Gallagher The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-202-0
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Alex Harvey was active in the music industry from the very birth of British rock and roll. A Zelig-like figure, he won a contest to become Scotland's Tommy Steele in the 1950s, followed the Beatles to Hamburg in the early 1960s, dabbled in psychedelic rock during the Summer of Love, and joined the house band of counterculture musical Hair at the close of the decade. By the time 1972 rolled around, he had been there and done that, but had never made it big. He was 37 years old and was thinking of calling it a day.
Also thinking of calling it a day were Scottish hard rockers Tear Gas. They had released two albums, each with a different line-up, none of which set the world alight, and now their singer wanted out. In a last-ditch effort to salvage something, Alex Harvey and Tear Gas's respective managers decided to unite their respective acts. The result was Sensational.
This book examines not only the eight albums by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band but also Harvey's earlier work with his Soul Band and solo, and his post-SAHB releases. It also reviews those two Tear Gas albums as well as Fourplay, the album SAHB released without Alex.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band is Peter Gallagher's third book in Sonicbond's On Track series after entries for Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and T. Rex and Warren Zevon. He also wrote Kiss In The 1970s for their Decades series. He is a regular contributor to the British music magazine Shindig!, and has also been published in The Dark Side, Writing Magazine, and The London Reader. His website dedicated to local tourism can be found at www.brownsignblogging.com. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gallagher, Peter

Leseproben

Introduction: Vambo, and How He Came Into The World

I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city, and I beseech thee, suffer me to speak unto the people.

St. Paul, Acts 21:39

When Saint Paul spoke of his hometown, he didn’t use the word ‘mean’ to indicate cruel or unpleasant, but rather lowly or of poor quality. In other words, by stating Tarsus was ‘no mean city’ he was saying that it was a town of significance and importance. When the phrase was later applied to Glasgow, however, it became a byword meaning precisely cruel and unpleasant, thanks to the novel No Mean City by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long.

Published in 1935, the year Alex Harvey was born, it presents the Gorbals, the area Harvey largely grew up in, as a bleak, slum-ridden, densely populated landscape of unrelenting poverty and violence, the latter personified by the book’s protagonist, the self-styled ‘razor king’, Johnnie Stark.

The book was quickly dismissed by the city fathers and the media as inaccurate and sensationalist, but they were concerned more about the novel’s potential negative impact on Glasgow’s reputation than its accuracy. No Mean City had its moments of melodrama, but it was more social realism than penny dreadful. The Great Depression had hit Glasgow much as it had the rest of Europe and North America, resulting in mass unemployment, while chronic overcrowding and poor sanitation in areas such as the Gorbals meant disease and death were commonplace, while malnutrition, alcohol addiction, domestic abuse and sectarian violence were all on a sickening rise. According to David Montgomery, in his dissertation on the Sensational Alex Harvey Band song ‘The Tomahawk Kid’, the Gorbals was ‘the only ghetto in the United Kingdom at that time which might have rivalled those in New York, Chicago, or Detroit in terms of squalor and violence’. This, then, was the environment Alex Harvey was born into, on 4 February 1935.

Or was it? Harvey’s birthplace seems to shift depending on whoever is writing about him. In a 2019 article on the singer in the Glasgow Evening Times newspaper, Kinning Park, which lies to the west of the Gorbals, was identified as Harvey’s birthplace, and one would hope professional reporters would get their facts right. Kinning Park is also a popular online option. The April 2000 issue of Mojo magazine, meanwhile, goes further west and settles on Govan. We will allow the article’s writer the benefit of the doubt; perhaps he was getting mixed up with Govan Road, part of which is in the Gorbals, and is the location biographer John Neil Munro plumps for in his book The Sensational Alex Harvey. This is also identified as Harvey’s birthplace in the book, written by Tim Barr, that formed part of Alex Harvey: The Last of the Teenage Idols, an extensive fourteen-disc career retrospective box set released by Universal Music in 2016. With these two stalwarts rooting for it, it seems Govan Road is the safe bet, although the Harvey family – father Leslie, mother Greta, and baby Alex – soon relocated to Thistle Street, also in the Gorbals.

It was to Thistle Street that Harvey returned in 1975, out to revisit his past in the company of Melody Maker’s Allan Jones. Some of his memories are charming, as he recalled a woman that owned a goat, or singing ‘My Cup Runneth Over’ at the Sunday school on the corner. It all sounds very endearing, very Little House on the Prairie, and not at all Gorbals grim. That soon changes.

‘There were hundreds of people lived in this street’, he tells Jones, ‘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’.

‘See this wall? There used to be a bullet hole … Aye, fuck, it’s still fucking there. Will ye look at that?’

‘We used to drop bread into it, that horrible fucking hole, and the rats would come out for the bread, and we’d drop bricks on the little bastards and squash them tae fuck’.

‘Some kids got two police dogs, cut their heads off and pinned them to the wall with bayonets’.

Later, in a bar, one of Harvey’s old pals recalls a man being attacked with hammers, knives, and hatchets. ‘They completely destroyed him’, concludes the friend. ‘It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen’. Jones reports Harvey nodding in grave agreement.

Maybe not so bucolic, then. The canine cops story sounds a bit suspect, and no amount of rummaging through old newspapers at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library shed any light on such an incident. Perhaps it was just an urban myth; this was the land of the Gorbals Vampire after all, a famous case of mass hysteria in 1954 that saw hundreds of local children arm themselves with homemade weapons and descend upon the Southern Necropolis to kill a monster with iron teeth that had devoured two local kids. Like the decapitated dogs, no children had been reported missing, let alone eaten, but it is tempting to think that Alex’s then ten-year-old brother Leslie Jnr. might have been amongst the prepubescent vampire hunters. It is also worth remembering that the teller of this shaggy dog story would regularly claim to have been an apprentice lion tamer, a trade that Glasgow, like every other city on the planet, hadn’t much call for.

Tall tales aside, the Gorbals of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s was a grim soot- stained landscape of violence, poverty, and desolation, and Glasgow was indeed a mean city, an environment in which the young Alex soon learned how to take care of himself. Despite this, Harvey remembered his childhood fondly. Talking in 1974 on a promotional interview disc sent out to US radio stations, he said:

As far as I am concerned, I had a great childhood. Although it was a tough place to live, and it was wild, there was warmth. Where I lived at that particular time, you didn’t have to lock your door at all, because that was your part of the street, and you knew everybody else and no one would steal from the man next door. We had a communal toilet, about 100 people used it, so that brings about a certain amount of togetherness, I suppose.

It didn’t hurt that there were certain points of light that helped dispel the darkness, and these would impact every bit as much on Harvey as the harshness of his surroundings. Despite his oldest son having left Strathbungo senior secondary school in 1950 with no formal qualifications, Leslie Snr. believed education was his children’s best path of breaking free of the Gorbals and its poverty. He didn’t want his sons believing their only opportunities lay in following the accepted path for working-class men in Glasgow, which was to get a job in the shipyards or the docks. Instead, he encouraged his children to think big, and to expand their knowledge by reading everything and anything. For Alex, who soon became a voracious and lifelong reader, the printed page became an escape route out of the drudgery of Gorbals life. He enjoyed history (speciality: the British Empire), which he saw not as some dusty subject on the school curriculum but as a library containing several millennia worth of stories, and also classics by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper, which in turn led to a love of ‘boys own’ adventure-style stories, science fiction, and comic books.

Cinema, or the ‘flicks’, was another way in which the young Harvey was able to step outside of the now. Glasgow was the cinema capital of the world back then, boasting over 110 picture houses, more per head than any other city in the world, all providing much-needed escapism during the Depression years and the misery of the Second World War. The country’s biggest cinema was Green’s Playhouse in Renfield Street, which opened in 1927 with a capacity of more than 4,000. As the Glasgow Apollo, it would later host some of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s most memorable gigs.

Harvey became an avid cinemagoer, as he recalled to rock photographer Janet Macoska in 1974. ‘When I was 15 and I lived in the Gorbals, the only thing you could do – there was no television then – the only escape really was the movies. During the war, I went as many times as I could steal the money, or get into the pictures for nothing, to see anything that was a big Hollywood spectacular; from cowboys to monster movies. I loved entertainers like Fred Astaire’. He would later tell music journalist Charles Shaar Murray that King Kong ‘was the greatest film ever made’. At the time he was speaking, in the mid-1970s, many might agree; his assertion that the Eighth Wonder of the World was also ‘the very first rock and roll hero’ is less convincing.

Music was the third light piercing the Glasgow gloom. As with cinemas, the city punched above its weight when it came to dancehalls, boasting more than any other in the United Kingdom, including London. Once legendary venues such as the Locarno, the Plaza, and the colossal Dennistoun Palais may now linger only in the memories of a dwindling generation, but others maintain a spectral presence. The Barrowland Ballroom, for example, is not a ballroom but a concert venue; however, it did begin as a dancehall and even outlived most of the competition, surviving into the early 1970s before changing tastes and possible guilt by association with serial killer Bible John...