Roy Harper: what should have been a great gig was marred by a weird audience

Live in Totnes, June 1989

An unpleasant experience for me and friends, but most of all for Roy.

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I have been listening to and enjoying Roy’s music since about 1971 and seen him live umpteen times in pubs, clubs, theatres – and the Royal Festival Hall. He is a thread that runs through my entire exploration of music from the beginning to now. However, this particular gig in Totnes was not entirely enjoyable, not because of Roy, but rather the audience. Roy himself was clearly perplexed and said as much; I am paraphrasing but it was essentially along the lines of this is the most unpleasant gig I have played at.

For once I remembered to take my Canon camera with me for the short trip from Newton Abbot, hence the photographs here. I was living in London at the time (1975-2004) but visited home about six times a year. Harper would play at various venues in London two or three – or even more – times a year, and I hardly missed a gig, year on year. Some were better than others but nothing could prepare me for the gig back on my home turf in Devon. Which I was really looking forward to.

It was noisy, with almost all of the noise coming from the crowd. It was like there were twenty groups of roughly ten people each all sat in circles on a hard floor engaging in conversation. They seemed oblivious to the fact that someone was on stage with a guitar attempting to be heard over the din. They had paid to come to a Roy Harper gig, a rare enough event in Devon, but acted like they were at a Las Vegas cabaret joint – sans round tables and chairs – with a dull and utterly uninteresting opening act on stage. I’ve been to those Vegas joints and it is not easy for the artists when people are more interested in the colour of their cocktails, how good the entrees look and who is that man/woman at the next table?

No suits or sequins in Totnes, just bedraggled stoned-out hippies talking crap (probably) amongst themselves – and sod the man on stage with a guitar. I was embarrassed. My friends were embarrassed. What the hell must Harper think?

He was not unaware of the scene before him. The audience were not hostile – they were oblivious. I am not sure which is worse, although I suspect Roy had a view on that. He made it known that this was all rather unpleasant. At one point we feared he would just walk away and not come back but no, he persevered. I’d like to think that the few of us paying rapt attention to not just the songs but the (usually) engaging rap between songs helped him to carry on. He was playing for us, and sod the rest of them.

Anyway, Roy was good and I got my photographs, which incidentally did not see the light of day until Covid, which presented an opportunity to dig out and scan hundreds (thousands?) of old negatives. I’m quite pleased with them. And I now feel the urge to play my all-time favourite Harper song (at the moment; these things are strangely fluid) – Hallucinating Light. I like jazz, and this has a nice tinge to it, as well as stunning sound quality – LP of course!

In the photos below Harper looks sometimes baffled and exasperated but mostly focussed and engaged with the song. Photos taken on Canon EOS6 and scanned on Epson V850 Pro; reproduced here at reduced size.

As ever, images are cropped; click on a photo to enlarge and viewed at correct aspect ratio.