Release Date 1978 Information here comes from the All-Music Guide and from the album. ALBUM RELEASES - CD Mountain 37782 1993 CD Vertigo/Phonogram 514415-2 1978 LP Mountain 114

PERSONNEL Alexander Harvey -- Guitar, Vocal, Trumpet Zal Cleminson -- Guitar, Vocals Tommy Eyre -- Keyboards, Vocals Chris Glen -- Bass, Vocals Ted McKenna -- Drums, Vocals Guy Bidmead -- Engineer Recorded at Ridge Farm, Dorking, with the Maison Rouge Mobile and at Basing St. Studios, London

ALBUM TRACKS

1. Rock Drill .......... 6:22
   (A. Harvey/T. Eyre)
   
2. Dolphins .......... 6:10
   (A. Harvey/H. McKenna/A. Cleminson/C. Glen)
   
3. Rock' N' Roll .......... 3:40
   (A. Harvey/H. McKenna/A. Cleminson)
   
4. King Kong .......... 3:15
   (M. Steiner)
   
5. Booids .......... 1:38
   (Trad./Arr.: A. Harvey/A. Cleminson/C. Glen/E. McKenna/T. Eyre)
   
6. Who Murdered Sex? .......... 5:16
   (A. Harvey/T. Eyre/A. Cleminson)
   
7. Nightmare City .......... 3:48
   (A. Harvey)
   
8. Water Beastie .......... 4:50
   (A. Harvey)
   
9. Mrs. Blackhouse .......... 3:34
   (A. Harvey)

Fast-rewind action replay instant update: The Sensational Alex Harvey Band did a slow-motion disintegration number after Alex fell off a stage and did his back in. They recorded one last album - this one - and did a few more gigs, but due to this and that things were never quite the same again. Keyboard player Hugh McKenna, the musical ideas man of the band, quit and was replaced by Tommy Eyre, then the whole thing went smash in a mass of bad vibes and litigation.

Guitarist Zal Cleminson, bassist Chris Glen and drummer Ted McKenna stuck together in a band called Zal, but according to current reports they're - ummmm - sort of interesting, which presumably means that they're a trifle on the shambolic side but should be good if and/or when they get it together.

Alex, on the other hand, tried for a major comeback gig t'other week, but since Mountain did a legal on his which put the kibosh on his performing the "Vibrania Suite" which he's been working on for the last three or four years, he was forced to revise half his show at the last minute and the results - going by what I've read in the papers, since I missed the gig owing to a bad case of being in the States at the time - allegedly made Titanic look like the biggest success since Fleetwood Mac.

This would not seem to augur well for "Rock Drill": a posthumously released elpee by a band which has not exactly set the world alight since dissolving into it's component parts.

Bear in mind that most of it was recorded under conditions of intense physical and emotional stress: Alex was already talking vaguely about retirement; he was sick to death of the way that his gigs had become increasingly transformed into mere ritual; he was sickened by the rock biz; his back injury meant that for most of the time he was either in intense pain or else whacked out on painkillers.

Not exactly the circumstances - as you will appreciate - most likely to produce music of a rousing good humour or an uncomplicated raunch.

So - magnum opus or indigestible morass? Do the SAHB make their collective exit with a bang or a whimper? Read on.

"Rock Drill" has the slightly uncomfortable aura of an album which has been assembled after the fact. At times - particularly during the "Rock Drill Suite" that occupies the first side - edits flash by lie telegraph poles on a train journey. The credits state "Produced by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band"; Remixed by David Batchelor, which would seem to indicate that Batchelor was called in to turn the band's tapes into an album.

The "Rock Drill Suite" is an extraordinary mixture of the riveting and the tedious. The side is dominated by Eyre's massively portentous multi-overdubbed neo-orchestral keyboards; a towering edifice of art-rock excess which sets out to be ominous and Gothic but all too frequently ends up being grandiosely redundant. Zal Cleminson's excellent guitar is sadly underexposed throughout, neglected in favour of keyboards, keyboards, keyboards and still more keyboards. Only Ted McKenna's rocking, powerful drums - recorded with a relatively unmodified "live" sound - eschew bullshit all the way.

Alex himself is onstage for only about half the suite, and whatever energy and bollocks the side possesses come from him. When Alex is singing - or talking - the music ceases to be oppressively Wagnerian and is relegated to the status of scenery, and sometimes his presence hangs over the music even when he's not actually flapping his lips.

However, there "are" long slices of outright tedium, which would suggest that the "Rock Drill Suite" would have had enormously greater impact had it's energy not been dissipated by extending it to a full side. Some judicious editing would have helped. As it is. some of the most powerful singing and writing of Harvey's entire career is buried in a piece of music so long and unwieldy that many potential listeners will be put off; there's an awful lot of sludge between the good bits.

The songs on the second side are lighter fare. After the brief instrumental "Booids" we get "Who Murdered Sex?" which starts with a bit of Harvey mouth percussion and leads into a number which is both zany and rocking as it features Harvey reciting a series of sex mag small-ads in a progressively mounting delirium that would do credit to Frank Zappa.

"Nightmare City" is the nearest this to old-time straight-ahead SAHB rock on the album, and the splendidly loopy "Water Beastie", which opens up with a bit of yerractual Scots traditional vocalising, moves into a charming reggae-ish ditty about the Loch Ness Monster.

Now it gets weird.

Around the time that the album was being recorded, Alex and Chris Glen played me a tape of "No Complaints Department", a killer song which was one of the best things the band had ever produced, and I was eagerly awaiting the album so that I could hear it again. If you peel away the sticker that gives the track listing for the second side of this album, you'll see that "No Complaints Department" was originally intended to be the final track on the album, a potentially great farewell to the SAHB.

It's not here.

Instead, the album signs off with "Mrs Blackhouse", Alex's well intentioned but ultimately fatuous song about Mary Whitehouse, a weak, ineffectual closer.

I loved the SAHB for their energy, their wit, for their imagination and for the fact that they really cared about the kids they played to. It ended sadly and badly, and "Rock Drill" is an only partially satisfactory end to the story.

The worst of it is, as I've said, tedious in the extreme, but at it's best it's truly desperate music for the desperate hours. If you loved the Sensational Alex Harvey Band only half as much as I did, you won't want to miss it.

Review courtesy a SAHB List contributor: Used here with the author's kind permission.

©1996-2002 dwm