Return of the Gorbals Stormtrooper
At 44, Alex Harvey is a veteran of nearly 3 decades of rock n' roll. Last week in Glasgow he opened the latest chapter in an extraordinary career. Allan Jones provides the footnotes:

The new band was in the hotel bar celebrating Its debut. Harvey was in the lobby, entertaining the police.

"They're jes' bebbies" he observed ruefully, introducing the 2 young constables.

"They're facin' up to the toughest city in the country, an' they're jes' wee bebbies."

They had young innocent faces flushed with the cold of the Glasgow night and between them they shared less than 5 years service on the Glasgow police force. They considered themselves fortunate to be patrolling one of the less volatile precincts of the city.

"Blackhill. Easterhouse. Parts of Castlemilk. Govan. They're the real no go areas," one of them remarked, swirling the whisky in his glass.

"You should see Blackhill..." I told him I had. "The police station there, its like a small fort. No windows, barred doors. Its under siege most of the time."

It was astonishing to think that when Harvey ran with the gangs in the Glasgow in the 40s, they weren't even born. They were intrigued to learn from Alex something of the atmosphere of the city during that violent era. Harvey told them that Glasgow's reputation for violence was exaggerated.

"There're were a lot of bad, bad boys around", he conceded. He mentioned Jimmy Boyle, now incarcerated in Glasgow's notorious Barlinnie prison. There were Theres, though, some of them even more dangerous. "Few of the gangs were actually armed, though" he said. "Unless there were a war on. It was the guys who were too fucken mental to trust that carried the armory - the bayonets, the fucken cannons. "

The two policemen nodded. There were still a lot of lunatics on the street. One of them told us about a recent arrest he had made on Sauchiehall street. He and his neighbour/Partner had noticed 2 men walking up and down a queue outside a club. One of the men barged into the crowd. Someone complained. The man whipped out a meat cleaver from beneath his overcoat and sliced open the head of the man who had complained.

"That poor bastard was scarred for life. The guy with the hatchet got 18 months. He was out inside a year."

"Its allus been the same", Harvey sympathized. "Some guy breaks intae a house, hammers a chisel through some fuckers head and meks off wi' a coupla quid. The police move intae grab him and he's got 12 bayonets, two shotguns and a rifle. He gets to the court and they let him off 'cos There's insufficient evidence. . . "

The Theree constable told us that last year he'd been attacked by a drunk with a knife. His attacker was fined £15 and bound over for a year. There was simply no deterrent, the law was too weak, the courts were afraid.

"I've been thinken about a plan for a perfect society", Harvey said, outraged. "In this perfect society, There's no prisons. Nothing. You can commit any crime you want to. Murder, robbery, litterin'. But you can only do it ONCE. If you do it again, you're arrested and killed. No trial, no apology. No promises that you wont do it again. You're jes' killed. "

"It seems a wee bit extreme", one of the policemen said, laughing uncomfortably.

"No one said, paradise would be cheap", said Harvey.

You should see it when its full. Half empty, with the circle closed and the stalls naked, the Apollo is cheerless, cold, a cavernous void. The first time I came here, the Apollo was full and it was a marvelous sight: alive, bursting with the excited anticipation of its audience. That was the first time the SAHB had headlined at the Apollo, and the Glasgow audience received them like returning heroes. SAHB were an electrifying experience in those days, a deranged guerilla outfit rampaging through the sterile certainties of mid seventies Rock, a kinetic rock n' roll pantomime. Consigned to memory now, of course, since Harvey walked out on them in November 1977, disillusioned and confused.

His career since the demise of SAHB has been afflicted by business complications and lawsuits, so he's gigged infrequently. There was the memorable extravaganza at the London Palladium in March, 1978. Unannounced appearances at pub gigs in London and Glasgow. But no records and no permanent band until RCA released " The Mafia Stole My Guitar" last December.

And now he has returned to the boards with the new band and a debut tour whose first date is at the Apollo on a bleak January night. No vast, cheering crowds this time. Rumours suggest that only 200 advance tickets had been sold, that people were being let in free at the door. There were 1000 curious souls in the audience when the lights finally went down and the prerecorded fanfares announced the imminent arrival of the new Alex Harvey Band.

"How the mighty are fallen," someone cynically remarked. Alex bore his disappointment philosophically.

"I had tae tell ma own cousins I was playin' tonight."

If the new band presently lacks the dazzling theatrical flourish of SAHB, it is no less eccentric in design and appearance. What a motley crew they are! Decked out, at Harvey's insistence, in full evening dress (with the leader in a crumpled white tuxedo) they look like hell's own cabaret band.

The rhythm section, and guitarist Matthew Cang, are young and precocious; Tommy Eyre looks like a slightly bewildered estate agent with neatly trimmed whiskers and gold framed glasses, and the two saxophonists, who give the music a tremendous thrust, look like throwbacks to Alex's past. indeed, one of them, Bill Patrick, played in Glasgow dance bands with Alex in 1956. the other, Don Weller, is an almost Falstaffian figure, fleetingly reminiscent of Zero Mostel. The new Band invites only brief comparisons with SAHB (most notably on new arrangements of SAHB standards like Faith healer, Midnight Moses and Next). The music is more restrained, more considered in its evocation of specific atmospheres. NAHB, compared to SAHB are perhaps a little over rehearsed. The vital spark of surprise is not yet there.

Harvey, though, remains as singularly unpredictable as ever. One of the great Rock showmen, he carries the melodrama of the new material with swashbuckling panache, leering over the lip of the stage, his battered features contorted with passion and rage, his voice a hoarse sirens wail of barely contained ferocity. His direct empathy with his audience remains an unchallenged delight.

The strength of the new material from "The Mafia" resides in its acute marshaling of Harvey's talent for extended narratives, colourful, moving and picturesque.

"Back to the Depot", a deranged, surreal epic sprawled across a vivid canvas.

"Wait for Me Mama", an evocation of the charge of the light brigade (Harvey's themes are nothing if not unusual) was prefaced by a typical indictment of the military's exploitation of the Scottish working class - "It was allus the mad jocks they had in the front line, getten wasted by shrapnel and shit. . . " he elaborated later. "They useta tell youse: kill a darkee, kill a rusheean, kill a chinese, kill anyone who's not scottish. . . ; Are youse gonnae keep fallin' for it?"

The concert ended with an unexpected version of Marley's "Small Axe", translated into a thrilling Rock anthem, with great, flaring horn lines and a wild, rousing chorus to which the audience lent passionate vocal support.

"Guneet, ma bebbies", he said at the end, as the audience clamoured around the foot of the stage. "God bless youse."

"It had tae be done an it had tae be done here", Harvey said later, explaining why he had decided to make such an ambitious debut with the new band. "I had tae see if I still had th' arrogance to go out an' shake ma arse. . . Im 44. I didn't know if I could still do it. i knew that if I could do it here i could do it anywhere. . . " He looked pleased, and a little relieved.

"Y asked me before the gig whether I was nervous. I felt righteous. i belong on that stage, nowhere else. "

I wondered whether he had felt nostalgic for SAHB, missed them tonight.

"Oh, aye" he said. "The tears I held back woulda filled buckets. But you go on, y know. . . if there's one feelin' I have, it's one of loneliness, overwhelmin' loneliness. It hits me sometime that Im the only one still doin' it. . . there's no one else I started with thas still doin' it. Like, we were talkin' about General Grimes (an old friend of Harvey's and a former member of the Big Soul Band). General Grimes was one of the last. . . and he's givin up now, too. He's forgotten Hank Williams, forgotten Jimmie Rodgers, forgotten Broonzy and Leadbelly. They was magic, those people. . . but Im 44, an' I ain't forgotten. I'm still shakin' ma arse. There's no one else ma age. . . fuck, there are guys 15 years younger than me, given up, singin' in fucken clubs. . . I dunno - there's your man, McCartney. Sounds like an old fucken man. Tell me this, do youse think Paul McCartney meks records jes' tae annoy me, personally - or does he wannae get up everyone's fucken nose wi' his fucken antics?"

He is reminded, by a local reporter, that McCartney sold out the Apollo.

"An' I didnae, is tha whayouse sayin'?" Harvey demanded. "Lissen - if youse put me an' Paul McCartney ina room wi' a 100 people, an they didnae know who we were and you give us a guitar each and we sat at opposite ends of the room and played, do youse know wha would happen?"

The reported declared his ignorance.

"I'd have 99 people up ma end of th' room", Harvey declared with a wild, mischievous grin.

"An he'd have one . An' tha'd probably be his wife."

I asked what he thought if it was Lennon, instead of McCartney in that room with him.

"Ah", he crackled. "He'd have one hundred an one people up his end of the room. He mighta been sittin on it fer years, but he still knows how tae shake his arse. . . an thas what rockenroll is all about. Knowing what tae do wiyer arse."

Article reproduced without permission of the author. Transcribed by Ulf Nawrot

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