Fifteen years older than his charges, SAHB's self-appointed leader was aslo something of a local hero winning a Daily Record competition to find "Scotland's Tommy Steele" in 1957 and playing Hamburg's Top Ten Club in 1963 leading Alex Harvey And His Soul Band. He later also played in the pit band for the musical Hair. Another previous engagement was as a lion-tamer. In short, he'd lived a bit.

The new outfit's debut, Framed, was a spunky, hard rock album, recorded and mixed in just three days. Both the title track and I Just Wanna Make Love To You were songs Harvey had been playing since his Soul Band days. "It was almost like a live album", remembers SAHB guitarist Zal Cleminson. "The band was progressing quickly and we already had a substantial live following."

In 1973, with glam stomping across the air-waves, it was decided that SAHB's second album should be a more lavish affair with at least one eye on the Zeitgeist. "Phil Wainman had just had hits with Mud and The Sweet, and live, we were all in costumes and make-up," says drummer Ted McKenna. Wainman seemed like a logical choice as producer, and he and SAHB ensconced themselves at Audio International in west London to begin work on Next.

Without underplaying Cleminson's wonderful guitar work - viz Vambo Marble Eye and The Faith Healer - or compromising Harvey's rock-burlesque vision, Wainman developed arrangements with brass and strings, and coaxed some stellar performances. He must have realised fairly quickly that single-chart success was unlikely. Both The Faith Healer and Last Of The Teenage Idols stretched to over seven minutes, and Gang Bang was decidedly 'adult'. The album's title track, a cover of a Jacques Brel song about mobile army brothels, was hardly going to get SAHB on Magpie, either.

"I think the subject matter of Next appealed to Alex's slightly warped sense of humour", says Cleminson. "He liked the fact that it was about guys in the Foreign Legion having their arses slapped by big hairy sergeants as they wandered about the showers." The guiatarist also recalls that a willingness to tackle material in any style was part of Harvey's 'sensational' remit. Next, a tragi-comic tango featuring sections which dropped to string-quartet and vocal, was a challenge they met with undeniable panache.

One of the album's most gripping tracks is The Faith Healer, a slow-building epic with the refrain "Can I put my hands on you" repeated to sinister effect, it's built around a gargantuan throb which sounds spookily animate. The contraption that generatd that sound was the Tootlebug Drone. When Alex was engaged at Hair in Shaftesbury Avenue in 1968 he'd had the device custom-built for him by electronics boffin Ashley Tootle. Big Bud's Brass, the musicians who parped bawdily on Gang Band, were also friends that Harvey had made while at Hair.

Speaking on the telephone today, Ted McKenna quickly acknowledges that Gang Bang was less than PC. "I remember Alex saying something like 'Don't knock it if you've never tried it'," he says, fending off good-natured heckling from his wife. "The important thing to emphasise is that the woman in the song is a willing participant," he adds. "Alex wasn't unaware of the psychological damage stuff like that could do - he was just pointing out that it was something that went on, and that it went on for a reason."

Both McKenna and Cleminson remember Harvey as a larger-than-life figure who was also a great leader and motivator. "When we were in Tear Gas we thought we were the dog's bollocks," says Cleminson, "but in SAHB, Alex took the bull by the horns. Initally we were in awe of him, but on the later albums there was too much band influence and not enough Alex." McKenna recalls Harvey reading up on military strategy and enthralling them with tales about the Trojans. "His job was to marshall the troops like a general, as he puts it."

Harvey's vision for the band is clearest on Next. His faux-naif crooning on part three of Last Of The Teenage Idols, and exaggerated sibilance on Swampsnake (a la Ka from Disney's Jungle Book) are wonderfully theatrical. Harvey's background meant that he instinctively wrote for the stage, where characters like The Faith Healer and Vambo became much more potent. The fact that the album didn't chart until SAHB had toured with it speaks volumes. (In fact it didn't enter the charts until 1975, when the group were well established.)

Perhaps the age difference between him and his band prompted it, but even at 38, much of Harvey's input on Next was derived from a nostalgic look over his shoulder. Last Of The Teenage Idols was a clear reference to the Tommy Steele competition, Vambo Marble Eye was inspired by the comic books he'd read as a child, and Giddy Up A Ding Dong had been a hit for Freddie Bell And The Bellboys at the height of skiffle. "That song's from Alex's youth, his time singing round campfires up at Loch Lomond trying to be Elvis or Bill Haley," says Cleminson. "I think it was a Number 1 for us in Sweden."

SAHB were among the casualities of punk and split in 1977. Harvey - no stranger to the punk spirit himself - kept working. He'd just finished a four week tour of Belgium when he died of a heart attack on February 4, 1982.

This article appeared originally in the August, 1999 issue of MOJO.
Article reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

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