"GUID eve-ning, boys an' girrls..." Face it. Miami does not know what is happening. The kid with the pudding-basin haircut and the hornrims and the Jerry Lewis face and the Jethro Tull T-shirt and the totally cancelled eyes, a walking definition of the "gormless", is in a state of complete disorientation. So is his girlfriend.

"...Ma name is Harrvey."

And so are the ushers, big black muthas wearing "Hi Fli" sweatshirts - "Hi Fli" being some utterly whacked-out ball games that they play in Miami's Jai Alai Stadium, where all this weirdness is taking place.

Most of the audience are either horsing around the auditorium like good ol'boys (an girrls) should, or else flaking out in their seats under the influence of some particularly vicious local smoke.

Despite the soft drinks only bar, a reasonable number are solidly alked out. In other words they're a Jethro Tull audience.

"Alex Harrvey..."

Which means that they're prepared to be surprised, but only by something that they're expecting.

These kids can be surprised by anything except the unexpected, which is why the spectacle of two pipers in full Highland splendour skirling their way down the aisles and through the theatre has already put them into a state of mild catatonia even before a small shaggy-haired figure wearing a home-made pirate's coat, a hooped T shirt, cut-down Levis shorts and a pair of red, white and blue cowboy boots has wandered out onto the stage and addressed them in a thick Glaswegian accent the like of which they have probably never heard outside a whisky commercial on TV.

"I'd like to introduce you to ma band..."

Which is, after all, the name of the game.

Lemme tell you a little about Miami. It's in-the-South-but-not-the-South (i.e. it's geographically South but sociologically it's sumpn-else-again).

It's so full of Cubans that all the signs are bilingual English and Spanish, it's where American Jews with more money than taste go when they retire on account of the fact that there's no such thing as winter in Florida.

In actual fact, the temperature's generally between 80 and 90 - about the same as it's been in London over the summer - but it's so humid that when you go out it's like being licked all over by a German shepherd.

The air-conditioning's so frosty that you have to put on a jacket on indoors and take it off when you go outdoors.

There are recorded incidences of people catching colds indoors when the temperature's way over 90 outside, and that's about all you need to know about Miami, except that it took me an hour and a half to get through customs and immigration because of hordes of Cubans bringing their families in and customs guys flipping the pages of your books and checking the contents of talcum powder containers with a dip-stick.

"We request your patience - a drug free America comes first."

That's Miami. Now back to our regularly scheduled feature.

There's a "Vambo Rools!" sticker on the front of the Harvey band's dressing room. As if that wasn't enough to tip the world off to their whereabouts, you can hear the pipes tuning up before you even open the door. The pipers' names are Mark and Kyle, and they're about as Scottish as Bob Marley.

Mark is actually Italian, if you wanna get ethnic about it, and affect a coonskin Davy Crockett hat offstage, but they sure look impressive in their costumes.

As ever, the opener is "The Faith Healer", and the audience starts to relax a little. After all a riff is a riff is a riff, and if "the Faith Healer" has anything it's sure got a riff to it. But waitaminnit, who are these guys, anyway?

Sure, all you hip-ass Limey kids know about Chris Glen's pretty-boy pout and exo-jockstrap and Zal Cleminson's... well, you know about Zal Cleminson. If you haven't seen the band, then at least you've seen photos (in fact, you probably saw photos before you even saw the band), whereas these kids are getting the whole thing cold.

The most appropriate description of their reaction is probably "bemused hostility". After all, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band is nothing at all like Z.Z. Top and not a bit like Led Zeppelin and bears no relation at all to Yes or the Average White Band or David Bowie and has only the most tenuous conceptual connection with Alice Cooper or Jethro Tull...

Well, yeah, the SAHB's ain't really much like anything except an animated rock and roll comic book, and if something is like nothing else you've ever had to react to before, that means that your reaction is going to have to be like no reaction you've ever had before... but we got us an audience here that is a trifle - uh - out of it and having trouble getting it reactions together.

So let's hunker down behind the mixing desk behind which the band's invaluable producer/tour manager/soundmeister Davey Batchelor is doing his usual masterly job - yeah, right next to the two chicks who're squealing, "But Jethro Tull's manager said we could sit here" - and try and see this thing through, shall we?

You'll remember we in Miami...

Okay. End of number and scattered applause. "This next song", enunciates Harvey carefully, "is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson". The band comes down hard into "The Tomahawk Kid" while the audience rummages through its collective subconscious and tries to remember who Robert Louis Stevenson is while up on the stage Alex careers into his next fantasy.

Hugh McKenna - alias "Johnny Kool" - is wearing (Hi, Lisa!) a white silk bathrobe that he probably thinks look kung fu but just makes him look like he's just climbed out of the bath and didn't have time to dress for the gig, and despite the fact that the heat is playing hell with his keyboards - makes 'em go out of tune and such - he's wailin'.

Whenever he takes a synthesiser solo, he duplicates almost exactly the tone of Zal's guitar, leaving Zal free to either block out granite rhythm guitar or double up on those dentist 's drill licks.

The set is ridiculously short - a mere 40 minutes, give or two weirdness - with no encores. It's all part of the Support Band Blues - like not getting a mention in the programme, like taking a chance of getting a sound check. There's been a certain edge between Tull and the SAHBs, even though Barriemore Barlow drums with the Harvey band during the sound checks, and though it's resolved by a simple twist of fate at the end of the tour, it's most definitely there.

"We were going t'have a football game today," sighs Harvey that evening. "Us v Tull. Then Ian Anderson calls a rehearsal. With two dates to go he calls a rehearsal. For hell's sake..."

So the set is short and packed tight with tried-and-trusted Harvey specials like "Delilah", which messes up the audience's mind but good, bro'. Harvey blandly announces that it's number three in Britain (the previous night he'd said number eight), and the audience is roused to laughter by Zal and Chris' Hanna-Barbara while-the-cat's-away cartoon-mouse dance routine.

"Sometimes," says Harvey, "sometimes they call me the last of the teenage idols."

Now that's going way back. "The Last of the Teenage Idols" was a piece de resistance from "Next...", the second SAHB album, released in late '73, and it's been more than two years since they last performed it in Britain.

It's a strong number though, and it gets up steam for the closer which starts, in time-honoured fashion with the extraordinary catharsis of "Framed", which is all it's ever been in Britain, and more.

Cleminson's guitar-hero routine has grown even more frenzied and psychotic with the passing of time and... yeah, there's more.

From his vantage point in front of his bull-dozered brick wall, Harvey begins to harangue the audience "Do you believe that I was framed? Do you believe me?"

Mixed bag of yeah, no-ways, boos and assorted catcalls.

"Inconclusive", muses Harvey (the hoodlum jacket contrasting most strange with the shorts). "Yes", and he holds up the mike while the yeahs come back. "No!" and the noes out-load the yesses. He gets back into the song and it crunches to a halt while he sits up there swinging his legs off his little platform.

"You're 200 years old this year...right?" The audience applauds loudly. "You've got every race, creed, colour, nationality and culture that's ever been. You're the biggest, strongest and most powerful nation that's ever been...

"Don't fuck it up."

And he bangs one hand onto the microphone, laying down a beat that's picked up by Ted McKenna at the drums, and over that he chants his incantation. "Don't-buy-any-bullets. Doan't make any bullets. Doan't shute any bullets, an' doan't pess in thawater supply".

And as he removes the final mask and speaks to them direct through the final ritual of "Anthem" and shines a light-gun into the audience as the pipers re-enter, the kids, unbidden, make double peace signs and begin to sway entranced as the slow uncurling melody fills the hall.

That audience may not be sure whether it like Alex Harvey or not. None of them may ever lay down their bucks for one of his albums. But they sure ain't gonna forget they saw him for quite... some... time.

ALEX HARVEY has this thing about sharks. He's seen 'Jaws', one of America's two biggest movie hits at the moment (the other being 'Rollerball'), more than once, has started collecting spin-off books and magazines, and is currently trying to convince his go'jus wife Trudi that it'll be perfectly alright if he climbs into the shark tank at the Miami Seaquarium.

"They're well-fed", he insists. "They won't attack unless they're hungry." He leans over the railing and dangles Trudi's shawl into the water. As eight-foot-long shark noses lazily through the water ignoring the fabric trailing on the surface of the water. Sharks ain't dumb. Everybody knows y'caint eat shawls.

"Oh, come on, Alec", she remonstrates. She knows Harvey ain't gonna go play submariner with the sharks. Harvey knows he's staying on dry land, but he feels like getting talked out of it. So he skips around checking out the whales and the dolphins and all manner of exotic marine life... and getting so knocked out that 'Jaws' may even get to replace 'King Kong' as Alex Harvey's greatest movie of all time. Maybe.

There are all kinds of toys there, dolphin rocking horses you can ride, a diver's mask you can wear, souvenir books, T-shirts, postcards and every other manifestation of American tack sensibility, and Harvey, a bizarre little figure in his singlet, shorts and those godamn cowboy boots, runs around exclaiming, "Will ye look at tha'? For f#?ks sake!!" and just generally having the time of his life while the band indulgently trail him around and broil in the sun.

"When I grow up", murmurs Barbara Birdfeather, the band's American P.R, "I want to be killer whale," but I think Harvey, if he can't get to be a whale or a shark, wants to be a crocodile.

He's got this book, see, about the intertwined destinies of Man and Croc, one of the illustrations of which is a photograph of a cardboard box containing the remnants of a man who's just had a fairly serious difference of opinion with one of them there crocs.

Plus there are photographs of baby crocs in the process of hatching, still only halfway out of the egg and they already look vicious as hell. For a man of peace, Harvey is certainly into sources of potential gore and mayhem.

Still, even the promise of getting him into the headlines doesn't lure Trudy into allowing him into the water, so he bops off and inspects the dolphins, poses with everything in sight that can possibly be posed with, and then goes away for his din-din.

Up in the room, someone's messing with the tape machine while a couple of glitter groupies roll and light a series of man-eating smokes.

The occasion is the playing of a bunch of tapes that could end up as the successor to the new live album. The working titles are "Alex Harvey's Greatest Hits" and "The Attic Tapes", and they-re... well, theyre.

Let's talk about that later. They consist of duel-to-the-death with various songs by other artists that have at some point passed through the SAHB's stage act over the last coupla years - things like Del Shannon's "Runaway", Alice Cooper's "School's Out", the Osmonds' "Crazy Horses", (stop laughing, it's later than you think), cowboy songs, pub songs, a jazz-funk piece in 9/4, a frenetic, chaotic rock and roll jam with missed beats falling like skittles and Harvey haranguing the band like a stoned sergeant-major.

All kinds of ridiculous stuff, fabulous fun for all the family, thrills, spills and chills, non-stop action all in colour for a dime, fracture your frame of reference the Alex Harvey way- today!!!

No way it is the local next step in the continuing story of everyday rock and roll madmen that began with "Framed" and worked its way through "Next..", "The Impossible Dream", and "Tomorrow Belongs to Me".

Instead, it's more of a combination of "These Foolish Pin-Ups" and "The Basement Tapes", bit of additional information and entertaining oddments, clues as to the background of what's been going on and what may be going on in the future.

God knows when it's coming out or in what form. In fact I may have hallucinated the whole thing

FOUR A.M. The morning after the second Miami gig, with two more dates to go before the end of the tour, some sneaky muthas ripped off the SAHB's truck. It contained all the band's instruments, including a snare drum that'd been in Ted McKenna's family for more than 30 years. Alex's beat up old Telecaster that he's had since 1960, his leather jacket, his pirate coat... all insured, of course, but still a hell of a drag for all concerned.

And Jethro Tull came through for them, loaning gear and guitars and keyboards... Ian Anderson even lent Alex his black leather jacket to wear during "Framed". The camaraderie of the road, man. When it counts, it sometimes comes through.

"Shit", Harvey hisses through his teeth. "Ah doan' mind about the gear...tha's nothin'. But I had two 'Sgt. Fury' comics in that truck!"

Alex Harvey is not left handed.

ADDENDUM: Me and Joe Stevens runs into Alex a few days later in the "Other End" bar in New York's Bleeker Street. During a six a.m. cab hunt, a moocher hits on him around 14th Street and asks him for a nickel to help him get home. Instead of doing what a native New Yorker would (which is simply walk faster and ignor him), Harvey turns around to face his new acquaintance.

"Excuse me, Chief", he sez. "Excuse me...I was just goin' to ask you for a dollar for me an' ma friends... we're tryin' to get some money so we can get back to Scotland."

The moocher is... confused. He mumbles back that he wants a nickel.

"Oh, no chief", Alex admonishes him. "That's a sucker's game, that. You'll never get anywhere askin' for nickels. We're after dollars."

Amen.