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.
 

 
Again, as Charles Shaar Murray once wrote of SAHB’s version of “Next”:

Alex Harvey had the insight to locate the central core of the song and the passion to get him to that core. His performance of Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’ is purest bravura, and it works precisely because Harvey reduced the distance between himself and the song to nothing. He became the song, was utterly present in the song and, by doing so, pulled the listener right in there himself.

Pulling the audience into the heart of a song through their performance was what Harvey and SAHB did and why they were and still are so beloved and so highly regarded. Everyone, or at least every serious music snob, should own at least one SAHB album. I think that their entire back catalog should be made available on prescription—life would be so much better if this were so.

Harvey quit SAHB after four glorious years in 1976. He rejoined the band in 1978 for their last album Rock Drill—but the glory days were over. At the height of their fame in 1974, SAHB played the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio during a tour that should have seen them convert America to their unique talents. Alas, it didn’t happen—though Ohioans were smart enough to recognise genius when they saw it and the band had a major fanbase in Cleveland.

Set List: “Faith Healer,” “Midnight Moses,” “Sergeant Fury,” “Framed,” “Anthem,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
Meet the Father of Prog Rock