Roy Harper
Album: Songs Of Love And Loss
Label: Salvo
Tracks: 23
Website: http://www.royharper.co.uk

At the age of 70, Roy's just been presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. And hurrah - so well deserved too… But his reputation has always tended to be that of something of an iconoclast, a maverick specialising in bitter political commentary of often epic proportions - which has rather overshadowed the surprising statistic, revealed back in 2003 when Roy was organising a book of lyrics (The Passions Of Great Fortune), that (at that point in time even) close on 40% of the songs he'd written over the preceding years could be categorised as love-related. Out of that realisation grew the idea to release a couple of collections of love-songs and laments; and at long last, after a decade of delays and false starts, this double-disc set (released over a year ago, but strangely, not yet reviewed in these pages) has fulfilled that promise.

Drawing on Roy's back-catalogue up to 1992's Death Or Glory?, with the majority of his album releases prior to that represented, the two volumes of Songs Of Love And Loss deliver a plausible sequence of songs that, in Roy's own words, "gathers a dynamic mix of them together in just their own context". It was evidently a labour of love in the quite literal double-meaning sense too, and proves a rewarding experience for the listener who already knows Roy's output, perhaps also enabling him/her to discover new perspectives along the way. It also acts as a very positive introduction to Roy's work for the uninitiated who might hitherto have been turned away by the aforementioned reputation issue. Roy has also provided succinct (and valuable) one-sentence-or-so commentaries on the songs.

As can be gleaned from elsewhere within the liner notes, all tracks have been digitally remastered, and the sound quality is consistent - although the nature of the musical settings varies from simple vox-and-guitar through to David Bedford's sumptuous string arrangements on the tracks sourced from 1974's Valentine (one of Roy's best-selling albums). The disc-divide doesn't neatly observe the love/loss thematic distinction, since the two are inevitably interwoven, but there's a loose chronology in that the tracks from Roy's Sophisticated Beggar debut and Come Out Fighting Ghenghis Smith are succeeded in turn by selections from Flat Baroque And Berserk, Lifemask and Valentine. Other albums represented, if not as extensively, include Bullinamingvase, HQ, Jugula, Once and Unknown Soldier.

So, as an intelligently compiled overview of one important aspect of Roy's songwriting and performing career up to the mid-90s, Songs Of Love And Loss is very persuasive (and those who intend to fill in the gaps will be pleased to learn of Roy's intention that his complete catalogue will be made available in digital download format through his website).

David Kidman