Roy Harper
Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith

Surely being remembered mainly for a song dedicated to him by Led Zeppelin, with whom he was a close friend, or for the vocal cameo on "Have A Cigar" by Pink Floyd, must not be a cause of extreme pride for a musician who has written at least a couple of fundamental pages for English folk in particular and the Music of the century, in general.

Harper was born in the suburbs of Manchester but soon moved to the countryside, orphaned of his mother... at the tender age of 10 he played in his brother's skiffle band, the De Boys, but relations with the family were stormy and at 15 he left home to join the Royal Air Force. The rigid military life created major problems for him and his insubordination was treated as a mental disorder, so much so as to make him enter and exit various mental centers (where he participated in the infamous ECT Program... electroshock...!), which earned him a discharge. He wandered widely across Europe as a street artist until 1964, the year he returned home. He chose London and the Les Cousins club as his headquarters, a renowned folk club where other artists like Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell also performed, which allowed him to find a way to publish his first work "Sophisticated Beggar" with the small label Strike Records. This album of introspective folk did not go unnoticed, so much that CBS sent producer Shel Talmy to sign the promising young songwriter, producing his new work "Come out Fighting Ghengis Smith" which came to light in 1968.

Already from the cover, it was baffling and caused quite a stir upon release, but once you get past the visual impact, you enter a world suspended above a soft cloud, where Harper's soft voice floats through all possible folk digressions. You're left speechless listening to the Drake-like premonitions of the subdued "All You Need Is," almost as if advising a brighter future to his friend than the one that awaited him or in the joyful ballad "You Don't Need Money," but unlike Nick, Roy Harper is curious to explore the origins of American folk by Woody Guthrie with the sweetness of "What You Have" or "the bastardization" brought about by people like Kaleidoscope (USA) who are mixing it with psychedelia, so "Freak Street" and the title track seem to come straight out of the colorful hallucinations of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Harper doesn't hesitate to venture into "avant-garde" territories with the sarcastic pastoral-religious piece "Highgate Cemetary" built on an unusual minimal structure, where the object of his words is the earthly power of the Church, represented by the London cemetery built a century earlier to collect the remains of the English bourgeoisie in a more appropriate and worthy place than churchyards, used until then. But all this is not enough for him, so much so that the jewel of the album is found in the 11 minutes of "Circle," where amidst talking interludes, Harper draws future scenarios that transport the listener's mind directly into the 90s, much to the splendid oratorical quality of Belle And Sebastian and the cerebral introspection of Lambchop... and it's no joke.

Roy Harper is still active and has produced albums of very high quality, even if he has received very few recognitions; Mojo magazine inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2005, but his peaks were reached with the album in question and the splendid "Stormcock" of 1971, of which you can read a dadaist review by morningstar.