ALEX HARVEY'S GLASGOW

"Jesus Christ" he says, looking at the devastation around him, the tenement where he lived for 17 years with his parents and younger brother Leslie not now much more than rubble, "Where do you think its all fuckin' gone?" He wanders down the street, awash with memories.

"There was a woman, lived along here, had a goat" he remembers. "There was a sunday school on that corner. We used to sing there.... My cup runneth over... Too fuckin' right. God didn't have much of a chance up here. There was hundreds of people in this street. And there were lines of demarcation. If you didn't live here you weren't welcome. It was OUR territory and you didnae fuck wi' us. There was a stable here somewhere. There was a big hole. We used to drop bread into it, that horrible fuckin' hole, and the rats would come out for the bread and we'd drop bricks on the little bastards and squash 'em tae fuck.

"Come over here", he says then, "See this wall?" He's looking for something now. "There used to be a bullet hole... Aye, fuck, it's still fuckin' there. Will ye look at that?"

Standing there on Thistle Street in the rain, he sounds almost wistful. He's reminded then of something else.

"Over there," he says, pointing to some desolate waste ground. "There was a terrible incident. Some kids got two police dogs, cut their heads off and pinned them to a wall with bayonets."

At the time of which I'm writing, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, in these grisly pre-punk years, are just about the most exciting band in the country and Alex is enjoying what will sadly turn out to be a brief but glorious period of commercial success. I'm here in Glasgow to write a Melody Maker profile on him and his hometown. Which means that for nearly a week, I follow him from pub to pub, meeting extraordinary people from his past and listening to one astonishing story after another.

In a pub in Govan, he's talking about Glasgow during the war.

"Clydebank got hammered. Flattened. Fuckin' decimated. The Luftwaffe had it in for us. I remember people in the streets, weeping and crying. You'd start missing people. They just wouldn't be there any more. The fuckin' streets where they lived wouldn't be there. A lot of kids got it. If you were in a tenement, you burned. There was no escape."

A couple of drinks later, he's telling me why he was determined to avoid National Service.

"I wasnae gonna fight for the fuckin' English." he says. "I'd been brought up in a single-end in a tenement. Me and my old man and my mother and brother. And these people come along and say, 'Fight for your country!' In this place I lived, there were rats crawling through the walls. Fight for that? For Christ's sake, what were they talking about? I couldn't have cared less if the fuckin' Germans had come and taken the Gorbals. They could have had it any time they fuckin' liked. They were welcome to it. I mean, I hold no brief for Hitler. He was a monster and should have been smothered at birth. But I wasnae gonna fight in the fuckin' Army to protect the fuckin' Gorbals. This was a place, right, where 100 kids had to use the same shithouse. Where families were crammed into one fuckin' room with a picture of the Queen on the wall where the rats were crawling. 'Join the Army and protect your country!' they told us. That was our country. Rats and tenements. And no fucker was protecting us from that."

Later that night, in a pub in the Gorbals, we meet a couple of Alex's friends from the old days when Glasgow was known as "No Mean City" and gangs ran wild here, hard men with fearsome reputations for violence. Their names are General Grimes, who used to play bass in Harvey's legendary Big Soul Band, and Joe McCourtney, a former Glasgow club owner. Joe's telling us about he small army of bouncers he used to employ -- "Very heavy gentlemen, kinda guys who run through walls" -- and what happened to one of them after he discovered a group of rival bouncers in one of Joe's clubs, opening beer cans with knives, in contravention of a local peace treaty.

This led to a bit of a scrap and one of Joe's men tore into a couple of the rival bouncers, beating them wickedly. Three of the rival bouncers swore revenge, went back to the club looking for Joe's man. They found him outside the club, caught in a mass of people jammed on a stairway. Over 800 people were locked out of the club that night, and there was nowhere for Joe's man to run.

He made it to a landing on the second or third floor of the building where Joe's club was, and that's where they caught him. They stabbed him dozens of times in the back and stomach and took off his head with a hatchet.

"They completely destroyed the man." Joe tells us grimly. "It was the most terrible thing I've ever seen."

We're all a bit quiet for a moment, then General Grimes pipes up.

"More drinks fer fuck's sek!" he insists.

Much, much later, we're in a mini-cab hurtling through the Gorbals. Alex and General Grimes are in the back. harvey's thrashing away at a huge banjo. The General's having a few problems with his 12-string acoustic and they're both more than a little worse for wear after the seven ours of drinking that have led us to this moment. Up front, next to me, the cab drivers looks petrified at these two apparent lunatics singing rebel songs and screaming obscenities.

"There goes Thistle Street." Alex shouts into the night. "See that corner? I had my fuckin' hand slashed open there once by a guy wi' a razor."

Then, suddenly very angry, he opens the window of the cab and starts screaming; "Fuck Thistle Street! Fuck the fuckin' Gorbals. Fuck the fuckin' lot of youse!"

"Fer Christ's sake, Alex," says General Grimes. "Shut the fuck up and play your banjo. What the fuck are you tryin' to do? Give theneighbourhood a bad name or something?"

Allan Jones
Editor, Uncut

used without permission: transcribed by John Roussety

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