While his commercial yield was perhaps too small to ensure he became a fully-fledged household name, larger than life Scot ALEX HARVEY did more than enough to be legitimately dubbed ‘legendary’ in my book.
Sadly dying a day short of his 47th birthday in February 1982, Harvey nonetheless crammed several lifetimes into his flamboyant innings on earth. Initially cutting his teeth as a kind of proto-Glaswegian Tommy Steele, his remarkable story also includes a rites of passage musical apprenticeship in the same hard-edged 1960s Hamburg that shaped The Beatles, not to mention a spell in the notorious counter-culture musical ‘Hair’ and a brief diversion as a sensitive singer/ songwriter (Nick Drake he surely wasn’t) prior to his career-defining period with the self-explanatory Sensational Alex Harvey Band.
Spectrum’s new 2-CD anthology ‘Best of the Sensational Alex Harvey’ goes further than most in that it dips into Harvey’s pre-SAHB life as well as laying out a generous selection of the tried ’n’ tested classics. CD2 houses tracks from his mid-60s Hamburg phase (primarily sweaty R’n’B cuts like the Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’ and a horn-led soul revue tilt at Lieber & Stoller’s ‘Framed’) while the excerpts from ‘Hair’ come on like Bo Diddley-style rave-ups. The title track from Harvey’s 1969 solo album ‘Roman Wall Blues’, though, is far more interesting as it sows the seeds of the SAHB’S patented theatricality before your very ears.
Entertaining though CD2 is, however, it’s the first silver disc that will hook in those after on a generous, cut-price SAHB career retrospective. In fact, it’s only when you check out these 17 tracks that you realise just how prolific the SAHB were, releasing a whopping seven albums between 1972-’77 and building up a formidable live reputation into the bargain.
Such a hectic workload did little to dampen the SAHB’S creativity. Indeed, the eclectic spread of the band’s work remains staggering to this day. Led from the front by Harvey’s overgrown Dennis-the-Menace-meets-Bluebeard persona and guitarist Zal Cleminson’s clown face and electric green cat suit, the SAHB were enormously striking visually, but their staggering onstage eclecticism transferred over to their recorded output.
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Straddling both glam and the early days of punk, the SAHB may predominantly have traded in blues and hard rock, but ultimately these goalposts were very flexible indeed. Sure, the likes of ‘River of Love’ and ‘Snake Bite’ are immediate, Led Zep-style groovers, but they rub shoulders with off-the-map theatrical treasures like a tango version of Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’, a timeless waltz-style re-invention of Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ (which netted them a Top 10 hit in the process) and even a bizarrely endearing version of the Irving Berlin show tune ‘Cheek to Cheek’. The SAHB were never too far away from getting their rocks off though: check out their anthemic 1976 hit ‘Boston Tea Party’, the taut and tense ‘Faith Healer’ or their crazed, proto-punk thrash through The Osmonds’(!) ‘Crazy Horses’ if you don’t believe me.
Inevitably with such a collection, there are a few glaring omissions (where’s ‘Swampsnake’ for starters?) but with a raft of radio and Whistle Test recordings also thrown in to fill in the bigger picture, ‘The Best of The Sensational Alex Harvey’ thrillingly demonstrates just how far ahead of his time this sorely-missed little Glaswegian geezer really was.
Spectrum Music online
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