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The Sensational Alex Harvey Band: Live Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, Ohio, 1974

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Success was a long time a-coming for Alex Harvey. He started out on a high in the mid-1950s when he won the title of the next “Teenage Idol” in “a Tommy Steele rock-alike” contest. Giddy heights, perhaps, but the reality of being the next big thing was gigging across nowheresville Scotland playing working men’s clubs, where his group Alex Harvey and his Soul Band were generally hated by the audience who preferred the more traditional entertainment of pie-eating contests—as Harvey once told B. A. Robertson. His band played skiffle, rock ‘n’ roll, and the blues. He released a couple of albums in the early sixties which were more popular with his family and friends than the record-buying public.

In 1967, Harvey got a five-year stint playing guitar in the London West End musical Hair. It gave him some much-needed stability away from gigging, a regular income, and some good theatrical experience which furthered his ambition to kick-start his own rock ‘n’ roll career with a new band.

The band he eventually teamed up with was Tear Gas. He’d heard about them from a pal. Tear Gas was a prog rock group, who like Harvey were also from Glasgow. According to Harvey, they were loud, raucous, and undisciplined, but hugely talented. Onstage they were shy. Off-stage they were stars. They need some guidance—they found it in thirty-something “Daddy” Harvey.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was born. With Harvey on lead vocal, Zal Cleminson on guitar, Chris Glen on bass, and cousins Hugh and Ted McKenna on keyboards and drums respectively. Together they formed the greatest band that came out of Scotland in the 1970s. And the most influential band that came out of Scotland in the seventies. If you lived in Glasgow back then, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band (or SAHB) was bigger than Jesus and a central part of the city’s holy trinity alongside soccer and alcohol.

SAHB mixed rock, hard rock, prog rock, blues, with theater and cabaret. There was literally nothing to compare with them. As rock critic Charles Shaar Murray described it:

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were one of the craziest, most honest, most creative and most courageous bands of their time…

Though they gained a cult-following and influenced acts as different as Nick Cave (who honed part of his act on Harvey’s performative skills and later covered SAHB’s “Hammer Song” on Kicking Against the Pricks), John Lydon, Ian Dury, and Kurt Cobain. To get an idea what SAHB could do, take a gander at Harvey’s definitive performance of the Jacques Brel’s song “Next” from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973.
 

 
Hear SAHB in concert, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.27.2019
11:29 am
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Alex Harvey was the Director: SAHB was the soundtrack

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They were making a film, and Alex Harvey was the director, creating the different scenes, to which SAHB put the sound track. And what a great film it was too.

It’s 30 years since Alex Harvey died on the eve of his 47th birthday. Hard to believe, but there it is. It seems so recent but is now so very far away. Yet, we all need some Alex Harvey in our life, just to remember the brilliance of the man, and of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Here is Alex in a brief interview with “Whispering” Bob Harris on the Old Grey Whistle Test, where he talks about his early days as the Scottish Tommy Steele, playing in the Big Soul Band, and performing in the musical Hair. The key thing to note here is the long apprenticeship Harvey had before he reaped success.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band


 
3 bonus tracks from SAHB, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.02.2012
07:35 pm
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The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

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Musical tastes are important when it comes to relationships, something I realized the night Alex Harvey died, in 1982. The radio was playing a loop of tracks in memory of the great man, when my then girlfriend asked why I liked The Sensational Alex Harvey Band? I explained, and she replied, ‘But he looked so dirty, like a bad workman that would come to your house and drink Dad’s booze and fuck Mom.’ She had a point, and some imagination, but that was the moment I knew we wouldn’t last.

If you lived in Glasgow in the 1970s, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were bigger than Jesus. Well, Alex was at least, for he was one of the city’s three religions - the other two being soccer and alcohol. While soccer could disappoint, and drink left you hungover, SAHB never let you down.

As Charles Shaar Murray wrote, after Alex Harvey’s death in the NME:

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were one of the craziest, most honest, most creative and most courageous bands of their time, and also the most public and best-known phase of the career of Alex Harvey, the man who won a Tommy Steele rock-alike contest in Glasgow in the mid-fifties and thereafter dubbed himself The Last Of The Teenage Idols.

Alex Harvey was a genuine working-class hero, born in Plantation, the harbor district of Glasgow in 1935, he grew up with a love of Billie Holliday, Big Bill Broozny, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. In 1959, he formed his first band, Alex Harvey’s Soul Band, which established his great, cigarette and alcohol voice that didn’t mimic American inflection, but delivered songs in his native Glaswegian. The band toured the U.K. and Europe, and for one gig had the embryonic Beatles as support.

But Harvey was more than just a Blues singer and he moved on to performing in the musical Hair, which inspired the theatrical style he used with his most successful group, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

SAHB were unique as they mixed genres and styles - Weimar cabaret, film, Blues, rock and torch song, with which, as Murray writes, “they achieved their impact simply because Alex Harvey had the insight to locate the central core of the song and the passion to get him to that core.”

What showed most about Alex Harvey the performer was his very real devotion to his audiences. He would go to any length to enlighten and to entertain, and - as his notion of theatrical presentation developed from a few simple costume changes and bits of business to complex arrangements of props and gadgets - his work was never bombastic and never attempted to substitute extravagance for genuine communication. Time after time, he would exhort his audiences to avoid both private and institutionalized violence - “don’t make any bullets, don’t buy any bullets and don’t shoot any fucken bullets” - and to behave responsibly towards each other and their environment - “don’t pish in the water supply.”

During the period of Alex’s greatest popularity, he did not just provide an escape from everyday existence through dem ol’ rock and roll fantasies, but he depicted and celebrated that existence and the process of that escape, and the relationship of one to the other.

Vambo still rules.
 

 
Bonus clips of SAHB plus an interview with Alex Harvey after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.29.2010
06:16 pm
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