The automatic beer vendor is trying to be difficult. Alex Harvey is not pleased. The recalcitrant machine refuses to function, displaying blind disobedience in the face of Harvey's patient exhortations.
He retreats a little and stares at this particularly obstinate hunk of technology. He strikes one of his theatrical punk poses,
arms folded across the chest of his black tee shirt (which hangs loose around his throat), his head inclined to one side,
just the meanest suspicion of a sneer on his face.
He doesn't look too far removed from the Glasgow hoodlum he may once have been. One could quite easily imagine him hanging out on some street corner, scarred leather jacket and jeans, blade at the hip. Just the kind of image to reduce Bruce Springsteen's melodramatic street persona to the level of kindergarten fantasy.
If the Alex Harvey of legend - and almost every musician born north of Carlisle seems to have at least one anecdote to add to the Harvey myth - would never have been out of place at a parking lot rumble or haunting the tenements on the loose for a little vandalism, the Alex Harvey we have here is all together more restrained.
"F--- it," he says, delivering a flat handed slap to the chrome and plastic skin of the machine.
We retire to the reception area of the Bee-Hive Hotel (it has a Drone Bar, but the waitresses are dressed in anonymous blue uniforms, not a yellow and black striped outfit in sight).
This hotel is the headquarters for the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's assault on nearby Watford. The band is coming up for its third birthday, observes Harvey, and they're preparing themselves for something significant.
After two years of fighting audiences they began, last year, to feel the first signs of an increasing respect. They were beginning to communicate. It's been no easy journey, there's been no level of compromise, but now they're on the very precipice of an international break-through. Success is coming far more quickly in America than they had anticipated.
When he formed this band it wasn't so much a case of a last stand, but a new beginning. Harvey's experience was instantly transmitted to his musicians. "There was a wedding of ideals. When I first saw Tear Gas, I knew they had to be my band. I saw them in Arran, and it can be pretty wild over there.
"Good natured kids, basically, but they get drunk and shout and wanna fight a bit. Tear Gas were a hard, stomping band, and they were very defiant. I'd been around long enough to know what a good band was... and seeing them individually, like Zal cutting loose and becoming a complete maniac, it was completely brain bending.
"I sensed there was something very strong which we could create between us."
Harvey's concept of what this band should determine to achieve - an idea which has developed over the last two albums,
especially in the creation of Vambo - evolved from a natural appreciation of theatre and the dramatic extension of the rock
and roll impulse.
"I always thought we could be more than rock and roll. We had to move, somehow, towards the future. I always thought that a group should be a miniature theatre... four musicians, a dancer and a mad scientist."
The excitement, the essential viability of rock, argues Harvey, is in its sense of outrage, its dismissal of moderation in pursuit of the extreme.
"The violence of rock, especially of SAHB, who when they put their minds to it can generate a ferocious energy, has to be seen in a theatrical context. We became known as a violent band," he says.
"I'd like to wipe all that away. I like us to go to the edge, but we've got the respect from an audience that enables us to control a situation."
Violence, in its most senseless manifestations, has no place in Harvey's philosophy, "One of the things I hate in life, something I can't f--- stand, is someone trying to be bigger than someone else. Trying to assume power and spitting on people. B---- to that.
"These people who wreck hotels, it's a form of pollution. It's needless. Smashing up a hotel is exactly the same as some firm coming along and dumping oil waste in a lake, then saying, "It'll be cool, man, we can pay for the damage.' It's a mental disease, which causes friction. No one needs that."
The violence which erupted at Stoke, he says, made him angry and desperate because it was, really, so pathetic. "Those kids are smart, smarter than I was at their age. It made me so sad. I got very, VERY angry with them, and I started to snarl. Y'know at times like that, I don't panic. It was an emergency, I just felt, 'This is IT.'
"You have to be clear and precise in a situation like that, because it's dangerous and you can't fool around."
That rare moment of communication emphasized something which Alex has always considered characteristic of SAHB. It's their ability to speak in the language of the street.
"Once you've been on the street," Alex once said (it was after the Apollo concert last year), "you can never lose that
feeling. You become part of that atmosphere. It's not something you can assume. You're lost if you try that one."
Vambo, is an extension of that experience, the ultimate street hero, the central character in the intricate SAHB mythology - "I like that word, it has implications.
"Vambo... he's a bit like Spiderman, but closer to the street. There's nothing you can teach Vambo about the street and its people. He's an example, NOT a leader. There's no place for leaders. Politics is dead.
"Rock and roll, I don't really like to say this, IS politics, now." There's a new language evolving through Vambo and the approach of Vibrania, the new state heralded by "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." It's a language based on visual symbols, marked by the quality of graffiti.
"It has the urgency, it's brief. It's assimilated the quality of speed... I left school at 14. I can't spell very well. That's maybe got a lot to do with it." He remembers reading Last Of The Mohicans and being impressed by Fenimore Cooper's description of a clearing in a forest.
It was an immaculate evocation, he says, and he was impressed by the power of the language. Then he read a Classics Illustrated version of the book. There was the same scene.
"In one frame of illustration, that's all it took to capture the same feeling. It took Fenimore Cooper two pages, maybe, to write. But there it was summed up in a single frame. Rock and roll should be like that. A thousand stories in a thousand pictures."
Alex's music, the new album particularly, works with that economy and dramatic precision. Nothing is manipulated for effect, he stresses, you have to have an appreciation of the spontaneous. It's like street theatre, there's a cheapness about it which adds to the sense of the all important outrage.
©1996-2002 dwm