Friday, November 29, 2024

Quintessence of Old Wave (1 of ??)


Who knew Roy Harper took a turn at acting? Playing a young rising musician in what the director admits was "a mess".

This film / trailer gets extra Quintessence of Old Wave points on account of actually featuring Whispering Bob Harris of Old Grey Whistle Test renown in it - presumably playing himself more or less as Harper plays himself more or less.

Amazing how many movies there are out there that one has never ever heard of - big budget efforts too. I guess the miss to hit ratio in the motion picture game is as poor as in the music industry. And unlike with records, they don't stick around in solid form, circulating in second-hand record shops and junkshops and car boot sales and charity shops. There must still be many many films that never made it to DVD. 

Now there is a Roy-in-the-bath scene in this trailer, which reminded me that while he's one of my favorite singers, I'd rather he hadn't taken his kit off at every opportunity



Was Harper in fact some kind of sex symbol? The Harvest marketing department certainly seemed to think so. And presumably Roy did as well






































"Flashes", "flashing" - geddit?
















Lost the beard in the '80s, kept the hair




Watch out Sex Pistols, how about this for EMI shareholders-upsetting controv? This is 1977 and whatever the album (Bullinamingvase?) that Roy did that year

Originally the album contained the song "Watford Gap" which contained somewhat disparaging lyrics concerning the Watford Gap service station, a motorway service area situated between junctions 16 and 17 of the M1 motorway, near Watford Gap, in Northamptonshire, England.

Just about a mile from where the motorways all merge

You can view the national edifice, a monumental splurge

It's the lonesome traveller's rotgut or bacteria's revenge

The great plastic spectacular descendant of Stonehenge

And the people come to worship on their death-defying wheels

Fancy-dressed as shovels for their death-defying meals

It's the Watford Gap, Watford Gap

A plate of grease and a load of crap

Harper claimed the food was "junk, absolute junk. I tried to get the media food commentators of the day interested, but none of them would help me because they were all kind of bought off in some way, they were in the pockets of the corporations. I got a reply from Bernard Levin – he agreed with me but wouldn't go public about it".

Subsequent pressings omitted the song at the behest of an EMI board member who was (also) a non-executive director of Blue Boar (the owners of the service station). Under duress, Harper replaced the controversial track with "Breakfast With You", a song he himself allegedly described as "pap".[citation needed] In 1996, "Watford Gap" was finally restored to the re-issued CD, with "Breakfast With You" now the closing track.


Controversy of another and more unsavory type stirred - retrospectively, not amazingly at the time (they were different times)  by the song "Forbidden Fruit". At the time, Harper claimed the song was just a fantasy, one he shared with Lewis Carroll...  

C.f. his mates Jimmy Page and Johnny Peel

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 This is pretty amazing - studio songscapery that takes the peaks of Stormcock to a whole other dimension


This is his "Starsailor" I guess


3 comments:

  1. Stormcock is such an elemental album, a lot less stormy than Starsailor, kind of the calm before the storm, and the mistle thrush singing in defiance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Was it a sex symbol move? Isn't it more in line with Two Virgins?

    Adam Clayton was nude on the back cover of Achtung Baby, and I've never heard anyone refer to him as a sex symbol. And in terms of non-sexualised nudity, there's technically Nevermind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes I guess it could be a Two Virgins move - corollary of him as soul-bared emotional nudist, singer-songwriter confessional authenticist

      Then again the first example of Harper starkers is the album Valentine which is an album of love songs (whereas his normal mode is diatribe and denunciation - "I Hate the White Man" etc)

      Just noticed the little slogan at the bottom of the ad for Valentine - "music to droop your drawers to"

      It wouldn't be that surprising if he had been a sex symbol - the Old Wave idea of male pulchritude was quite different

      In one class I do, I contrast the look of the singer in the Climax Blues Band with Paul Simenon to show how in just a year, ideas of male 'hot' completely switched around from Old Wave to New Wave
      https://youtu.be/FRVSSwJYqh0?si=lDmavIRl_d6U2Vxu

      Delete

Quintessence(s) of Old Wave (4 of ??)

  There can surely be none-more-Old-Wave than this clip of Lindisfarne doing "Fog On The Tyne" on the Old Grey Whistle Test . Sc...