Colin Harper: Writer On Music


Colin Harper graduated with a BA Hons in Modern History from Queen’s University Belfast in 1989. He became a professional feature writer and reviewer, on music and occasionally theatre, in April 1994 having endured a series of poorly-paid dead-end jobs. (He had contributed to various national and local publications for a year or two before this date.) He had nothing to lose - but cunningly ensured he got on the property ladder before leaving bankable employment. And, yes, that would be his key piece of advice to anyone thinking of a career in freelance writing…

During the mid ‘90s, Harper was lucky enough to be able to pursue his interests, to meet his heroes, and to consequently build up a modest profile as a writer, in several areas of music and largely in five particular publications. For the Irish News, a Belfast daily paper, he contributed more or less weekly features on unsigned local rock bands and pieces on visiting international artists; for Q and Mojo magazines he contributed monthly handfuls of CD reviews, mostly on current folk and acoustic music and progressive rock reissues and, in Mojo, occasional features; for The Independent, a UK national daily, he contributed fairly regular concert reviews, usually from shows in Belfast and Dublin, and occasional features, generally on folk and rock artists of a certain vintage; and for the Irish Times, a Dublin national daily, he contributed concert and theatre reviews, generally from Belfast, and the odd interview feature..

More sporadically, he contributed to Folk Roots, Record Collector and The Guitar Magazine, and had occasional pieces published in various other titles including Acoustic Guitar, The Living Tradition, The Sunday Tribune, The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. In addition, he compiled and/or annotated a sizeable number of CD reissues and compilations for labels including Windsong, Demon, Castle/Sanctuary, Hux, Snapper and others he‘s long forgotten.

Memorable interview subjects for newspaper or magazine features during this period include John McLaughlin, Peter Green, Jan Akkerman, Anne Briggs, Altan, Chris Smither, Andy Powell (Wishbone Ash), Ralph McTell, Roy Harper, David Gates (Bread), Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, Shaun Davey, Jimmie Rodgers, Leo Kottke, Arlo Guthrie, Clannad, David Gray, Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Davy Graham, Andy Irvine, Sean Keane, Martin Carthy, Gay Woods, Steve Tilston, Ashley Hutchings, Sharon Shannon, Jez Lowe, Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill, Paddy Keenan, Stockton’s Wing, Frances Black, Something Happens, Eleanor McEvoy, Paul Brady, Gary Moore and Colin Reid.

Enthusiastic about the perpetually under-dog-ish local music scene in Northern Ireland, he was the driving force behind two multi-artist live albums that document the era: Alive In Belfast: The Warehouse Sessions (2CD, 1995) and Live At The Belfast Empire (1996) - the former creating quite a stir at the time and having a certain historic cachet now in featuring early performances from traditional singer Cara Dillon and future Ivor Novello-winning songwriter Iain Archer.

In 1995, keeping his options open, he signed up for a two-year part-time postgraduate diploma course in Information Management - a librarianship qualification - at Queen’s University, graduating in 1997. Keeping fingers in more than one pie would be another piece of advice he’d suggest to would-be freelancers…

In 1997/98 he was arm-twisted into managing a comeback version of nationally successful Belfast ‘80s band The Adventures, but was happy to admit after a certain amount of ‘moving things forward’ that he really wasn’t ruthless enough for this kind of Machiavellian carry-on.

In 1998, on Bert Jansch’s suggestion, and providing a fair enough reason to end his Adventuring, he renewed his interest - originally dating from bursts of work done in the very early ‘90s, in periods of unemployment between those dead-end jobs - in writing a Bert Jansch biography, and secured a publishing deal with Bloomsbury. Personal arrangements - marriage to Heather in March 1999 and consequent equity from the sale of two houses and purchase of one - allowed him to dedicate roughly a year, spanning 1998-99, to the project. The result, Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival, was published in August 2000, with a launch event at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Harper was also the driving force behind the 2CD tribute album, People On The Highway: A Bert Jansch Encomium (Market Square Records, 2000), which featured many of Bert’s peers whom he had interviewed for the book. Having previously played a small part in the making of Acoustic Routes, Jan Leman’s 1992 BBC documentary of Jansch and his peers, Harper was substantially involved as an advisor and interviewee in Matt Quinn’s independently made Jansch documentary Dreamweaver - screened on Channel 4 in 2000, and again featuring contributions from many of those interviewed for the book.

Seeing the Jansch biography as his ‘magnum opus’, and the product of much more time and intensity of effort than would be financially or personally viable to repeat, he began to actively pursue employment as a librarian. In September 2001, after a period of part-time voluntary work at Belfast’s venerable subscription-based Linen Hall Library, he accepted a branch library job with the local education board. A ‘character building’ experience, he was lucky enough to secure a library post at a Belfast music college in March 2003, which remains - in spite of extreme financial pressures on the college from without - a very happy situation.

Librarian bliss notwithstanding, Harper continued to be involved in musical projects and in writing: journalism (generally in Mojo and Record Collector), CD reissues/compilations and books.

In 2003, North Down Borough Council published Seaside Rock, his affectionate monograph on pop music in the North Down area of Northern Ireland, particularly focused on the beat music boom in the ‘60s - commissioned and written in early 2001..

In October 2004 the Collins Press published Irish Folk, Trad & Blues: A Secret History - essentially a ‘patchwork narrative’, substantially illustrated, on selected pioneers of Irish music in the rock era, co-written with jazz and blues expert Trevor Hodgett and drawing together in one place much of the work on Irish music and musicians which each writer had had published in an array of newspapers and magazines over the previous number of years, alongside work done specifically for the book. The centrepiece of the book was a long essay on Sweeney’s Men, which derived out of a on/off project to work with legendary Irish musician Andy Irvine on an ’assisted autobiography’. It remains possible that more work may yet be done on this project.

Since escaping into music librarianship, Harper has been in the relatively secure financial position to be able to organise and guarantee two wildlife charity albums - The Wildlife Album (2004) and Live In Hope: The Wildlife Album 2 (2005) - each one released nationally via the good auspices of Market Square Records and internationally available via a dedicated website, with proceeds going to the WWF and the Ulster Wildlife Trust, and each featuring a range of local and international artists, with many of the tracks exclusive to the albums.

During 2005/2006 he was delighted to be involved in director Mike Connolly’s ground-breaking three-part BBC4 series Folk Britannia, the first two parts of which act as a visual companion piece to Dazzling Stranger which was itself republished in 2006 on Bloomsbury as before, with a new cover, full discography and other additional material.

Recent CD projects for Sanctuary Records have included deluxe editions of the first five Atomic Rooster albums (1970-73), Andy Roberts’ Just For The Record: The Solo Anthology 1969-76 (Sanctuary, 2005) - compiled and annotated by Harper in very close co-operation with the artist - and The Time Has Come: 1967-73, a widely acclaimed 4CD Pentangle box set, released in early 2007. Other 2007 reissue projects have included Anne Briggs The Time Has Come through SonyBMG, Wizz Jones’ Lucky The Man through Hux and the Vincent Crane anthology Close Your Eyes through Sanctuary, with the aopproval of Vincent’s widow Jean.

One humbling, and quite rarified, bi-product of Harper’s otherwise unremarkable career in writing about music was revealed at the February 2006 launch, in Dublin, of ex-Mellow Candle singer Alison O’Donnell’s duo album with Isabel Ni Chuireain, Mise Agus Ise (Osmosis, 2006) - which includes a sleevenote from Harper. Though not on the album, O’Donnell debuted a new song that night entitled ‘Dated But Still Lovely’ - a song based entirely on a phrase from a Harper review of a Mellow Candle album, The Virgin Prophet, several years previous. A singular honour indeed!

Harper essentially retired from writing about music in June 2007, though the very occasional piece or CD note may yet sneak out. He has no plans to write any more books (though he said the same thing two books ago) and likes the idea of just reading the things in his back garden in between bouts of cycling in the country.


Colin Harper: Closet Musician


The precedents for people who write about music being involved in actually writing (or worse still, performing) music are not illustrious, but Harper has nevertheless enjoyed a determinedly coy (for that very reason) sideline in pottering about with music since learning guitar - in a self-taught, idiosyncratic fashion - at school in the early ‘80s.

A cassette album collection of mostly original songs and instrumental pieces, titled Nothing Is Easy and featuring a vast number of willing helpers from the local music scene, collectively credited to ‘The Legends Of Tomorrow‘, was recorded during 1995-96, launched with a one-off, invites-only performance at Belfast’s Rotterdam Bar and circulated to friends and contributing musicians in a limited edition of 100 copies. It wasn’t easy, but it was liberating..

One of his songs, ‘Dear Anne’, performed by a one-off live version of The Legends, appeared on Live At The Belfast Empire (1996), while his setting of a part of ‘Psalm 86’ - written in the early ‘80s - was recorded by local rock stars Peter Wilson (aka Duke Special) and Brian Houston for a contemporary gospel cassette album released locally circa 1998.

Harper revived the Legends moniker for a cover of the Jansch-written title track, fronted by singer Janet Holmes, on the Bert Jansch tribute album People On The Highway: A Bert Jansch Encomium (Market Square Records, 2000). Subsequently, he joined Janet and other local musicians involved in the track in contributing additional parts to a handful of guitar/vocal recordings sent over by London-based blues icon Duffy Power, for a now complete but as-yet unreleased album, True.

From 2001, Harper has been involved in promoting Janet Holmes as a solo artist, co-funding and co-producing a nationally released album, The Road To The West (Market Square Records, 2004). Janet has featured substantially on local radio and TV, gigging whenever the opportunity has presented itself. Recordings for a second album began in 2005.

Several Harper compositions appeared in 2004 on both Janet’s album The Road To The West and charity project The Wildlife Album. Janet’s album included reworkings of three songs from the multi-tracks of the Nothing Is Easy sessions (‘Letting Go’, ‘When You Needed’ and ‘The Wind And The Rain’) plus an entirely new recording of the Harper/Archer/Monro co-write from that period, ‘Be The One’, and one new composition, ’The Fields Of July’ - written during a stay at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan.
The Wildlife Album included three pieces resurrected in their original form from Nothing Is Easy (‘My Heart Is Broken’, ‘Be The One’ and ‘The Master Of Silence: Slight Return’), plus one piece from that period substantially added to and remixed (‘The Master Of Silence: Trip To Ennis’) and two new pieces - the Bert Jansch duet ‘Blues For A Green Earth’ and the string quartet ‘Passing Away: For The Dodo & The Great Auk‘.

Having invited her to record a contribution to The Wildlife Album in 2004, Harper became involved the following year in helping semi-legendary local singer Tina McSherry, formerly of traditional group Tamalin, get back into songwriting, performing and recording after a long absence. Unintentionally, this has led to him - having wisely given up any aspirations as a performing musician after a brief summer of hanging out at folk festivals in 1990 (notwithstanding occasional forays into recording studios thereafter) - into becoming guitarist in a new McSherry led quartet.

In 2005, another local singer, Caroline Orr, asked a number of her friends and associates involved in music to write her a song for an album she intended to make with all proceeds going to the third world charities that benefit from her sister’s fair trade café, Common Grounds, in Belfast‘s University area.. Suffering writer’s block, Harper offered ‘Against The World’, a full-band, Who-esque outtake from the Janet Holmes album sessions. With her collaborator Jules Maxwell, Caroline recorded the song on her album Common Thread - dramatically rearranging it as a piano/viola accompanied ballad.

In fact… Harper entered Caroline‘s revelatory arrangement, alongside ‘When You Needed’ from the Janet Holmes album, into Irish broadcaster RTE’s search for a 2006 Ireland entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. He was both amused and yet gently encouraged to receive a letter congratulating him in both songs getting into ‘the final 85’ out of 1,337 entries.. Well, it’s certainly a failure but it’s better than total and utter rejection, isn’t it? Onwards and upwards!

But back in the real world… Harper asked his music college colleague Anita Mawhinney to transcribe Caroline’s piano/vocal arrangement for voice and string quartet, and it was performed in this fashion at a wildlife charity concert at Belfast bookshop No Alibis in March 2006, in a typically eclectic programme of music and author readings which included three pieces recreated from The Wildlife Album (‘Passing Away’ and ‘Bonjour Mon Couer’, with singer/violinist Denise Roden and other willing colleagues from the music college, and ‘Blues For A Green Earth’ with Harper and local guitar hero Ivan Muirhead and Roisin Gallagher on glockenspiel) and the live debut of the Tina McSherry ensemble.

Now that he’s retired from writing about music, Harper is enjoying a more active involvement in creating music at the moment, working towards a very limited edition ‘private pressing’ CD, for friends and the numerous musical friends involved (Tina McSherry, Janet Holmes, Caroline Orr, Ciaran Gribbin, Duke Special, Brian Houston and many more) of compositions spanning 1996-2007 as a bit of fun, while also aspiring to have a couple of very recent songs covered by name artists. Absolutely nothing is riding on it either way. So it’s harmless to dream, and probably a better use of time than buying lottery tickets.

Written in the third person by CH, April 2006; updated September 2007