Without Roy Harper’s baroque, mellifluous, melancholy folk there would have been no ‘Stairway to Heaven’. James Delingpole meets a neglected genius
In 1970, shortly before the release of Led Zeppelin III, guitarist Jimmy Page invited his folk-singing chum Roy Harper up to his Oxford Street offices to have a look at the new album. ‘What do you think?’ asked Page. ‘It’s nice,’ replied Harper, toying with the amusing picture wheel built into the sleeve. ‘Look at it!’ said Page. ‘Yes, it’s nice,’ said Harper. ‘No. Look at it!’ said Page, growing exasperated. And then Harper noticed the title of track five, side two. ‘Oh. Oh! Thanks! I don’t know what to say.’
And this is the reason I’m sitting here with Harper 41 years on, in a café near Paddington station. As a long-standing Led Zep fan, I’d often wondered about the identity of the man namechecked in that song title ‘Hats Off to (Roy) Harper’. Just how good is his music? Can he really have been that important and influential? Now here’s my chance to find out.
Before we meet, I do a spot of homework, listening to such early Harper albums as Folkjokeopus, Flat Baroque and Berserk and Stormcock. It’s an experience at once enrapturing and mortifying. Why did I leave it so long before discovering this neglected genius? If it hadn’t been for Roy Harper’s baroque, mellifluous, melancholy folk, I quickly appreciate, Led Zeppelin could never have come up with ‘Stairway to Heaven’; nor would Nick Drake have sounded the way he did; nor, perhaps, would there have been Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes. So why is his music not better known?
Harper can think of lots of reasons — from the ‘difficulty’ of his material to the length of his songs (‘not much opportunity for singles’) to philistine label bosses.
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