Harry's Gone Fishing
The title track to the 1999 album. "Who's Harry?", asks Leon in the sleevenotes. Apparently he doesn't know. (Leon has remarked that the song emerged from a play he'd written, but further details are not known.)
Harry is someone who can do seemingly anything and solve any problem, and yet he doesn't appear in the song in person. The main character is an old man with a weathered face, who talks mystically of Harry as he wanders the city. Is Harry a delusion in the man's mind? No; others believe in him too and see him as something of a saviour, although we never quite get to the bottom of who - or what - he is.
Harry is someone who can do seemingly anything and solve any problem, and yet he doesn't appear in the song in person. The main character is an old man with a weathered face, who talks mystically of Harry as he wanders the city. Is Harry a delusion in the man's mind? No; others believe in him too and see him as something of a saviour, although we never quite get to the bottom of who - or what - he is.
"The narrator's revelatory walk in 'Harry's Gone Fishing' is a device common in traditional song and in poetry (Blake's London, for example). As for the mythical Harry, for those who are (as Winstanley put it) hedged out by the great god money, he seems to me a more down-to-earth, less passive saviour to believe in than, say, the gospel Jesus. The tune reminds me of the Saturday Night Waltz sequence in Aaron Copland's Rodeo." - (Turning Silence Into Song (songbook), p45)
“In ‘Harry’s Gone Fishing’, the ‘I’ is not the songwriter; the old man is an imagined character, and Harry may not exist, may never have existed. But maybe sometimes people need a saviour to believe in and Harry, even if he doesn’t exist, has got a lot more going for him than, say, the Gospel Jesus.” - LR (sleevenotes to The World Turned Upside Down (CD box set), p55)
"A couple of songs - 'Susie', 'Harry's Gone Fishing' - did emerge mysteriously from plays that I wrote." - LR (interview with Colin Randall, 2016)
“In ‘Harry’s Gone Fishing’, the ‘I’ is not the songwriter; the old man is an imagined character, and Harry may not exist, may never have existed. But maybe sometimes people need a saviour to believe in and Harry, even if he doesn’t exist, has got a lot more going for him than, say, the Gospel Jesus.” - LR (sleevenotes to The World Turned Upside Down (CD box set), p55)
"A couple of songs - 'Susie', 'Harry's Gone Fishing' - did emerge mysteriously from plays that I wrote." - LR (interview with Colin Randall, 2016)
Recordings
Version 1 (1999)
Version 2 (2011) Live performance, released in 2014
Version 2 (2011) Live performance, released in 2014