Roy Harper

Record Review: “Gather in the Mushrooms” is music of innocence and rare beauty

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This new edition of “Gather In The Mushrooms” contains the cream of both long-deleted compilations with a few additions – Roy Harper, Fotheringay – that weren’t available to Sanctuary at the time.

Though they aren’t traditional, these songs have an authenticity of their own, an autumnal atmosphere and a naivety which proved influential in the 00s neo-folk boom (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Alasdair Roberts, Tuung et al) but impossible to replicate. For many of these acts at the end of the 60s, folk music and the hippy world that surrounded them was a way of life, a way of opting out from the Vietnam war, Angry Brigade and three-day-week early 70s. Anne Briggs lived in a caravan in Suffolk, Shelagh McDonald lived in a tent, Vashti Bunyan eschewed electricity; they weren’t part-timers.

Gather In The Mushrooms
Gather In The Mushrooms

Listening to “Gather In The Mushrooms”, we are transported to a time when no one used the term post-modernist. It may not have resonated with dyed-in-the wool political folkies, but over five decades later this music sounds very evocative of an England of yore – not necessarily one of poachers and pedlars, but one of long-haired youths in tie-dye T-shirts, bikers and hippies, acoustic guitars played in white stone cottages.

Groups such as Midwinter and Oberon made primitive, privately recorded folk albums; today they sound as distant and mystical as the field recordings of Alan Lomax. The sincerity and folk knowledge of a group like Forest becomes irrelevant once you hear something as eerie and evocative as ‘Graveyard’. Home-made, homely, warm as soup or chilling as a hoar frost, this is music of innocence and rare beauty.

TRACKS:

  1. CORN RIGS – Magnet & Paul Giovanni
  2. MORNING WAY – Trader Horne
  3. NOTTANUM TOWN – Oberon
  4. GRAVEYARD – Forest
  5. THE SKATER – Midwinter
  6. WINTER WINDS – Fotheringay
  7. LORD AND MASTER – Heron
  8. FLY HIGH – Bridget St John
  9. SHEEP SEASON – Mellow Candle
  10. THE BELLS OF DUNWICH – Stone Angel (LP Bonus Track)
  11. THE SEAGULLS SCREAM – Christine Quayle
  12. FOREST AND THE SHORE – Keith Christmas
  13. ROSEMARY HILL – Fresh Maggots
  14. FINE HORSEMAN – Anne Briggs
  15. THE WEREWOLF – Barry Dransfield
  16. ANOTHER DAY – Roy Harper
  17. WINDOW OVER THE BAY – Vashti Bunyan
  18. ELEVEN WILLOWS – C.O.B. (Clive’s Original Band)
  19. THE HERALD – Comus

Source: gather in the mushrooms: the british folk underground 1969-1975 – various artists (compiled by bob stanley) (2025 reissue) – resident

Roy Harper: “It was his time but the boat just sailed away”

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In 1971 revolutionary singer-songwriter Roy Harper was about to go deep into the world of concept rock – but his four-track opus got buried by his label. In 2011 Prog found out why.

By Rob Hughes

There are many ways to describe Roy Harper, but ‘conventional’ has never been one of them. He emerged from London’s boho folk circuit of the 60s as a singer-songwriter of alarming intensity, motored by a mistrust of authority and an inalienable belief in everyone’s basic right to individual freedom. While other folkies were protesting the Vietnam War, Harper was railing against deeper societal ills. But then he was never really a folkie in any traditional sense.

Shaped by a traumatic early life – a fanatically religious stepmother, homelessness, prison, a spell in a mental institution – his music avoided the easy route too. Harper’s early albums were hallucinogenic things that skittered between poetry, revox-blues and psychedelia, as much prone to spliffed-up lunacy as they were to chilling autobiography and 17-minute songs about Patrick McGoohan. His underground status as a countercultural hero was finally seeping upwards by 1970, when his friendship with Led Zeppelin led to the touching tribute Hats Off To (Roy) Harper, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III that October.

He was by then managed by Peter Jenner, onetime custodian of Pink Floyd (who themselves would later invite Harper to sing Have A Cigar on the multi-platinum Wish You Were Here). Jenner had produced Harper’s previous opus, 1970’s wonderful Flat Baroque And Berserk, at Abbey Road. With the same studio again available, and a searing new set of compositions, Harper began making Stormcock. For once in his five-year recording career, he was able to fully focus on the job at hand.

The combined studio time of his first three albums – from 1966’s The Sophisticated Beggar to 1969’s Folkjokeopus – had been a week. “Flat Baroque And Berserk was where I was spreading wings and finding out exactly what could be done,” Harper tells Prog. “But then I saw a different light at the end of that record. I felt the time was right for me to do what I really wanted to, which was Stormcock.”

Adds Jenner, who again produced the album: “The Floyd were making things like Atom Heart Mother and Meddle; Zeppelin were making long tracks and The Who were doing Tommy. The spirit of the times was concept rock. Suddenly, in terms of songwriting, you weren’t restricted to three minutes or what was acceptable for radio.”

Stormcock was a masterpiece. Comprising just four songs, most featuring only Harper and his dizzying skill on acoustic and 12-string guitar, it was emotionally fierce and highly inventive. There were savage attacks on war, the judicial system, rock critics and religious dogma – among other things – alongside an anguished plea to save the planet. And, trading as S. Flavius Mercurius, Jimmy Page provided flashing lead guitar on the 12-and-a-half-minute The Same Old Rock. It remains Harper’s own personal highlight of Stormcock.

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