Five essential songs from The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
UK glam in its early 1970s pomp was a glitter bomb of effete aliens and androgynous escapism, cutting some of the most electric blasts of radiant rock as a much-needed, teen-focused riposte to the 1960s’ hangover of earnest singer-songwriters and bloated prog excess.
As magical as T-Rex and Ziggy Stardust‘s shimmering pop theatre was every Thursday evening on Top of the Pops, Scotland’s The Sensational Alex Harvey Band carved out a markedly more menacing presence among glam’s preening glitterati—burnishing an intoxicating bombast of hard rock tales that sowed the seeds of punk with their street cabaret and working-class vaudeville.
Enigmatic and brawny frontman Harvey had been waiting for a moment like glam to serve as a foil for his animated raconteur approach to songwriting and performance. Raised in Glasgow’s Kinning Park, Harvey had been slogging it in the music business for nearly 20 years before he finally touched the charts, cycling through skiffle, big beat, and blues, notably opening for Johnny Gentle and His Group backed by a pre-fame Beatles in Alloa’s Town Hall. After several years in the pit band for the West End’s Hair musical, Harvey corraled the members of Tear Gas, plus keyboardist Hugh McKenna, to form his Sensational Band.
The signature look was realised from their debut LP in 1972, Harvey, the hoop-shirted ruffian with a comic book presence of prowess and cunning clashing with lead guitarist Zal Cleminson’s svelt mime in a yellow and green jumpsuit. Their live shows revelled in hard-nosed bombast, spraying graffiti on giant mock brick walls before smashing through in bike leather, playing with glam’s escapism yet planted in a cartoon version of urban reality, all confidently presented by an ensemble that was of effortless, inescapable authenticity and unique character among a musical crowd filled with towering glitter egos.
SAHB released a run of acclaimed albums across the decade, cultivating a dedicated fandom in the UK and, curiously, Ohio’s Cleveland, before releasing their final album together in 1978—straddling the punk they inspired and the metal that was just about to emerge. Harvey released two solo albums before tragically dying of a heart attack in 1982, a day before his 47th birthday. Their dazzlingly inventive and colourful work left a lasting mark, influencing AC/DC’s Bon Scott, while Nick Cave confessed to cutting his teeth playing only SAHB covers—even before his days fronting The Boys Next Door.
With such a colourful body of work charged with rock bluster and evocative lyricism, let’s peruse the SAHB songbook and select five you must hear pronto.
Five essential The Sensational Alex Harvey Band songs:
5. ‘Hammer Song’
Originally recorded with a gentler folk pace on 1969’s Roman Wall Blues solo LP, the ‘Hammer Song’ resurrected for SAHB’s 1972 Framed debut depicts a tapestry of proletarian labour sweating and toiling through life’s adversity with only the tools they know: men with hammers, furnaces, chisels, and shovels all simultaneously seeking answers yet burying themselves ever further away from finding it. Allegedly making ends meet as a carpenter and tomb engraver before his music efforts took off, Harvey bellows the song’s callused existentialism with fierce authority.
‘Hammer Song’ is guided by a cinematic grasp of dramatic restraint. The opening acoustic guitar and backing licks illustrate the thematic factory floor or deep, rumbling mine of our blue-collar protagonists. Following a moment of terse disquiet from McKenna’s eerie keys, Cleminson lets rip with a solo so gobsmackingly stirring it stands alongside anything Phil Manzanera or David Gilmour committed to recording at the time.
4. ‘Vambo Marble Eye’
One of the most enduring features of SAHB’s live lore, Harvey and the gang would arrive on stage holding an oversized ancient book and read aloud the legends of one Vambo, the Glaswegian street hero largely existing as an embellished alter-ego of his own wayward youth, given extra life with Harvey spray painting “Vambo rools” on the stage’s giant brick wall behind them.
‘Vambo Marble Eye’ captures the extra brimming confidence radiating from SAHB for 1973’s Next…, a proto-punk stomper that cuts with an aggressive mirth from the first second, Cleminson’s choppy wah guitar against McKenna’s thunderous piano all tumbling together with such chaotic energy it threatens to engulf their charismatic ringleader. Vambo would crop up in later albums as a recurring motif, but the streetwise reveller’s debut on Next… was never topped, a technicolour explosion of cartoon rock that still sounds just as fun as it did over 50 years ago.
3. ‘The Tale of the Giant Stoneater’
As glam was starting to peter by 1975, SAHB strode on with their eccentric narratives with Tomorrow Belongs to Me‘s showman strut. Cabaret covers, satirical arch concepts, and an ode to Chinese takeaway food all form their fourth LP’s bubbling lyrical stew. Possibly mocking artist Roger Dean’s artwork for Yes, and given an Amazing Stories pulp cover, Harvey makes clear that SAHB is still firing all comedic cylinders.
The album’s grand centrepiece, ‘The Tale of the Giant Stoneater, ‘ crumples all their theatrical fancies into a seven-minute opus that spans childlike storytelling, hard-rocking environmental devastation, and a detour into syrupy corny hoedown country complete with a wonky American accent. Inspired by the machinery ripping up the west Scotland countryside, Harvey’s fantastical tale of mechanical entities devouring nature and prehistoric dinosaurs never lapses into pomposity despite the array of genres the track speeds around.
2. ‘Boston Tea Party’
By the time of their biggest hit, Harvey was ready to jump ship and take another stab at a solo career. Punk had landed, and their contemporaries either took sharp creative U-turn, lapsed into complete artistic irrelevancy or were happy to play the nostalgia circuit from then on. Harvey decided to lead 1976’s SAHB Stories with ‘Boston Tea Party’, their defining track exploring the historical events of colonial America when angry colonists dumped 45 tonnes of tea in the Boston harbour as a protest to Great Britain’s taxation policies, sparking the War of Independence.
Not obvious fodder for a pop song, but ‘Boston Tea Party’ saw the band playing to all their collective strengths. Harvey’s masterful lyrical scene-setting and animated vocals, coupled with Ted McKenna’s steady drum beat, shrouds the song in a nocturnal, subterfuge drama, thrusting the listener deep within 18th century Boston’s revolutionary powder keg.
1. ‘The Dolphins’
Harvey made his first departure from the band following SAHB stories, and the rest of the band even cut Fourplay under the SAHB (Without Alex) moniker, featuring Harvey tied up and gagged on its back cover. Harvey returned for one more LP and fronted the band for the final time on 1978’s Rock Drill, an album inspired by avant-garde sculptor Jacob Epstein’s metal works piece exploring Man’s descent into machine hybridity, set to a score with a tougher hard rock swagger as well as a smattering of new wave synths.
Forming the second part of The Rock Drill Suite, which dominates the beginning of the record, ‘The Dolphins’ stands as one of the finest cuts SAHB has ever produced. Graceful yet heavy, its thematic wonder of dolphins underneath Earth’s scraggy rock is a fitting poetic reveal of SAHB’s conceptual obsessions, unearthing magic underneath a coarse and weary surface truth. It’s punk, it’s rock opera, it’s new wave of British heavy metal, it could only be Harvey and his Sensational Band, and a perfect final roll of the dice.
