THE SENSATIONAL ALEX HARVEY BAND

There Ain't Nothin' Like a, Gang-Bang

(To Blow Away The Blues)...

Ltraiy Kaye

by

That's the rust of the British Empire down there, scaling the stage, fainting from the heat, watching respectfully and with equal inattention as the disc jockey from Capitol Radio tries vainly to restore some order.

"We want Ah-lex!" they chant in unison, crawling like white ants over the footlights. A quick totter, a wave to the crowd, then the abrupt jar of being heaved off the stage by security. Glory bound.

The lights go down to a flurry of applause. A heartbeat pulses over the loudspeakers, countered by the psionic whine of a reverential machine. A beam of light spins out, targeting a figure high atop a mountain of amplifiers, right arm extended as if in supplication. Let... me... put... my ... hands ... on ... you, he whispers harshly, the band moving in shadow.

Let me... a leap to the floor... put my... hands on you ... His pale knuckles curl in tense suspension.

The group's guitarist is decorated like* a clown, miming a grimace as he writhes his instrument through its paces, exaggerating each movement so it becomes lapsed in time, slowed to the point of pain.

Let me put my hands on you ... A girl screams in the left balcony and falls to the crowd below, absorbed in mutilation. The music continues, unabated, oblivious, a cruising vulture flying over an area of scrub.

"Ah," for an oily pause. "Is your name ... Alexander?"

He's waited a long time for this moment, has Alex Harvey, and now that it's here he's not about to let it slip away.

"I think I'm a survivor," he says getting comfortable in his manager's office, overlooking the stately serenity of Hyde Park. "I've seen a lot of kids — contemporaries of mine — really dropped into pieces, buried by the road somewhere. I suppose I've always had a certain amount of ambition, but as to "Making it," I don't really know what that means.. I'm happy, I've always been

pretty happy. That's the first thing. I don't know if that's the end if you're a star. I've known a few stars, quite a few, and I don't think any of them are happy. That scares me a lot. If I ever thought it would be like that I'd walk out. Say goodbye, fuck off somewhere. Just like that."

Alex snaps his fingers. At 38, he's had a lot of years to plot his future, recognize its pleasures and pitfalls, prepare himself for the inevitable twinge of success. Now, fronting the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, he's ready to collect. The band has been together nearly two and a half years, has three albums to their credit (only two in America), and are now pleased to find themselves regarded as headliners in their home country and most of Europe.

On record, the SAHB is a sure-footed power bloc, unerringly produced by Sweet-supervisor Phil Wainman. Live, their dramatic and slightly burlesque approach takes on a whole new personality, an entertaining and thoroughly professional spectacle that moves briskly around its various scenarios. The appeal is to the British street mentality, a point most obviously taken when Alex — in the guise of a dead end hooligan — exhibits a can of black spray paint to inscribe the cryptic Vambo Rool on a conveniently placed polystyrene brick wall. It's not exactly Taki 183, but on the other hand ...

"The music's got to be first," says Alex, speaking slowly to reveal actual words beneath the burrs of his heavy Scottish accent, "and after that, any means at all. I don't care. I don't think there's anything sacred, as much as I've never believed in the music itself being sufficient. Most of the people that I like .. . musicians, say from Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Hendrix ... anybody like that... they're all a bit theatrical. King Kong. I like King Kong. That's rock and roll to me. It's got all the ingredients ... boy meets girl, a bit of madness and menace ... and misunderstanding.

"I've never really gone in for introverted music, like a band that can turn their backs to the audience. It's alright if they want, but if that's going to be your style, why be on a stage? A stage is higher up, and when you open the curtains the people immediately have a look at you. You're putting yourself on that pedestal, you're trying to attract attention, you're saying this is what I'm doing. That's the point where we get off."

Harvey originally began playing music in Glasgow, where he developed an affection for "the cowboys ... Hank Williams, Gene Autry, the like." He mixed it up^with a little Muddy^Waters and Bill Broonzy, and a "stately and beautiful" Jelly Roll Morton, forming the Big Soul Band about 1958. It was a large aggregation, "Wabash Cannonball" to "I Got A Woman," including two saxophones and the third actual bass guitar in Britain, a fact Alex nods to with justifiable pride.

A later off-shoot of that band wound up in Hamburg shortly after the Beatles" residency. "When you talk about beat groups," remembers Alex, "there's ho way you can discount the German experience. It changed everybody around. You had to do such long hours that after awhile everything was reduced to .its mere essentials. Kids that went there, to play the guitar or bass or drums, soon found out the singer just couldn't take it for six hours and more a night. So everybody sang; it kind of put you out of yourself."

Alex shakes his head nostalgically. "It was a wide-open town. We went there straight from Glasgow. We hadn't even been to London yet, but suddenly we were able to watch people like Ray Charles live on stage, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry . .. which was

"...rock and roll takes a certain amount of ignorance."

just completely crazy out of this world; because they never really came to Britain then. All the jukeboxes there catered to American servicemen, and they contained stuff we hadn't dreamed of. Everything was twenty four hours; in Glasgow, the whole place shut up by ten o'clock."

Alex was semi-discovered in Hamburg and fished up by DeutscheGramaphone to counter the Beatles, resulting in a debut album. Sales were minimal, but it helped when they got back to England and found a small following in the r&b oriented Graham Bond — Zoot Money audience. Harvey adtnits Bond was more accomplished technically, but that the Big Soul Band had the edge in "ignorance ... rock and roll takes a certain amount of ignorance. You make up for it in enthusiasm."

Nonetheless, the group folded and Alex eventually went back to Scotland. A publishing company in London took him under their wing for a time with the hopes of making him a nouveau Tom Jones, and after that obvious miscast piddled down the drain, Alex found work as a session guitarist with Hair, a position he fulfilled with on-and-off fervor for nearly five years. In the meanwhile he began writing songs, toying intermittently with the idea of forming a band once again.

"I re-met my present manager — Bill Fehilly — along about this time; he'd been a jazz promotor in Scotland in the

fifties, and apart from my band working for him at times, he was the first guy to bring people like Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane to this country. I used to post bills for him. We talked about forming a band, but that's never completely satisfactory, and then I thought what I might do is find a group that was already together."

Enter Teargas, a struggling musical combine with two albums to their credit and a lack of momentum that was rapidly reaching crisis proportions. "They sounded like what I was looking for... people who could play, but who were a bit uptight as well, a bit angry ... just at the edge, before it goes off. On the verge of gettin" out of control." The necessary arrangements were made, and the two forces inter-locked.

For both, it appears to have become quite a fortuitous collaboration. The ex-Teargas seem aggreeably suited to their supportive role, and guitarist Zal Cleminson provides a willing foil for most of Alex's shenanigans. Harvey boosts them unconditionally: "I think my band is one of the greatest bands in the world potentially, I really do. I mean they can play. We're just scratchin'the surface now .. ."

He may be right. As it stands today, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band is a versatile and highly polished attraction, running from a Fred Astaire-ish Carioca that provides a guitar showpiece for Zal to the melodramatic interlude of Jacques Brel's "Next," a mini-morality play reflecting a young man's loss of innocence. They are assured enough on stage to neatly preen toward a photographer in the midst of a song, and diversified to the point of continual interest. As Alex says to introduce the classic "Gang Bang," "It's not the speed, but the intensity ..."

"I don't know what kind of image I have personally," he shrugs. "I'm a bit old, y'know, to be a teenage idol. I'd like Jo get "em all... I know everybody says this, but I'm as interested in the straights as I am in the kids out there.

"I think that was something we misunderstood about rock and roll, maybe, when it came along. When it started, nobody talked about whether the guitar was in tune, or how dreadful the lyrics were. Just like jazz, it was another four letter word. It meant the same thing; in that way it's timeless. There's always got to be a touch of humor and a touch of insanity to it. Sometimes, thinking about the whole thing, it really gets hilarious to me. I'll be in the dressing room, getting ready, putting on this leather jacket. . . and it's quite funny."

After all these years, it might be said that Alex Harvey has earned his right to the last laugh.