John Neil Munro

All these years later I am still able to tell you the exact date I saw the Sensational Alex Harvey Band at the Liverpool Empire Theatre: 11 May 1976. Admittedly, I obtained the date from the handy list of UK tour dates at the back of John Neil Munro’s biography of the self-styled Last of the Teenage Idols, but I am still able to tell you nonetheless. Of the show itself I retain only fleeting yet startling impressions: Harvey as Hitler goose-stepping across the stage as he sang ‘Framed’, or spray-painting an imitation brick wall with graffiti before kicking his way through it.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (SAHB to devotees and there were many) were something special in seventies rock music. They fused theatrical flair and musical eclecticism and mixed music hall with menace. Patrolling the playpen of glam they added a street-edge that presaged punk. As a performer Harvey, born and raised in the tenements of Glasgow, exuded a dangerous glamour. He was the oldest punk in town but, in his pugnacious way, preached peace and love.

His repertoire mocks the word ‘eclectic’; he must be the only artist who has covered both Jacques Brel’s Next and Crazy Horses by the Osmonds. As a reimaginer of other people’s songs he merits comparison with Nina Simone. Harvey didn’t sing songs he became them. He could take a song like Delilah, the tediously melodramatic Tom Jones number, and expertly subvert it, transplanting and transforming it from cabaret kitsch to darkly comic Gorbals nightmare in one foul swoop.

Until I came across this in a charity bookshop in Edinburgh recently I had no idea a biography of Harvey existed. Munro’s book evokes adjectives like ‘solid’, ‘well-researched’ and ‘workmanlike’ rather than ‘insightful or ‘inspired’. He doesn’t quite get to the heart of this charismatic and enigmatic man who became an overnight success when pushing forty after serving an apprenticeship of some twenty years in the business they call show.

Still, there’s plenty of interesting and informative stuff here, particularly on Harvey’s long pre-SAHB career, of which I knew little. It was certainly a varied one, encompassing Hamburg in the early sixties and West End musical theatre (he played guitar in the pit band in Hair) at the end of that decade, upmarket cabaret clubs and rock ‘n’ roll dives. All this experience and musical eclecticism finally found focus in SAHB. I hadn’t realised how much of the core SAHB repertoire had been performed and even recorded by Alex in other and earlier contexts. And I certainly didn’t know that in 1970 Harvey and Mike Oldfield were briefly in a band together. Now there’s a pairing to boggle the mind.… (mere)