6. Roy HarperHQ
Roy was about the same time. The Old Grey Whistle Test was on later than Top Of The Pops, and you had to be a bit older to stay up late and get away with it. I got my first sighting of Jobriath on there. I don’t know if I saw a flash of Klaus Nomi on there too, and of course David doing ‘Queen Bitch’, Roxy doing ‘Ladytron’, and the New York Dolls was quite a moment for some people. It was via Genesis doing ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ from Selling England By The Pound, that I became interested slightly in that longer haired world. I didn’t go for Pink Floyd; I thought there was something not quite right about hippies, and you were either a hippie or not a hippie.
Somehow, I heard the track ‘Hallucinating Light’ by Roy Harper, and was amazed by the quality of his voice. And of course, he had Chris Spedding playing guitar – David Gilmour plays guitar on the album also – but Chris had a sort of slightly Roxy Music edge to him as well. It is just a great album. ‘The Game (Parts 1-5)’ is a brilliant song sequence and it just appealed to me, as a perfect artistic statement. None of my other friends got into it, it was almost a guilty pleasure, but there was nothing to be guilty about because it was just a great record. The track where he has the colliery band – ‘When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease’ – is beautiful. It’s hard not to shed a tear – it’s a lovely song. He also had connections with Led Zeppelin, who I wasn’t interested in at all, but a lot of people only know him because he sung on one of their tracks, but for me he was something outside of that.
