“I was sailing the Atlantic on that one,” he admitted.He encored with the beautiful “Another Day”; or, rather, he didn’t He couldn’t resist a final chat with the audience. Some things never change.Roy Harper plays the 100 Club again on Thursday and Friday ( www.the100club.co.uk). This he prefaced with an atheist polemic that drew cheers from some but resolute silence from others. He also did the notorious ditty “Watford Gap”, a much more focused attack, this time on 1970s motorway food.The second half began with another digression, this time a moan about how EMI didn’t promote 1971’s Stormcock, before he played its four longish tracks. It’s a habit of his to quote lyrics from his songs, and this, allied to his lengthy anecdotes, can get wearing.
But the music was spellbinding. Harper sat, his left foot on a delay pedal connected to his voice, which harmonised with its own echoes, the trademark vibrato adding to its hypnotic texture.

It is Harper’s main asset, especially in songs that can sound similar (following one number, after a welter of vocal echo and guitar-hammering, he admitted “at the end there I could have gone into every song I ever wrote”).Standouts in the first half included “Frozen Moment” and a recent, vehemently anti-war and anti-religion, epic, “The Death of God”. The first half began with “Tom Tiddler’s Ground”, a love song of “long before Eden was lost and found”, a line that Harper took delight in. Maybe even Zep would have been surprised if they’d been told that Harper would stay true to his vision. To close your eyes was to let go of time: this could have been any day in the last 40 years. To open them again, though, was to see a forest of grey hair.

With his twinkling eyes, silver beard, tightly buttoned shirt and hippie trousers, Harper looked somewhere between a science teacher and my idea of Homer. The artist Marcel Duchamp gave up painting at the age of 36 and devoted the rest of his life to playing chess As for Axl Rose, maybe he’d be better off binning the album. That way, he can at least be sure the legend will live on.’Chinese Democracy’ will be released later this year Allegedly. There’s a song on Led Zeppelin III called “Hats off to (Roy) Harper”, which is a tribute to the singer-songwriter’s refusal to sell out It was recorded in 1970. The Fall’s Mark E Smith pulled off the same trick with “How I Wrote Elastic Man” – “I’m living a fake/ People say, ‘You are entitled to and great’/ But I haven’t wrote for 90 days.” Last year, Nick Cave revealed the same affliction in “There She Goes My Beautiful World”, complaining: “Me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears/ Me, I’m lying here for what seems like years/ I’m just lying on my bed with nothing in my head.”Of course, there’s a difference between writer’s block and simply being a perfectionist.

But there is something compelling about a once-brilliant songwriter in creative exile. Pete Townshend managed to haul The Who out of a creative quagmire with the lyrics: “When you take up a pencil and sharpen it up/ When you’re kicking the fence and nothing will budge” in “Guitar and Pen”. The Scots siblings The Proclaimers took seven years to follow up their Hit The Highway album, citing the death of their father and writer’s block as the reasons.And who could blame The Stone Roses and Elastica for clamming up when it came to their respective second albums? The Roses’ sophomore effort Second Coming, released five years after their 1989 debut, failed to live up to the title’s promise, while Elastica’s The Menace, released after a six-year hiatus, was dead on arrival.For a songwriter locked in artistic paralysis, a suitable theme can often be staring them in the face. The rumour of creative constipation can be the perfect smokescreen for the artist whose greatest work is behind them, and for whom the prospect of a worthy successor seems impossible. In such instances, one imagines, it’s less a case of writer’s block than stone-cold fear.The Stereo MCs, creators of the Zeitgeist-surfing, award-winning 1992 album Connected, took nine years to get back in the studio – but the resulting LP, Deep Down and Dirty, bombed. Unhinged he may have been, but these are hardly the actions of a man looking to get back to work.One more persistent rumour about Kate Bush is that, rather than summoning her muse, she spent the last decade baking cakes. Two years ago, on visiting the singer at her home to see what she’d been working on, her label bosses were apparently confronted with a teatime spread that would have put Mrs Beeton to shame.These cases cannot be called writer’s block, but there have been plenty of artists claiming to have suffered from this in the hope that it will afford them the mythical status of tortured genius In fact, “writer’s block” can hide a multitude of sins.

For a slacker singer-songwriter living off the spoils of the last multimillion-seller, there can be no better excuse to avoid going back to work. It wasn’t until last year that the partially rehabilitated Wilson dusted down the old Smile tapes with the help of the original producer Van Dyke Parks and released the album, to huge acclaim.These delays conjure up pictures of an artist in torment, searching for their muse. But in the notoriously indisciplined world of rock, this is not always the case. Wilson’s 20-year sabbatical might look like a punishing period of artistic purgatory until you learn that he spent much of that time in bed, only getting up to take delivery of consignments of cocaine and fast food. After trying – and mercifully failing – to burn the master tapes, Wilson threw in the towel and his “teenage symphony to God” ended up locked away in a vault.After that, he didn’t go near a recording studio for 20 years.