Considering The Situation: A journey through the musical career of The Sensational Alex Harvey

The late, and great, Alex Harvey was ultimately responsible for the selling of my soul to the devil known as rock`n`roll. As a raw and impressionable teenager he was the subject of my first ever interview with a genuine rock`n`roll star. He took the total piss out of me and I was totally beguiled by this craggy rocker, who, at that time, was nearer forty than twenty, and had the only band in the world to live up to its ‘sensational’ moniker.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were that, and more, encompassing a theatrical, vaudevillian burlesque quality that gathered many strange musical bed-fellows into one powerful rock`n`roll experience, be it hard rock, blues, country or even a baroque waltz or two. Now following the well deserved resurgence in interest in that band’s work via an extensive re-master and reissue campaign last year, comes this anthology that delves beneath the surface of SAHB, right back to Alex’s roots back in the late fifties and early sixties.
So disc one, of this double set, presents a selection of songs from Alex Harvey and his Soul Band era material that launched his career, through his time in the musical ‘Hair’ house band, solo outings and material with Rock Workshop – the bulk of which appears on CD for the first time, and some previously unreleased. Opening with a version of ‘Shout’, a song one teenage girl, Marie Lawrie, was to later make her own as LuLu, many of the songs from The Soul Band era would re-emerge years later within the SAHB cannon – ‘Framed’, ‘Midnight Moses’ and ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’, proving you just cannot keep a good song down. What also stands out from the bulk of the songs here is the sheer quality of these early sixties recordings. They have lost little, if any, of their impact, something that is also true of disc two and its virtual SAHB best off selection.
It was an act of genius when Alex teamed up with what was the struggling, but very adept Tear Gas after meeting them at one of Glasgow’s legendary music pubs, The Burns Howf. Here was a hungry young band that could provide the musical backdrop to the vision he held of The Sensational band to come. Very soon that vision was realised and, in surprisingly quick time, the band released eight albums before burning out as punk, something Alex fully endorsed – even stating his desire to manage a young Johnny Rotten. They began to capture the minds of a new generation of youth, many of who would come back and rediscover the delights of SAHB many years later. Most of the band’s best known and loved songs are here – ‘Next’, ‘The Last Of The Teenage Idols’, a live version of ‘FaithHealer’, the big singles ‘Boston Tea Party’, ‘Sgt. Fury’ and, of course, his riotous reconstruction of Tom Jones finest moment ‘Delilah’. Also included are some of the best album tracks: ‘Tomahawk Kid’, ‘Action Strasse’, and the saga of Alex’s mythical superhero alter ego ‘Vambo’ – someone half way between “Santa Claus and Spiderman” he used to say.
Nit-picks, if any, about this anthology centre mainly around the fact that none of his post SAHB work with his ‘new’ band, prior to his premature death at 47 from a heart attack, is included. This would have rounded things off nicely. That said, it goes out on a high with the quirky curio that is ‘I Love Monsters Too’, which was the only musical track on a bizarre album of interviews and tales from people who claim to have seen the Loch Ness monster that Alex recorded, and was released by none other than K-Tel (seventies version of JML) –‘let’s sell stuff no one wants via TV!’.
Overall this album serves the memory of Alex Harvey far better than the rather dull and dry biography that was recently published, which strangely was written by someone who never met Alex or saw any of his bands play. I was lucky enough to meet and talk with Alex many times. He was prone to hold his head in his hands when asked if everything was O.K., he’d then say, “I’m considering the situation”. Well now many years on I have considered the situation and I still believe Alex Harvey to be truly sensational. Brian Guthrie 10/10