In part 8 of this article series we focus on three fantastic singers and musicians who released wonderful albums in 1970 with the same label, Harvest Records. Unlike some of the groups we reviewed in the previous three parts of this series, all three artists here were able to sustain long careers, producing many great albums. We start this review with a singer who by his own admission was always on the fringe of the folk scene.
“I was never really a bona fide member of the folk scene. I was too much of a modernist, really. Just too modern for what was going on in the folk clubs. I wanted to modernize music, but more than that to completely modernize people’s attitudes towards life in general. I was involved in trying to bring meat to the folk music, which is a big mistake anyway.” The speaker is Roy Harper, who in 1970 released his most successful album, Flat Baroque and Berserk. It is his only album to make the top 20 in the albums chart, topping at… #20.
After three albums recorded haphazardly with most songs completed in a single take, Harper signed with EMI’s sublabel Harvest Records. The benefit was an opportunity to record at one of the most celebrated studios in the UK – Abbey Road. He recalled the experience: “I’d suddenly come from second-class studios to Abbey Road, the best studio in the world. I was in Studio 3 to start with, and after that it alternated between Studio 3 and Studio 2. I remember seeing the odd Beatle now and again, so I think I got to hear a few of their sessions while I was recording.”
The album features the contributions of several excellent musicians. First is Tony Visconti, who plays recorder on the song Tom Tiddlers Ground. He talked about the recording session: “Unbeknownst to me the tape recorder was constantly running as Harper and I sat in the cavernous Studio 1 at Abbey Road (the symphonic studio). We sat in the dark but for one floor lamp to illuminate us and Roy engaged me in a conversation, part of which can be heard at the beginning of the song; my Brooklyn accent (with a hint of British vowels) was a source of fascination to Roy.”
Other contributors were classical harpist Skaila Kanga who played on a few Elton John albums during that period and the great arranger David Bedford on his first appearance of many on a Roy Harper album. Harper also gets help on Hell’s Angels, the rockiest song on the album. Harper wrote on the album sleeve: “I was accompanied by three very dear friends whose names I cannot give you because they belong to another label. Enough to say that they turned me on to rock and I turned them on to the Karelia.” The musicians were Keith Emerson, Lee Jackson and Brian Davison, otherwise known as The Nice and the reference is to The Karelia Suite, composed by Jean Sibelius. A month after the recording with Roy Harper, The Nice recorded the album Five Bridges on which they performed Intermezzo ‘Karelia Suite’.
The standout track on the album is I Hate the White Man, about which Harper said fifty years later in 2020, “I Hate the White Man was a song that wrote itself in 1968. To cut a long story short, I’d been involved in the tumult of that year.” Harper emoted feelings he had from a young age to global injustices around the world: “I guess that I always felt as a young person that I was discriminated against, because I had a step mother a Jehovah’s Witness who could not believe that I could not believe in that kind of a religion. I’ve gone through racial abuse. I was spat on twice in France in 1959 for having blue eyes and blonde hair. I was threatened with a knife in New York in 1969 for being English, by an Irish American ‘patriot’. I had to stand my ground. He had to be pulled away. In San Antonio, Texas, where I sang ‘I Hate the White Man’ on the radio in 1969, they received a phone call which was handed to me. It was a guy who said, ‘Are you Roy Harper?’ I answered him in the affirmative. Then he asked me whether I’d written the song. Again I said ‘yes’, to which he said, ‘Man, I’ve got a gun here.. I’m gonna come down there an’ put you out your misery’… in a Texan drawl.”
The song made quite an impact on its release, as it does today for younger listeners. “Even the young establishment was sort of wide-eyed and thinking ‘Isn’t that going too far?’”, Harper remembers. Still, now as then, he feels completely justified in writing its in-your-face lyrics: Persistent racism in the US, apartheid in South Africa and the Australian treatment of its aboriginal peoples. “It was appalling, just appalling. And something had to be said. It was perhaps an extreme song. It doesn’t seem like that to me anymore. It seems completely normal,” he says.
My favorite on this album is very different in its sentiment, one of Harper’s most loved love songs. Over the years Another Day received a number of great covers. Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel performed the song on Kate Bush’s Xmas TV Special in 1979. Perhaps the best interpretation was by Elizabeth Fraser on the first This Mortal Coil album It’ll End in Tears from 1984. Harper’s original version gets a wonderful orchestral arrangement by David Bedford, marking the beginning of a long term collaboration between the two musicians that continued through other albums Harper released on Harvest Records in the 1970s.
Roy harper said of the interesting front cover photograph: “Somebody had a friend who had a flat what looked Indian and didn’t we want to ‘get up there with the Maharishi and Cynthia’”. The album was produced by Peter Jenner, who later commented that his role as producer was “’vibemaster’, trying to keep everyone happy and to keep it moving. As Harper said ‘Roll us another one Pete!’”. Roy Harper added in the liner notes: “I don’t want to philosophize and all that. All I’d really like to say is that I hope we can manage to have plenty of conflict but no war and hope that we can pass it on to our children.”
Melody Maker wrote in July 1970: “Roy Harper is a sort of Gerald Scarfe of music. Like the cartoonist, what he does isn’t always pretty, it isn’t always enjoyable, but by God his work is impossible to ignore.” Well said.
From one outsider of the British folk scene to another. Michael Chapman was also on Harvest Records’ roster and one of the first to release an album on the label back in July 1969, his debut Rainmaker. In March 1970 Chapman followed up with one of his best albums, Fully Qualified Survivor. The same month he told Melody Maker: “I want to get out of folk clubs right away. I’ve only been on the folk scene because it was the only place you could play with an acoustic guitar. I don’t know anything about folk music – it bores me to tears. What I’m doing’s got f*** all to do with folk music.”
Chapman is one of the best acoustic guitar players to come out of the mid-1960s London scene, but he preferred to call himself an acoustic rock and roller. After playing solo gigs for over three years, he realized the limitations of a single musician on stage: “I don’t want to be considered an acoustic guitar freak. I always wanted to play as much guitar at once as the jazz men did with the organ for instance. But it’s very difficult to get it going in three parts, with bass drones, chords, and other figures thrown in.”
The solution – add a full band. And quite a group he added on his second album on Harvest: session drummer Barry Morgan, bass player Rick Kemp, later with Steeleye Span, and a new guitar talent. Chapman recalls: “The record company said we’ve got you some really great London guitar players and I said ‘sack ‘em I’ve got a gardener in Hull who can just take e’em all to the cleaners’.” That was Mick Ronson, soon to join David Bowie and his backup band Hype. That band would morph into The Spiders from Mars and the rest is history.
Of note here is the participation of Paul Buckmaster, a great orchestral arranger in popular music. In 1970 Buckmaster lent not only his arranging skills but also his excellent abilities as instrumentalist to Fully Qualified Survivor. Michael Chapman recalls the opening track Aviator: “Paul Buckmaster did the string arrangements, I think there was an eleven piece string section, I thought wow this is amazing on my record, all these beautiful strings, and Paul played cello on that Aviator track along with a guy called Johnny van Derek who was a violinist of some note, he played lead violin in one of the big London orchestras and he was a master musician who loved to play jazz and loved to play free as well.”
The album is one of Chapman’s favorites. He later said “I was well pleased with it, still am. It seemed to have a life of its own from the off.”
We close with one of my favorite 1970 albums – ‘Love, Death and the Lady’ by sisters Shirley and Dolly Collins. The previous year the two sisters released the magnificent album Anthems in Eden, and on the strength of that album Harvest Records asked them to record a second LP in 1970. Following the same formula as the previous album, the recording session included musicians from the early classical music crowd including the legendary Christopher Hogwood on harpsichord. Shirley Collins: “It’s a rather dark and austere album, made at a time I was breaking up with John, and the mood reflects that.” John is Austin John Marshall, who produced Shirley Collins’ albums The Sweet Primeroses, Anthems in Eden and this album here, Love, Death & The Lady. Working on an album produced by a partner as the relationship was coming to an end was not an easy experience, but the presence of a talented sister helped: “The unravelling of the marriage was present all the time, although I was grateful to John for producing a good album and art work. This time, the mood was bleak, Dolly and I photographed in black cloaks, with very serious, severe expressions. Dolly’s arrangements were more spare, stark often, fitting the mood of the songs.”
Shirley Collins remembers the recording sessions: “It was wonderful to have had that freedom to record for a major label, even though by today’s standards it was speedily done. Peter Bellamy in offering criticism for the albums said they sounded like they were done in one take. Well, he should have known as well anyone that in those days that was often all you got!”
The album is full of somber murder ballads and all manners of death. Shirley Collins: “You can sing about murders and suicides and revenge and Lord knows what, and it’s all acceptable. In fact, I find those songs particularly fascinating because they own up to what human beings are.”
The opening song is ‘Death and The Lady’, one of the oldest traditional songs Shirley Collins selected to perform on the album. It goes back centuries, perhaps from the Black Death Plague that killed close to 50% of Europe’s 14th century population. Collins said of the song: “It puts me in mind of the gripping scene in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, where a knight, newly returned from the Crusades, plays a long game of chess with Death on a lonely Scandinavian seashore. So many songs open with the words ‘As I walked out one morn in May’ that it is like the device ‘once upon a time’ that prefaces many fairy tales. On this walk you might encounter a sweetheart or a seducer, a soldier returning from fighting abroad for seven long and weary years, or serving on board ship. You might encounter the Devil, who you could outwit, or you might meet Death, who you couldn’t.”
Dolly Collins commented on her arrangements: “Things like Death and the Lady are pretty modern-sounding chords. Certainly not a traditional selection of chords for that song., that’s for sure. It wasn’t a deliberate policy to do something different. It was just because I was trying things out, pushing ahead, experimenting all the time.”
There are many wonderful songs on this album, including Polly on the Shore and Geordie, both of them also included in another 1970 album, On the Shore by Trees, reviewed in part 6 of this article series. Another favorite is ‘The Plains of Waterloo’, dating from the Napoleonic Wars. Collins: “True lovers eventually re-united after being tested for their fidelity – a broken token song. Dolly’s arrangement was steady, stately, beautiful. There are a couple of verses where the story moves to the battlefield, and John suggested that we use percussion there. I wasn’t keen at first, drums meant jazz, but agreed to give it a go, and it became a most telling moment, powerful and right, and so subtle in Terry Cox’s hands.”
Musicians on the album:
Shirley Collins – vocals
Christopher Hogwood – harpsichord
Alan Lumsden – sackbut
Adam Skeaping – bass viol, violone
Rod Skeaping – bass viol
Eleanor Sloan – rebec
John Fordham – recorder
Dolly Collins – flute, organ, piano
Terry Cox – percussion
Peter Wood – concertina
Uncredited male chorus includes John Fordham and Royston Wood
Sources:
Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy
All In The Downs: Reflections On Life, Landscape And Song, by Shirley Collins