As his stint with late 60s psychedelic act Giant Moth and his largely spoken-word documentary/concept LP Alex Harvey Presents: The Loch Ness Monster attest, Alex Harvey’s long, eclectic career was studded with prog-friendly episodes.
It was in 1972, though, that the singer recruited the group that were his passport to all kinds of versatility. With The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, prog, hard rock, and a slightly sinister strain of mime and Weimar Republic-inspired theatricality were go.
When Alex first met them at the Burns Howff pub in Glasgow, guitarist Zal Cleminson, keyboardist Hugh McKenna, his drummer cousin Ted and bassist Chris Glen were playing in Tear Gas, a thunderous and virtuosic prog fusion act whose set included a super-charged take on Jethro Tull’s Love Story.
Cleminson loved Jeff Beck and Frank Zappa, and Hugh McKenna could match Zal’s solos on Moog synthesiser or electric piano. When Alex dubbed his youthful new bandmates “sensational,” it gave them a broad and ambitious remit to aspire to.
On their second LP, 1973’s Next, The Faith Healer’s creepy, slow-evolving throb and the seven-minute, piano-led, prog triptych The Last Of The Teenage Idols signalled SAHB’s adventurousness. But it was April 1975’s Tomorrow Belongs To Me – replete with Marvel-meets-Roger-Dean cover art – that some reviewers read as a futuristic concept album.
That was largely down to The Tale Of The Giant Stoneater, a proto-eco-warrior stage play that was in part Harvey’s response to seeing a large tract of unspoiled wilderness being bulldozed while he was on holiday in the west of Scotland.
‘Journeys unstarted measure space for future parking lots,’ roars an incensed Harvey amid the song’s numerous shifts of mood, feel and time signature. Alex, being Alex, can’t resist also mentioning Bonnie Prince Charlie, Vikings and an ill-fated brontosaurus lying belly-up.
Elsewhere, the similarly epic and outlandish Give My Compliments To The Chef is a simmering stew of lyrical non-sequiturs, synth leads and earth-shaking Cleminson riffage, while the wind-machine and dizzying guitar/keys motifs that open Shark’s Teeth are highly Zappa-esque, as then-NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray observed when reviewing the album at the time.
More problematic, however, was the record’s title track, a cover of a song from the 30s Berlin-set musical Cabaret, which, together with Harvey’s attendant onstage appearances dressed as Hitler, brought charges of Nazism.
Clumsy and misjudged as such tactics now seem, Harvey was in fact satirising Hitler. The artist was a pacifist and a vehement critic of The National Front, his politics as progressive as some of the best music he made with SAHB.
