How the ruin of West Scotland shaped Alex Harvey’s glam ode to the natural world
Anything was lyrical fair game in The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s punchy glam vaudeville.
Indeed, a stirring number to environmental degradation can sit comfortably in its own disparate eccentricity between an innuendo-laden love letter to sexual want and an irreverent ode to Chinese takeaway food. On 1975’s Tomorrow Belongs to Me, Harvey and his Sensational Band were riding high on their Scottish cabaret peak, brewing an inimitable blast of hard rock swagger, providing the scoring muscle to their brawny frontman’s raconteur songwriting, a perfect slice of comic escapism that somehow felt affixed to the hard-nosed streets of Glasgow.
Yet, across proto-punk theatre and Broadway bluster, ‘The Tale of the Giant Stoneater’ stands as Tomorrow Belongs to Me’s centrepiece cut. It packs a lot in. Careening around children’s storybook, hefty rock drama, and a detour into country hoedown complete with wonky American accent, Harvey and the gang distil all their maverick eclecticism across its seven-minute hurtle without a second wasted.
“Sudden-savage-shining-solid-soiled-solid-sanded / Steel-shuddering-shattering-shovelling / Until the Sabre-toothed rooter roots the earth,” is a joy for its alliterative jewels in the mouth alone. But what kind of mechanoid behemoths plundering the Earth Harvey’s lyrically spotted are unclear. The album’s artwork offers more clues. Illustrated by Dave Field, Tomorrow Belongs to Me’s cover features a brontosaurus battling with ferocity an earthmoving digger, all presented in a sci-fi style of old Astounding Stories pulp and a possible spoof of Roger Dean’s fantasy work with arch-proggers Yes.
It turns out that such stirring, far-flung imagery was rooted much closer to home. “I was holidaying up in the West of Scotland, and I was driving along a bit called the Road to the Isles, Bonnie Prince Charlie Country,” Harvey recalled to International Musician & Recording World at the time. “All of a sudden, I saw this enormous bulldozer, eating through centuries of history; really unspoiled, beautiful land was just disappearing so a motorway could be built.”
Harvey always held a deep and unabashed pride in his Scottish heritage. Not an ounce of his blue-collar Glaswegian grit was ever compromised or softened to appease some broader audience potential, remaining stolidly true to his roots just as the Sensational Band always stuck to their creative guns with resolve.
Any threat to his beloved home country’s natural world by the forces of modernity was always going to hit hard, a duelling tension furthered in ‘The Tale of the Giant Stoneater’s surreal fable: “The eater eats his fill and is not satisfied / And roars and reves his mathematical rage / On the footprints of Vikings / Trapped on a sonic tape recorder.”
The Sensational Band were never one for po-faced seriousness, but still, ‘The Tale of the Giant Stoneater’ excavates a poignancy from Harvey’s lyrical pen atypical of their dizzyingly comic oeuvre. He would never be able to dwell too long, made of far sterner stuff to keep from plucking out the colourful and farcical from the dangers lurking in grim reality in the best Sensational tradition.
“I guess it comes of living in Glasgow,” Harvey quipped. “If you don’t laugh, you tend to end up an awfully moany, preaching sort of person. I think it’s probably better to laugh”.
