Release Date 1995

Good evening, boys and girls, My name is Harvey...I long ago lost count of the number of times I heard that introduction during the first half of the seventies. 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'. I remember him like this, a small, solidly built black haired man with rough, seamed features, gapped front teeth, eyes both piercing and amused and a grin that hit his face like an earthquake. He had the kind of voice that most English people would consider to be archetypically Glaswegian, and he embodied warmth, compassion and an all-consuming interest in and concern for other people.

What showed most about Alex Harvey the performer was his very 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.

His work derived from a variety of sources: his own experience of growing up in a decaying inner city, the music which he had discovered in his early teens and identified with so thoroughly (the music of artists like Billie Holiday, Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Parker, Django Reingardt, Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, Hank Williams, Big Bill Broonzy and Little Richard), and a rich vein of fantasy. He loved King Kong and Treasure Island, Sergeant Fury and his Howlin' Commandos and Tarzan, Frankenstein and Rio Bravo, Dashiell Hammett and Marlon Brando. In concert, he would demand, "Let me put my hands on you" and - in character as The Faith Healer - he would provide a series of Saturday morning serials that took what was going on outside the cinema into account.

When Alex told his audiences that he loved them they believed him, and the reason that they believed him was that they knew it was true.

When he was in front of an audience he gave himself unreservedly to that audience. A faith healer indeed.

-- Charles Shaar Murray, from the liner notes

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