Biography
Roy Harper is an English folk rock singer, songwriter and guitarist who has been a professional musician since 1964. Harper has released 32 albums (including 10 live albums) across his 50-year career. 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. His influence upon other musicians has been acknowledged by Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Harper
Taken from his website www.royharper.co.uk describes the album as follows:
Lifemask’ was made at the height of the ‘flower power’ expression/boom. I never considered myself a part of all that. I’d been an impressionable little ‘beatnik’ in the early sixties and by the seventies I tended to ignore the more outrageous vagaries of fashion, even though I was a very young person with an eye for fashion. However, I think that I’d become jaded by media fashion manipulation by the seventies.I rarely wore flares. I always thought that you had to be over six feet to get away with that, and I was a vane boy. Still am. Considerably more central to my existence though, was my poetry, and how I was relating to the world with it. How I could make the world relate to me with it. I had always regarded Tim Leary as half a charlatan, Allen Ginsberg as a quarter, and Byron as a smidgin or two. My heros were Shelley, Kerouac, Miles Davis and Keats. Latterly I see reflections of Hunter Thomson and Blake in the disturbed mirror. In the light of these admissions, it may not be too difficult to see where the major work on Lifemask, ‘The Lords Prayer’ is coming from. All that would be needed perhaps would be to be given the appropriate stimuli at the appropriate time of day. The song catalogues spontaneous interpretations of how we are inter-acting with the planet. It was never aimed at mass market and is just a poem for friends and kindred spirits. The poem was inspired by a collage of Geronimo in an eighteenth century English landscape drawing given to me by my friend, artist James Edgar, whilst I was in the mind altering substances period of my life. Jimmy Page plays throughout. The rest of the album is more conventional in structure, with two songs that are still regularly featured in my live set list. As a live song Highway Blues is a different song now than the song David Bowie once tried to record. And ‘South Africa’ is a dream come true. A love song to calm the fears and wash away the horror and stain of apartheid. Some of the songs comprised the soundtrack for the movie ‘Made’ which was on general release at the time. I co-starred with Carol White. There was a bath scene in which everyone got to see my bum. Unfortunately the film is no longer available, but I’m sure that there are some long memories out there able to recall other bum excursions.
The cover according to Aubrey Powell was not very exciting, mostly driven by what Roy Harper wanted. In this case, a photograph of his face in plaster of Paris, a take on the title, it was photographed against a white background and then airbrushed to remove the joins. The album came in a gimmick sleeve with the cover opening in the centre of the sleeve.
Cover Location: Hipgnosis Studio, London, UK
Who Did What: Cover Design – Hipgnosis/R. Harper. Photography – S. Thorgerson
Label: Harvest SHVL 808(UK)
Source: Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art, The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue: Aubrey Powell
Tracklist
| Side One Highway Blues All Ireland Little Lady Bank Of The Dead South Africa |
Side Two The Lord’s Prayer |
Credits
Roy Harper – Guitar, Synthesizer, Bass, Harmonica, Bells, and Vocals
Jimmy Page – Guitar on “Bank Of The Dead” and “The Lord’s Prayer”
Laurie Allan – Drums on “Highway Blues”
Steve Broughton – Bongos on “The Lord’s Prayer”
Tony Carr – Bongos on “The Lord’s Prayer” and drums on “Bank Of The Dead”
Brian Davison – Drums on “The Lord’s Prayer”
Brian Odgers – Bass on “Bank Of The Dead” and “The Lord’s Prayer”
Ray Warleigh – Flute on “The Lord’s Prayer”
John Leckie – Sound Engineer
Phil McDonald – Sound Engineer
Nick Webb – Sound Engineer
Peter Jenner – Producer
