roy harper

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

Album & Cover
If you like your Roy Harper live then ‘Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion’ is a very good record. The boys from EMI, headed by John Leckie, turned up to gigs on a regular basis for about a year. They bustled away in the background with techno talk. Sometimes they were in the foreground, muttering and tittering. Eventually it was decided that enough was enough, and we resorted to the Abbey Road Studios for a week or two to find out what we’d got and to do something about it. Many hours of fun if not games ensued, sorting through a barrow load of tape that was full of good times.

This was a Roy Harper cover with minimal input from the Hipgnosis crew. It was Harper’s idea of him nude and cold not be convinced otherwise. The initial printing of the album cover caused a strike among female workers at the EMI factory in Hayes when shop stewards found the picture of a naked man in that week’s new releases. The naked man is Harper himself, wearing a pair of football socks in the colours of his favourite football team, Manchester City F.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashes_from_the_Archives_of_Oblivion

Cover Location: Hipgnosis Studio, London, UK
Who Did What: Cover Design – Hipgnosis/R. Harper. Photography – A. Powell
Label: Harvest SHDW 405(UK)
Source: Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art, The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue: Aubrey Powell

Tracklist

Credits
Engineer – John Leckie
Presenter [All Concerts Presented By] – Ian Tilbury
Producer – Peter Jenner
Written-By – Harper