Roy Harper (born 12 June 1941) is an English folk rock singer, songwriter, poet and guitarist. 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.
Harper's influence has been acknowledged by Led Zeppelin, 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.
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. He performed additional concerts in 2019 and 2025.
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 six, he lived in St Annes-on-Sea, a place he described as being "like a cemetery with bus stops". 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. 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. 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. 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. Harper played his first paid performance at a poetry reading in Newcastle in 1960.
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.
1966–69: The first record deals
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). Harper's record company had different expectations. 'They wanted me to write commercial pop songs and when they heard the album I made for them, they didn't have a clue. They wanted hits. And I gave them "Circle"'. Bert Jansch contributed sleeve notes for the album and Harper paid tribute to Jansch with the song "Pretty Baby"; the B-side non-album track of his first single (released in March 1966). During this period, Harper was managed by American music entrepreneur Jo Lustig, manager of Pentangle and former agent to Julie Felix.
In June 1968, Harper performed at the first free concert ever held at Hyde Park, acting as compere and sharing the bill with Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Tyrannosaurus Rex. At the time, he spoke of co-writing a rock opera with Pink Floyd. No opera resulted, but it was the beginning of a musical relationship. Harper began to attract a following of fans from the underground music scene and tour the UK, performing at numerous venues such as the Lyceum Ballroom, Klooks Kleek and Mothers; venues that would gradually gain recognition for the variety and quality of their musical acts. Mothers in Birmingham was one such venue, and one to which Harper would frequently return. Harper later told Brum Beat magazine:
That was the first club outside London that meant anything at all and that's why there's been this long association with Birmingham. I played there about six times between 1968 and 1970. I have always enjoyed playing here.
A track from Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith, "Nobody's Got Any Money in the Summer" also appeared on the first bargain-priced sampler album, The Rock Machine Turns You On. The album was released in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and a number of other European countries as part of an international marketing campaign by Columbia Records (known in Europe as CBS).
In 1969, Harper undertook a short 6-venue tour with Ron Geesin and Ralph McTell. The tour programme contained the introductory paragraph: Roy Harper isn't an example of any category, the epitome of any movement or a rung on anybody's ladder; he built himself alone, piece by piece and his defiant character stands proud as if chiselled from belligerent granite.
That same year, Harper released his third album Folkjokeopus again produced by Shel Talmy, and released by Liberty Records. Side two included an extended 17-minute track, titled "McGoohan's Blues", which Harper referred to as the "main statement" within the album. Of his non-conformance to radio-friendly, standard, three-minute songs, Harper claimed it to be a revolt, and that he regarded the three-minute pop song as an anathema, a jingle to sell a band. (The title for "McGoohan's Blues" was a reference to actor Patrick McGoohan, who had starred in the UK TV series The Prisoner two years earlier). The track "Sergeant Sunshine" would also appear on Son of Gutbucket, a 1969 sampler album released to promote artists on the Liberty Records label.