The Stormcock Community

The 6-CD "BBC Tapes" collection has been re-issued with new artwork. I think that some of these recordings have been out of print for a while. If you're not familiar with them, they are all taken from various BBC sessions and concerts over the years and cover a range of material from early pieces (including a great live "Hells Angels") through full band material from "HQ" to some great duo stuff with Andy Roberts. Most of the material is of studio quality though there are a few tracks taken "off air" with the subsequent radio artifacts you'd expect.

It's a very satisfying set, and one that I rediscovered lately having not listened to any of it for a couple of years.

You can order it directly from Roy's web site and get the full set for £45, though you can also buy the individual CDs for £9 each. If you do the maths you'll see it makes sense to go for the set.

The Good News: Roy has been invited by Joanna Newson to perform a 45 minute set to support her show at the Albert Hall (London) on September 28th.

The Bad News: It's already sold out.

http://www.royharper.co.uk/shop/display_page.php?page=news for the direct info, and http://www.dragcity.com/bands/newsom.html to find out more about Joanna.

Hello, as you will notice I've done some updates to the site:

• I'm trying out a new visual theme that's a little less bland than the previous one
• I've upgraded the site framework software to Drupal 5.2 for some bug and security fixes
• I've installed a brand new forum. You can reach it from either the forum link on the orange bar at the top or the "View the Forum" link on the left under "Forum Activity". I was unable to transfer across all the old forum posts, but they still exist at http://www.stormcock.net/forum. I think the new forum is a big step forward. It is meant to synchronise with your main site account so you shouldn't need to create a seperate forum account.

Please let me know of any problems.

NB: You may need to Log out then back into the site to make your account work with the new forums.

Hi All,

We got back home last night from a wonderful week in Ireland. Thursday was "the last gig" as Roy put it. Only one word for it really: spellbinding. Again I didn't make out a complete set list but it included:

Sophisticated Beggar, Short and Sweet, Man in the Moon, Pan, Candide, Hors D'Oeuvres, Same Old Rock, One Man Rock'n'Roll Band, Me and My Woman, Don't you Grieve, 12 Hours of Sunset

The Stormcock suite was just bliss. I still believe this was the pinnacle of Roy's lyrical and musical endeavours; that sounds a bit off given the incredible body of work that followed it, and I certainly would never want to be without most of the following albums, but those four songs are 40 or so minutes of perfection and it was glorious to hear them live.

From talking to Roy later I found that he had in fact tuned his guitars up a couple of frets from the usual place, and was determined to give the gig his all, since it was the last (for a while if not for ever). Well, it paid off - standing ovations, smiling faces, and sad faces (both at the same time) all showed that.

I'd just like to state for the record that I would be happy to buy a raw unmixed soundboard copy of this gig from Roy/Tracy should they decide to make this available, at practically any price... The petition starts here! Actually in all seriousness I am interested to see how many people would be interested in that sort of raw concert recording made available officially; I'm putting a poll up on http://www.stormcock.net for fun. I have no idea whether this is planned or even possible, I just keep thinking how I'd love to see it happen.

I have uploaded a bucketload of photos to flickr.

I met a lot of wonderful people in the last week; many I already knew, but many became friends for the first time. Let's hope we get the chance to do this again sometime.

Love

Paul.

Paul G (aka Furiousblanket) kindly sent through an MP3 of an interview on Irish Radio that Roy did in 2004. It includes live performances of Green Man and Cricketer, some interesting anecdotes, and is worth a listen.

Here's a mailing from Tracy Harper, posted here with kind permission.

Hello All,

We're home from the tour now and finally getting back into the swing of things here. A big THANK YOU to all of you in the UK and Ireland who came out to see Roy and Matt on the road. It really was a great tour. The last live dates for a good while will happen in July here in Ireland. More about that below.

With many thanks to Paula for making this available to us, here's an MP3 of Nick's interview on Mojo radio recently. It's fairly low bitrate, and there's the odd glitch, but that doesn't matter for the spoken interview bits.

Click here

Including a Scottish tour in August AND the November tour!  wheeeee!

www.harperspace.com/nick-harper-tour.html

Nick was on Channel M tv Wednesday, June 6 on The City Centre Social.

Here is a low resolution capture of the broadcast, with kind permission of "dim" over at the www.harperspace.com forums. WMV format only I'm afraid, so it's a bit Microsoft-centric.

Nick on the telly