24/12/13 – Roy Harper – Commune – The Old Grey Whistle Test – 1974

Video Of The Day

Roy Harper 1974 ish

Roy Harper in 1974 playing a beautifully relaxed version of Commune from Valentine released on Harvest records in the same year. The album featured Jimmy Page, Ronnie Lane and Keith Moon on the second track, Male Chauvinist Pig Blues. That’s a band, but it also had some of his most beautiful spacey sparse songs such as Twelve Hours Of Sunset. The album is not on Spotify or You Tube. So just go buy it anyway.

Here’s the lyrics:

I thought that I heard the sound of my name
And I looked back down behind me
And with hair like the ripened wheat she came
Sure as the west wind to find me

And just for a moment I wished my life
To see our friends all around us
And I turned to her but I held my breath
In the far Norwegian mountains

For there we stood two children of spring
As everything seemed to be gleaming
Her looking breathless, clean out of my mind
And me with my crazy dreaming

To think of my friends underneath the same roof
In one common destination
When all we do is remain aloof
Like we have no close relation

And love is my torment
And I’ll take when I can
But I’ll give in the moment
When you are my woman and I am your man

And I watched her makin’ her first daisy chain
As her nipples hung hard in suggestion
And naked, gnat-bitten we drifted the plain
In the hazy dessert of sensation

And we dreamt of all the loves we’d known
And we never thought of the sorrow
With forelocks wound on the primrose down
In the wood by the empty long barrow

Two silver greenflies to flicker the back
Dropping lush of the emerald springtime
To lust for a moment in love of another
As dust on a dragonfly’s wing.

And love is no torment
For we’ll give when we can
And we’ll live in the moment
When you are my woman and I am your man

And the black cap sings and the forest rings
The nettles tall all around me
With shafts of sun and moving things
And poems fast and slowly

And fantasies of luscious thirst
For new lust and fresh waters to seek it
Like diamonds set in realities
Of skies drawn back in secret

But somewhere out there with my heart in her care
And her prayers in the breezes that caught them
She sits like the earth as I fly to her arms
Like the showering yellows of Autumn

And love is no torment
For we’ll give when we can
And we’ll live for the moment
When she is my woman and I am her man

Tags:

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply