And it could be Geoff and it could be John

Roy Harper - 'When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease' (HQ - 1975)

You can argue the toss¹ amongst yourselves, but for the first time at The Run Out Grooves, we are covering a closing track that is more famous than the album it is featured on. To the extent that before I started the project, I wouldn’t be able to name which Roy Harper album ‘When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease’ comes from if asked in a pub quiz². This is backed up by a quick look at the Spotify play counts for the album, which shows that it has notched up almost ten times as many plays as anything else on the album.³ The song also twice saw the light of day as a single in 1975 and 1978; it is arguably Harper’s most famous song.

The song compares a cricketer, specifically an older one, reaching the end of their innings and leaving the crease (that is, walking off the field of play for those less familiar with cricket terminology.) with death, the ultimate end. Harper labours this with reference to the weight of a cricket bat, two pounds and six ounces, and the famous English idiom of the traditional sound of leather on willow (ball on the bat) that has often been used to signify an idealised English summer. He also gets further into cricket jargon by mentioning silly mid-on.⁴

With cricket played in the summer between football seasons, for some, there is an immediate invocation of that time of year. Others will associate the concept of the end of an innings with autumn or even winter. Harper had one neat trick to try and evoke all those times of the year by using the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, a traditional Northern English brass band⁵. For some, it would remind them of a Salvation Army band and the Christmas period. Whichever season it brings to mind, it gives the song gravitas because, as Harper has said;