Keats and Byron?
Not Byron, but Shelley and Keats most definitely. Wordsworth was okay, too. And so I was attached to that from boyhood. But then the Beat poets hit me like the proverbial sledgehammer, and that was the direction I went off in. I spent from the age of 13 or 14 to the age of 21, those crucial seven years, writing poems and being my own version of a Beat poet. In fact, you could have called me in those days a Beatnik.
