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The guitarist made up and dressed as a harlequin seems to have been pumping out a solo forever. The rain was making its presence felt at Stoke City FC’s Victoria Ground stadium on May 17, 1975. So too were some bad-tempered people in the crowd as they waited for prog giants Yes to arrive on stage for their headline set. In the meantime, though, they were being regaled by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band playing a massively elongated version of fan favourite Vambo.
“Too much! No applause!” Harvey himself shouts, as many wonder where he’s been for the past five minutes. “No fucking applause!” he repeats, before turning his attention to a violent contingent in the field below him. “Hey, c**ts! C**ts! You – I’m talking about you, cracker baby! If you don’t stop that right now, I’m gonna come down and kick fuck out the lot of ya! Nobody fights or causes destruction at our concerts.’”
Harvey continues to berate, while gently introducing calming notions. “So we’re gonna be cool. Is that alright? See, these things happen. People get excited, ya know? I know all about violence. It doesn’t work.”
The story of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band stopping a riot at a Yes-headlining event ran through the music press during the summer of 1975, around the time when the Scottish rock band were at their very best. Listening back to Harvey’s commanding, overwhelming presence 50 years on (as included in Snapper Music’s new live box set Good Evening, Boys And Girls!), it begins to become clear why he so often appeared near or at the top of ‘Best Frontman’ lists in the 70s.
It wasn’t entirely an act. Born in the industrial heartlands of Glasgow, Harvey was more than 15 years older than most of his fans, and band members Zal Cleminson, Chris Glen, Hugh McKenna and his cousin Ted McKenna. He’d been there and done that, and while he entertained you he wanted to help you avoid making the mistakes he’d made.
SAHB were never hugely successful in terms of record sales. But seeing them live never failed to draw an extreme reaction. A show would often begin with Harvey appearing on stage, gesturing provocatively if it was a crowd who didn’t want to like him (such as Slade and Yes fans), then he’d take a can of beer, pour it over his head and fashion his hair into a duck’s arse quiff before saying, quietly but dangerously: “Good evening, boys and girls. I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce my band. The Sensational. Alex. Harvey. Band.”
Alex Harvey had nearly been a pin-up solo star in the 1950s before becoming nearly a pop star in the 60s, then nearly a hippie star at the end of that decade. Everyone wanted him to make it. But it took until he united with Scottish heavy prog band Tear Gas that it all came together.
From early on, their shows – Harvey as ringleader, harlequin guitarist Cleminson as ambitious sidekick, bassist Glen as kid-on-the-make, and the McKennas (keyboard player Hugh and drummer Ted) holding it all together – were a blend of music, theatre and sociology lectures. Bringing it into sharp focus was the front line of Harvey, Cleminson and Glen. When they marched side-by-side to the front of the stage, sneering, glaring and growling, the audience moved back.
“We were loud people, but we weren’t as loud as Alex on stage,” Glen says. “He’d get himself wound up before the show, shouting, ‘C**ts! C**ts! C**ts!’ into a mirror, and we’d all keep out of his way. It was very actor-like, getting into character, but if there was another band in the dressing room they’d think we were getting ready to fight!”
Good Evening, Boys And Girls! comprises 14 live tracks recorded between the establishing era of club shows in 1973 to their final bow at the Reading Festival in 1977. In a period when journalists couldn’t get over the fact that Harvey was in his forties – and everyone knew that was too old to rock’n’roll – he had a relationship with fans that any band leader would love. Everyone in the crowd would swear blind that his performance was directed at them personally.
“This really, really is true: you’ve got the power,” he tells the audience at a gig at London’s Marquee club in 1973. “You really have got it. You just gotta use it.” Later he adds: “It’s your world. Don’t do it wrong. You can do it better than the way we’re doing it.” And for a cheeky addition: “And if the police come, don’t give them your right name!”
Along with on-stage instructions to behave, to calm down, to sing along, to pay attention and to respect each other, Harvey lectured street politics to young people who, perhaps, didn’t care as much then as some do now, or at least didn’t discuss the state of the world as often as young people do now. He lectured to the point of acting like a schoolteacher: “Anyone who misbehaves will see me in my office tomorrow morning!” But of course his message was wrapped in entertainment.
Dave Batchelor had stepped away from Tear Gas to make room for Harvey, and became SAHB’s sound man and later their producer – a change he relished.
“Watching the show was like seeing a movie you loved but finding something new every time,” he says. “It was always: ‘Did he just say that? Look at that! What did they just do?’ Every performance had a wee diversion, and I was tuned in to respond to that, pushing one sound or changing it a bit or whatever.”
SAHB released eight albums over five years – an abandoned ninth was eventually released later – but reviews often mention a failure to capture the band’s live magic. Recordings of songs like The Faith Healer, Midnight Moses and Vaudeville-style covers of Framed, Next and their biggest hit, a cover of Tom Jones’s hit Delilah, have much to offer, as do prog epics like Isobel Goudie, Give My Compliments To The Chef and The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater.
“I know some of the guys thought the studio stuff was under-cooked,” Batchelor says. “We were always pressed for time. There was always something else to do. But on stage it was a different story – Alex would slow things right down and it felt like they had all the time in the world. When they marched through a crowd of Jethro Tull fans in America, led by two bagpipers, you knew you were making memories that would last forever.”
It’s often regarded as criminal that SAHB were never filmed for a concert movie release. The few YouTube clips that exist from TV and festival appearances demonstrate what might have been seen more often. A stack of audio evidence is presented in the box set, particularly their 1975-76 Christmas concerts.
“We went all-out on that,” Glen says. “No expense was explained to us! The model of the set cost more than we’d ever spent on a show before. We were all about making it up as we went along, using stuff we found backstage, buying cheap props or even nicking things off the street.”
Batchelor recalls: “We never went Hollywood. The idea was to ‘keep it Kinning Park’ – the place where Alex was born.”
“Even our costumes started out on the cheap,” Glen says, referring to the jumpsuits he and Cleminson wore, alongside Harvey in his striped top and pirate jacket. “Zal met an art student who said she could improve our early costumes, and she got it dead right. Then suddenly we were paying six times as much for London designers who totally missed what we were trying to do. That was a constant thing.”
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s homecoming to the iconic Glasgow Apollo in December 1975 is as electrifying as it is terrifying. The aggression in the audience recording is arresting – if it wasn’t for the sheer love apparent too, one wonders if it would have been safe to be there. “We’re trying to make intelligent rock’n’roll songs – is that alright?” Alex asks the audience, later adding his trademark phrase: “Don’t pish in the water supply!”
If only there was video of Cleminson’s solo April Kisses – the audience is heard oohing and aahing, but we have to imagine the performance as Harvey tempts his colleague with another guitar he keeps tantalisingly out of reach. Then there’s the talent contest, in which members of the band compete for fans’ applause, and which Hugh McKenna always won with an accordion performance.
Harvey took every opportunity to push his luck on behalf of his audience. In the mid-70s his Vambo character – who promoted contributing to the community while observing the rule ‘never vandal be’ – inspired street kids to form Vambo Liberation Front clubs, who went out and did good works. But he pushed it further when he started performing blues number Framed dressed as Adolf Hitler. And did it in Berlin. In full Nazi regalia.
“In case you get the wrong idea, Hitler was a bastard,” Harvey says in the 1976 recording. “And if any fascism comes your way, send them to me and I’ll kick the shit out of them. No fascism works – no way.”
“I didn’t know he was going to do Hitler. I don’t know if anyone did,” Batchelor says. “I remember trying to hide under the mixing desk because the audience were all around me! But no one had a problem. It seemed to work with what SAHB was. Alex made a point, got a reaction and it was a brilliant result.”
They also performed the Nazi anthem Tomorrow Belongs To Me, before which Harvey warned: “We’re going to do a very, very violent song, and I want everybody to be on their best behaviour… It’s a fascist song. We’re going to send it back against these bastards.”
It’s notable that socially conscious activists today have begun exploring the idea of making a large-scale laughing stock of right-wing narcissists – which Harvey can be heard doing 50 years ago.
Rock stardom was, it turned out, not what he’d imagined it to be. He’d often discussed wanting to be a director rather than a leader, and found the strain of leadership a heavy weight. “What do they want from me?” close friends recall him asking towards the end of SAHB.
“How many times have you heard: ‘Why the fuck didn’t you film the Christmas shows?’” Batchelor says, still incredulous. “But the manager, Bill Fehilly, told each of us individually that we’d always be looked after. When Bill died in a plane crash in 1976, Alex tried to hold the company to the deal. It didn’t happen.”
Glen recalls: “One time, Bill had a new car and I said I loved it. He handed me the keys – ‘It’s yours.’ To go from that to not knowing where the money was coming from or going to… it wasn’t easy. And Alex took it personally. He began asking questions like: ‘Who’s this “A. Driver” on the hotel list? Is this a scam?’ But it was because no one knew who’d be driving the truck when the hotels were booked.
“The trust had gone, and that added stress. Instead of taking it easier he was taking pills to kill the pain, taking more drink and drugs to cheer himself up because the pills were getting him down.”
Harvey collapsed on stage in 1976, soon after Fehilly’s death, and was forced to take a year off while his colleagues toured as SAHB (Without Alex). He was back to headline the Reading Festival in 1977, opening a new cycle of shows in support of new album Rock Drill. No one knew it would be his final concert with the band.
The Reading tape documents his welcome as a returning hero; the audience have very loudly given him permission to do what he will, and along with a band who have never sounded more together he does just that. After a joyful performance that promises much for a future that would never be, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band bow out with a cover of Carl Perkins’s 1950s rock’n’roll classic Blue Suede Shoes, which was a hit for Elvis Presley.
It’s a thoughtful choice for the end of a set, and a chapter of rock history. Harvey took great inspiration from Presley, and the death of The King a few weeks previously might have been the moment that the Scotsman began considering his situation. During rehearsals for the tour, Harvey took a taxi home and never came back. He died on tour with his New Band in 1982, a day short of his 47th birthday, which now feels criminally young for a rock musician.
“I kept in touch with Alex,” Chris Glen says. “He once asked me to manage him, but I was like: ‘What do I know about management?’ I think he wanted to get it all back together. I think if he hadn’t died it would have happened. There was definitely unfinished business – he still had a message that people needed to hear.”
Batchelor recalls: “So much was expected of SAHB that the show became less spontaneous. It was never a case of just doing what worked, but it became more difficult to balance the vibe and the expectations. And Alex was a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy. He lived for unpredictable moments. There were less of those, but he still gave it everything he could.”
Listening to their last concert, it’s difficult to imagine Harvey is in a weakened state. “We’ve got everything together – it’s you and us,” he states with that dangerous calm-before-the-storm voice. He performs Framed dressed as Jesus, and drops his polystyrene cross into the security pit, where it lands on DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, while telling the crowd: “Miracles don’t come quick.”
Harvey’s miracle was the concept of Vibrania, a mythical place he planned to illustrate to a far greater extent than he managed. “It’s about a perfect society,” he tells his Berlin fans in 1976. “I wish you’d come with us and live there. Everybody’s at peace.” In his short post-SAHB years he’d talk about saving whales and other eco-aware matters.
Despite the age difference, he’d stayed firmly on the side of the kids, aware they’d have to inherit the world left by previous generations. Hence his frequent encouragements, which can be heard throughout the box set, always delivered with affection in his voice. “Your enthusiasm makes me feel nice. I wish most of you were my children,” he says at London’s Mayfair in 1975, later adding: “You are the children of tomorrow, whether you like it or whether you don’t.”
In Manchester the same year he tells them: “That’s the only thing I can promise you – honesty.” A year later in the same city he asks: “You must know what adults are like? Yeah, they screw everything up.” And there’s a long lecture at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 75, where the crowd clap along as he tells them how it is.
How many people, five decades on, will listen to Harvey’s message now – sounding very much in the now on Good Evening, Boys And Girls! – and think: “I should have paid more attention to that back then.” Fortunately there’s still time.
Good Evening, Boys And Girls! is out now via Snapper. It's available from the Classic Rock Store.
