Roy Harper
Folkjokeopus

Premise: this won't be a "light" review.

It's impossible to COMPRESS into a single page (and the term doesn't seem exaggerated) that ocean of lived life that, impetuous, swells and sucks you into its waves for the nearly 18 minutes of "McGoohan's Blues." Something that has few equals in the musical journey of the Minstrel from Rusholme - but, I dare say, also in Rock as a whole. A torrential flow of anger, pain, disillusionment, regret, sarcasm - and flashes of bitter irony; yet, never more lucid an attack was launched against the establishment and its dogmas: a wounded rebel, misfit, social GUINEA PIG - Roy is the madman who, being mad, is also the only one who can see the truth for what it is. But unlike the Beatles' fool on the hill, who with his eyes could see the world turning, it's not cosmic truths he manages to glimpse. His third eye sees the horror of the world raped and commodified, the monsters (the real ones) coming out from the TV screen to entangle with their tentacles, the State as an immense war machine taking its unsuspecting children, all (and indiscriminately) pawns in the sordid game. 

All, like Roy, "TAILOR-MADE social experiments" like a tailor's fabric. But not all, like him, are aware of being so. Here, the dystopian fiction embodied by Patrick McGoohan, TV actor and inspiration for the piece, becomes raw reality.

An atrocious, brutal, ruthless analysis - neither epic nor rhetorical, because there cannot be rhetoric when you look around and understand that nothing will change, when you realize you are "the merry consumer who ends up being the food at a bigger feast"... meanwhile, the daily brainwashing is taken care of by advertising, politicians and clergymen have MUCH to say (the Church and its secular projections: here it is, Roy's eternal black beast...) and nothing stirs - "the village I was born in is also the one I will die in, and I never managed to leave, however much I tried..."

...but when the music changes, the other instruments overlay the guitar and the minor tones become major, a (minimal) glimpse of hope opens: nothing will change, it's true, but "I'm on my way, and the river carries me without knowing where, and I let myself be carried away..." Perhaps there is meaning, perhaps the meaning is to surrender to the current without suffering, and become one with the wind that blows away the ashes of the fire... 

Maybe.

"Folkjokeopus" (1969, Roy Harper's third work) is a marvelous combination of length and brevity, verbosity and synthesis, grand frescoes and delicate vignettes... and an explicit declaration of absolute anti-conventional songwriting. That the Voice of this Man is and remains a UNESCO heritage maybe you already knew, and it would be superfluous to dwell on it, except... how can you remain indifferent to a "She's The One" and its terrifying vocal surges...? - the strangest and "sui generis" love song ever written (Is it a love song...?): an anthem to a special woman, the one "you don't miss until you realize she's really gone", and for a while, you think that YOU is generic and Roy is talking about himself... when instead SHE is the wife of his friend-silent interlocutor, the one who never really understood her - "you have a wonderful woman with you, and you're really a fool to let her go...". And that falsetto...

...and that crystalline and almost unnatural sweetness of "Composer Of Live" - vocal arabesques drawing this tender ""ninnar-nanna"" for harpsichord, or yet again the Japanese melody of "In The Time Of Water" which - aside from the Voice - would not have been out of place on a Robbie Basho album... different scenarios from those of a factually perfect pop song like "Sgt. Sunshine" that opens the games, and from that masterful 12-string essay that is "One For All": eight almost entirely instrumental minutes (and here too Davey Graham and Bert Jansch, halfway between India and Albion folk-jazz, are well present) and a synthesis of technique and passion that forces you to hold your breath...

...and precisely, to catch one's breath, the cabaret-style interlude of "Exercising Some Control" and the close (perfect after the tension of "McGoohan's") of "Manana", a bit Donovan and a bit Roy Harper - naturally - which the piano of old Nicky Hopkins makes sublime. 

And now I catch my breath too.