‘Take me out…I want to see people and I want to see life…’
It was quite a trip he took us on.
Anyone who knew Dave Harper has at least one great story to recount – he had a record bag-full of adventures across a multi-coloured life & career from his days as press officer for Factory with New Order & the Mondays (before he passed this baton into the very safe hands of Jeff Barrett) to his passion for the Tour de France – many ups & downs, twists & turns. He was a classic yarn-spinner and could always knit one to entertain you over any long ride.
He could be daft as a brush and half as useful sometimes, but he was also a really warm-hearted, old-fashioned fella who spent later years looking after his dad as well as taking on a job as a carer, and being a very proud Grandpa, when not battling every sort of curveball nature threw at him in Spain.
I kept nagging him to write a book, even once got him as far as a list of scurrilous chapter headings, which I’ve been failing to find all week.
So instead, there’ll always be more than one definitive story of Mr H, this is just a little bit of mine.
We first met in the late 80s through my ex-flatmate James Brown who Harper had taken on many a daft press outing for the NME (& who can also spin a tale almost as well as Mr H).
H gave me my first proper job in music, three days of temp work which we managed to drag out to three months cos he seemed to like having me around, making tea, making up stories for press releases and being up for a road trip.
And we managed to keep dragging out those life skills for another 30-odd years, a friendship that would take us from Soho’s cafes to San Francisco’s Filmore and many points between.
A big chunk was spent as partners in a management company (with more than a touch of Broadway Danny Rose about it), and H always seeming to find good reasons to get out of the office.
Among our international excursions was a flight to Los Angeles for some vague reason, half an idea of getting into an early Coachella Festival, although H might have had other motives, and I was probably just cover.
We managed to bunk a lift in a van with Sigur Ros through the desert on their first visit to the USA, like a school trip with the Band that Fell to Earth, freaking the truckstop staff out with Icelandic requests for every fast food available. H was in his element.
Another year started with a trip to Tromso in the Arctic Circle, staying with the hospitable Rune & his family, maybe to see a local film festival but mainly to get a cable car up a mountain to be able to see where a major German battleship was sunk in a daring WWII raid (another of his passions, H always loved a bit of covert operations either in wartime or peacetime).
Face-freezing cold, as the sun was still a couple of fjords away, but we had a great time pinching lines from Heroes of Telemark and Where Eagles Dare.
We were treated to a massive meal of fresh cod liver and spuds, which stood us in good stead later in the bar where Rune was the DJ.
He’d kindly warned us that the locals had no words for excuse me so not to worry if a Viking suddenly pushed you out the way to get a drink. The boatload of fish oil & protein saw us through a long night of fun among locals partial to a bevvy and a late night snowy siesta.
We left just as the sun was coming up.
Chatting recently H reminded me of the ‘management training week’ we took ourselves off on in early September 2004 – a week post August bank holiday in a canal boat on the Kennet and Avon to Bath and beyond – probably the highlight of our sometimes ill-starred ‘professional partnership’.
In between the pastoral calm and collisions we meandered from pub to pub scheming how this time next year we’d have a number one album. Our collective memories recalled that we were only thwarted by getting the boat stuck on the Herculean lock gates that greeted us as we attempted to get back on the canal at dusk from a slightly psychedelic sunstroked trip down the River Avon, an Apocalypse Now moment as the lock filled and only part of the boat floated.
The one blessing being that we’d previously dropped the artist off back at their digs so we only had each other to blame.
It might have been a metaphor for what was to come. If you replace the gates of Hades with that bloody James Blunt album that kept us off the number one spot.
But nothing really compared to his own stories.
One of my favourites was from his time at Rough Trade working for The Smiths. During recording the Queen is Dead, it seems H regularly drove the singer back home to the North…in a re-purposed funeral car. Having studiously ignored him for most of the journey, halfway up the M6 Morrissey starts shouting and banging on the driver’s partition for H’s attention…”that fucker from 10cc just overtook us in a sports car, put your foot down!” triggering a Wacky Races chase back to Mancland to the backseat chorus of “Faster Harper, Faster!”.
If James Brown is right about the origins of the song then that ‘driving in your car’ line has a whole dafter meaning.
Of course, any of the above may or may not be true, H never let anything get in the way of a good story.
But not so long ago we bumped into Johnny Marr in Soho who made a point of thanking H for being ace all those years ago when ‘everything was a bit mental’.
Enough said.
Cheers skipper, thanks for the journey, you’ll be much missed x
Words: Tony Crean.
Photo by Suna Setna.
(Harper at Caught By The River, Port Elliot Festival – and that’s another story.)