How Good is that?
Who else other than Rolf Harris has introduced generations to the joys of painting, gigged with The Beatles, sold millions of records, opened Glastonbury and had the Queen sit for him?
WORDS ANDREW HUMPHREYS
PORTRAITS JAMIE BAKER
IF THERE IS ONE BIG ADVANTAGE OF NEVER BEING FASHIONABLE, it is that you can never really fall out of fashion either. Which might go some way to explaining how 58 years since he first appeared on British television, Rolf Harris is still appearing in living rooms across the land, doodling, wobbling his board and didgering his doo. He’s 82 years old this March, and on the face of it life just seems to be getting better.
Last year he got to spend time in the company of supermodels Lily Cole and Lizzy Jagger and actresses Emer Kenny and Dervla Kirwan as they posed for a painting based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he was part of Jamie’s Dream School, drafted in to fill the role of ‘dream art teacher’.
The previous year marked his sixth appearance at Glastonbury festival, where he played the main stage in front of a record-breaking 130,000-strong audience. Last November he wept his way even deeper into the public’s affection when he appeared as the subject of an episode of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.
And what a life story. Born in Perth, Western Australia to Welsh parents in 1930. An Australian junior backstroke champion at the age of 16. Emigrates to England to study art in 1952 and a year later finds himself fronting children’s programmes on TV. Writes and has international hits with ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and world music-prototype ‘Sun Arise’ (which reaches number two in the UK charts, kept off the top spot only by Elvis Presley). Introduced by producer (that’s Rolf’s producer) George Martin to little known newcomers The Beatles, with whom he performs and compères the band’s 1963 Christmas show. He – not Paul, not John, not George, not Ringo – is best man at Martin’s 1966 wedding. Invents the wobble board. Scores a UK Christmas number one with ‘Two Little Boys’ in 1969, which tops the charts for six weeks and sells over a million copies. Performs the very first concert at the newly completed Sydney Opera House in 1973. Opens the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane and in 1994 debuts at Glastonbury, a year after his cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ reaches number seven in the UK charts. Paints a portrait of the Queen in honour of her 80th birthday. And that’s not the half of it.
We meet at the high-end gallery in Mayfair, London that represents Rolf’s paintings. It’s only 10am and he’s already done a live satellite interview with an Australian TV channel this morning, conducted somewhere on the other side of town. The black-clad gallery girls greet him with big hugs, grappling to get their arms round his substantial frame, which is made all the more unwieldy by a big padded jacket. Planted firmly in super-sized Uggs, he is a big presence. Although the delivery has slowed with age the words never stop, and he’s given to breaking into song to illustrate a point. The hour we spend together is not so much an interview as a performance.
We’re meeting to talk about art, which has been a passion for Rolf throughout his life, and one which he has slightly more time to indulge these days. When he’s not otherwise engaged, he spends every morning painting at his home near Maidenhead in Berkshire. He favours an Impressionistic style but is totally promiscuous when it comes to subject matter, compulsively collecting images and scenes he thinks might make a good painting. He tells me how beautiful the light was on the Thames that morning and regrets not having a camera (he usually works from photographs). A week later during our photo shoot he spots a camel in an old issue of Voyager that he wants to paint, and when he sees a particular shot of himself he asks for a copy of that too – Rolf does a lot of self-portraits.
From an early age Rolf Harris wanted to be an artist, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, an accomplished Welsh portraitist. ‘We had examples of his work hanging on our wall all through my childhood. We had a wonderful self-portrait and also a portrait of his wife, my grandmother, which was painted the week after they heard that their second son had been killed in the First World War. She was about to cry at any moment and it is a brilliant painting. He showed real ability and was sent to Paris, where he studied in the same studio as Monet.’
At the age of 22, the grandson took himself off to London to study at art school. It was, he says, a letdown, although he did meet the girl who would become his wife – and to whom he has been married for over 50 years. The love of art remained, but it wasn’t going to pay the bills. While casting around for a good fit for his skills of drawing, telling stories and singing, Rolf saw some children’s television and thought he could do better. He secured himself an audition and impressed enough to be given a five-minute slot in a one-hour children’s show called Jigsaw. ‘Thirty pounds a programme they paid me.
I bought a brand new Morris Minor station wagon with the wooden back. Magic design, that was.’
The following year he was a regular on another programme with a character called Willoughby, a little drawing that came to life and talked back before being erased at the end of each show. At the same time, he was appearing in cabarets and nightclubs around London, performing some of his own songs and honing his skills as an entertainer. He was asked to try out for the pilot of a new TV show. ‘A bloke called and said, "We’ve got this music group and they live near you. They’re all based around Sydenham and they rehearse in St Michael’s Church on Croxted Road. We want you to introduce the band and interview them". So here was this group called The Rolling Stones, and I didn’t understand anything about what they were doing – the strutting and the posing, and the loud, loud guitars.’
‘I’ll give you an idea of the sort of songs I was writing at the time,’ says Rolf. Starts singing: ‘Just like the inside of any big shop / people were everywhere / suddenly business was brought to a stop / when a terrible yell hit the air / I’VE LOST MY MUMMY AH HA HA HA / I’VE LOST MY MU-HUM-MEE…’ Not exactly ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
‘This chap took the programme and showed it to the powers that be and they said, "No, forget it. Sorry. Not going to work." I think a lot of that was down to me being unable to relate to what they were doing. And a month later, Ready, Steady, Go! [the music programme of the 1960s] came out, exactly the same format. Exactly. And that was a huge hit.’
Not that it mattered: throughout the 60s Rolf fronted a succession of shows: Hi There, Hey Presto it’s Rolf and The Rolf Harris Show, which ran on into the 1980s. For the latter he came up with the idea of painting large canvases in which the subject only became clear with the very last brushstrokes; ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ was added to the lexicon of enduring TV catchphrases.
The act of turning art into family entertainment earned Harris the enmity of the paid pontificators on taste. ‘I remember I had people like the critic Milton Shulman saying, "Who does he think he is, Rembrandt?"’ Others were even less kind. ‘One of those guys, and I cannot remember who it was, said, "Rolf Harris is the essence of naff. Whatever he does is wrong, and whatever he wears is in appallingly bad taste". And you think to yourself, what have my clothes got to do with how I paint?’ (For the record, Rolf favours bold colours in both art and personal attire.)
Such jibes obviously still hurt, but affirmation of the public’s affection for his work comes in the high prices it fetches. In 2005, vindication came from a more unexpected source, when the BBC approached him to ask if he’d be interested in painting the Queen’s portrait. ‘They said they had to submit the idea to the palace first, then a couple of weeks later they came back and said everybody loved it, and I should get in touch with the Queen’s personal assistant. So I rang Angela, lovely girl, from the North somewhere, and she said, "Now you’re painting a portrait of the Queen, what would you like her to wear?" I said, "What would I like the Queen to wear? You’re kidding?" And she said no, the artist always choses. I said something bright. Maybe pink.’
‘I remember turning up with my canvas all wrapped up in brown paper, and my box of paints and brushes. We had to be there before 11 because that was when the Changing of the Guard happened but the Queen wasn’t arriving until two-thirty. I was ready by 11.30 – three hours to bloody wait. So we ate sandwiches and drank coffee while the butterflies in my stomach were breeding.’
‘Then she arrived and she was charming. She said hello to everybody and asked where I wanted her to sit. I sat her facing down the Mall so she had something to look at. I set the canvas close beside her and I said "How are you with the smell of turpentine?" and she said, "We shall find out". Her Majesty wasn’t sick, and once the portrait was finished she pronounced it ‘Friendly’. Rolf offered it to Britain’s National Portrait Gallery but they said no thanks.
It’s hard to imagine such an exuberant character as Rolf being nervous, and it’s not as though it was the first time meeting the Queen – he received his MBE, OBE and CBE from her. I wondered what else made him nervous?
‘I was nervous when I first got to Glastonbury. When we drove in and I saw the numbers of people and all the tents, I started to get panicky and I thought, what am I doing here! My god, this is a mistake! I’m sure they booked me as a joke because I went on at 10am on the Sunday morning. I think they thought everybody would be in their tents fast asleep. Instead, more than 70,000 people made their way to the stage and sang along to every single word of my songs. There were women holding banners saying ‘Rolf, will you didgeridoo me?’
‘It was hilarious,’ says Rolf. ‘But I was telling you how nervous I was seeing all these people. I parked the car at the Pyramid Stage and I was unloading my stuff when this big stagehand bloke came over. He said, "Are you going to do the one about the three-legged bloke, Rolf?" And I said, yeah. He said, "Good on you, son. You’re the only one I’m interested in seeing today."
He clapped me on the back and I thought how good is that? And it just took all the panic out of it.’
