By William Moore

When I was younger, I would go to rock concerts on a regular weekly basis. Growing up in England in the late 60s and early 70s was something of a luxury for anyone with an interest in what is today known as "classic rock", a vague musical genre which continues to play an important part in the fare put out by the likes of Radio City in Helsinki.

   

On any given Saturday night a teenager could - without too much effort or distance travelled - get to see now-legendary acts like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Cream, Free, Van Morrison, Traffic, or The Who, and even people like the Allman Brothers, Captain Beefheart, and the Grateful Dead showed up every so often for festivals and short tours.

   

Of course, if you set your sights lower, it was possible back then to find people who were not yet household names, but might soon become so: the delights of bemused students seeing a little-known Jimi Hendrix performing in a university dining-hall in February 1967 (alas, I was too young, but I saw the plaque on the wall), of Bob Marley and the Wailers jamming in a club not much bigger than a living-room, of the late lamented Ian Dury down the pub, or the lovably eccentric folk-rocker and guitarist extraordinaire Roy Harper, one of those people whom richer and more famous artists were forever talking about, but for whom "cult status" was the best that life offered.

Coming to Finland changed everything

, in rather strange ways. On the one hand the supply dried up, with peripheral location and the "semi-island" nature of the country - that sea journey from Sweden lugging all the equipment - limiting the number of touring artists. They got to Stockholm, but at that point they often turned around and went home.

   

Then again, when a few brave souls did come along, they generally played in much more intimate, humane venues than they would have picked in England or the U.S. In a sense it was a step back to the old days, with "name" artists showing up at places like Tavastia, an excellent rough and ready hall with general admission for around 700. The performers often relished the return to something more club-like, with a direct audience contact, and Finnish rock fans welcomed them and even on some occasions actually stopped slurping beer to listen.

As age has crept up

, I find I go to concerts relatively seldom, and following two diametrically-opposed lines of approach: on the one hand there is the frantic dialling and redialling of busy phone lines to secure hot tickets months in advance, even for gigs in Stockholm or farther afield, and on the other a sort of whimsical last-minute decision to go out for the hell of it instead of watching the sparkle-box, often without knowing anything about what I am to see and hear.

The idea to go and see Nick Harper

at SemiFinal (one of those living-room venues with a capacity of about 100 and a stage on which a four-piece band starts looking uncomfortably cramped) belonged in the latter "serendipitous" category.

   

I knew absolutely nothing about him except he was the son of a semi-famous father, but a brief announcement in Helsingin Sanomat's weekend review asserted that as a guitarist he was "better than his Dad". This in itself is uncommon, since few rock scions have been able to fill their parents' shoes, but considering that the elder Harper was himself something of an axe-hero phenomenon, the claim was a bold one.

But it was spot-on

. I can say that in more than 30 years of attending these things, I have never heard anyone - or anything - like this, with the possible exception of Leo Kottke, who already bears the ponderous mantle of "acoustic guitar virtuoso". It was breathtaking, and left me wondering why on earth there were only around 70 of us there to witness it.

   

Not only was the 36-year-old Mr Harper quite capable of turning his guitar from an innocuous but delightful Segovia-plays-Villa-Lobos instrument to a serious weapon of mass destruction in seconds, he was also charming, more amusing than most stand-up comics, modest as hell, and he seems to have an ability to write and deliver songs that are quite the equal of his acerbic father. In fact in the vocals, often stretched, often echo-supported, there was a stronger family resemblance than in his instrumental work, which was all his own.

   

He slipped adroitly from touching love ditties via The Galaxy Song (of Monty Python fame) into searing political rant as easily as he chatted up the audience and discussed Liverpool's 2-1 win over Tottenham while restringing his battered Lowden acoustic. The poor instrument succumbed three times during an electrifying performance of Building Our Own Temple; apparently this is pretty normal.

During several songs

he de-tuned or re-tuned the guitar as he played, dropping gorgeous harmonics like autumn leaves and then ripping out juggernaut percussive riffs, and all with this kind of boyish chemistry-set "Let's-see-what-happens-if-I-try... THIS" attitude. At one point, he completely cocked up the echo settings on his vocal mike, but seemed just as delighted with the result, milking it rather than getting irritated by the technological snafu.

   

It was very infectious stuff, and I found myself thinking that this was one man who could really cross that impossible chasm between playing for an old folks' home and at a headbangers' ball.

Just when we imagined

he'd done most everything our mothers told us never to do with an acoustic guitar, he floored everybody by producing a more than passable impression of Led Zeppelin's (yes, all four of them!) Whole Lotta Love during a riotous work-out on the old Elvis warhorse Guitar Man.

   

Jaws dropped, grown men wept into their beer, and people were grinning from ear to ear at the sheer unaffected joy of the fellow, who was clearly enjoying himself as much as his audience were.

   

For his encore, he plugged in, strummed a chord or two, then said "Awww...shit, no...", and instead wandered out unamplified into the audience, serenading several women and their surprised escorts with something called You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me. Balls of brass.

   

After the closing act's set, while the equipment was being packed away, Harper sat at the drum-kit used by Markus Nordenstreng and the Latebirds (interesting in their own right, though in my view the set was mixed overly loud), and happily bashed out the percussion accompaniment to the music coming off the house P.A., while his array of things to hit was gradually whittled down to a single cymbal. It was that kind of evening. 2.30 am and nobody seemed to want to go home.

To be able to experience all this

up close and personal and with no advance hype or preconceptions was so refreshing and so unusual that I felt a need to write about it, even if it has precious little to do with the normal content of this paper.

   

In a world of crass commercialism and no-talent artists who are created by and ultimately often destroyed by the media, the knowledge that there are still unsung musicians out there who could knock them six different ways from Sunday without recourse to MTV is reassuring in the extreme.

   

I was not alone. The rest of the audience, who appeared to be a 50/50 mix of the just-curious and the converted (several had actually made the trip from abroad and English seemed at times to be the dominant language being spoken), were equally gob-smacked by what they heard.

Nick Harper may not be everyone's cup of tea

, and I'd hate to see him through binoculars performing in a stadium, but the sooner someone picks up the phone and gets him back to Finland to play for a larger crowd - are you listening there at the Helsinki Festival? - the better for the mental health of this country.

   

It would be a crying shame if we had to wait the 25 years since his father last showed up here. Or then again, someone could invite them both, and next time he could actually remember to bring a few promotional CDs with him.