What nearly to wear: Ted, Zal, Alex, Chris and Hugh as the outfits and makeup take shape;
2 NEXT
SEVERAL thousand people knew the secret by now, and by the end of 1973 several tens of thousands of people were going to be sharing it. The year began with just a little time to reflect, and then a major act of commitment on everyone’s part: the guys moved down to London.
In the first instance they lived in Nazareth’s flat while their stablemates were in the USA, and in early months flittered between that and the Durand Hotel. Even so, they were only a few miles from Alex’s house, and so SAHB had the opportunity to begin doing things as a band, and really get to work on developing some sensational character.
TED: The day we were leaving Alex came to visit my parents. My dad was a tough man, a steelworker, a very sharp guy; and he said to Alex, are you gonny look after my boy? It was only afterwards I understood the significance, but Alex would have seen it at the time. I’d been to London with the Dream Police but this was the real deal – I wasn’t coming back for 21 years. It made me think of that old song, The Gallowa’Hills, the bit about leaving your old land for a new country, for better or worse.
CHRIS: Up until then it had still been Tear Gas and Alex, but this is when it became SAHB. And when the deal was done, we were being paid £50 a week – palm trees were waving! To put that in context, a Jaguar XJ12 cost £3500 at the time – now it’s about £55,000…
They were young boys on the make, and they had it large when time permitted. They became a regular fixture at the Speakeasy, mixing with Jeff Beck, the Jam, Motorhead, John Entwistle, Peter Green, Giner Baker – in those days there was no pecking order and no teams of minders. The most you had was one roadie, and he was there to stop you making an arse of yourself rather than to stop people approaching you.
Soon they moved into their own flat, customised to get the right number of bedrooms, and the domestic bliss didn’t begin at all.
TED: They just got it customised so they could stay up till four in the morning, partying, doing drugs and listening to music while I was trying to sleep. That’s why I started taking drugs…
CHRIS: See, this is the kind of shite that comes out. Anyway, I was in the room above the lounge so I had to put up with the noise too…
TED: No you didn’t – you were in the lounge making the noise!
CHRIS: Aye, well… that’s true.
But we were all in this flat. My wife moved down, Davie’s wife moved down – Zal’s wife didn’t because they already had a house in Glasgow and she was working. But we had all these Scottish lads and lassies, then Ted’s American girlfriend moved in. And no offence to anyone, but there’s a culture–shock going on there. She was intense, she was a vegan, what star sign are you, don’t tell me, you’re a capricorn, no… And after ten guesses: I knew it! Zal and I used to say we were asparagus with broccoli rising. And you couldn’t be cancer, because of the illness – you had to be a moonchild…
TED: But going over for dinner with Trudy and Alex was great fun. They were a lot of fun as a couple. The first time we went round Zal pretended to be an Australian who’d been in a car crash and had mental problems as a result. Alex loved it! We had all these sketches that had grown through the years. Another one was Zal playing the part of this cool guy leaning against a bar, and he’d act out chatting up a bird, then ask her to leave with him, and when he moved away from the bar he’d walk in the leaning shape, as if he was stuck in it… Bill thought it was hilarious, and he’d get Zal to do it everywhere we went.
Despite the band’s burgeoning social life, work continued on defining its attitude and character. Alex encouraged belief in the material and reliance on the team ethic. The band ran with it, and the harlequin Zal and punk Chris were born.
TED: When we did Framed we aimed to play it heavy and slow it down – and in the end I couldn’t believe how slow we did it. I got off on starting the beat because the audience were going mad. It was like time stopped. And then when the music came in it was astonishing – toes were curling, we were saying, we’re gonny fuckin’ play it this slow, right? If you all believe it, it works. Magic happens. And Alex noised me up about the things that used to bug me: There’s a screw loose on the hihat? Well, fuck, the concert’s cancelled… I got his point. If I wasn’t playing hard enough he’d turn round and growl at me, and hit cymbals till I got back into it. Feel something – he taught me that right away. It doesn’t matter what you feel as long as you feel something and pour it into your playing. The audience won’t feel anything if you don’t.
CHRIS: We used to do lots of things as a band – we went to see Cabaret, we went to Paris to see Alcazar and we began to see what the professionals could do with a show. Of course we had to find a way of doing it while keeping the costs down.
ZAL: It was part of the tounge-in-cheek thing, all the choreography. It was nothing new – the Shadows used to dance, but it appealed to us because you had this heavy band people were intimidated by, then when you went on stage you’d have them rolling in the aisles with the mad dance routine. Bill could see the potential of the presentation. We were playing the Marquee and he told me, from the back of the hall I can’t see the faces you’re making. Why don’t you try doing something to your face? I started out with green dots stuck all over my face, but eventually someone suggested painting it white, and as soon as it was said I knew, yeah, that works.
TED: Alex wanted to bring out the characters, like a comic book, so people could easily identify the statements that were being made. We started getting these ideas together.
CHRIS: He nailed it down by saying, it’s not going to work of you make people wear clothes that take away from their personality. I didn’t ever like the top of my outfit, but the codpiece was brilliant – I’d always had problems hitting the Fender precision off my bollocks, and the way I used to stand with my legs apart it really hurt. Bambi, our designer, said, why don’t you wear a codpiece outside your trousers? I said, what, like Alas Poor Yorick? She said she could make it look good. The first few times I wore it I was a bit self-conscious but it was a great idea.
ZAL: The thing we all liked about the costumes was the material was all matte – there was nothing shiny and glittery. They looked like Vaudeville or circus outfits. A lot of bands had started dressing up, so we were trying to avoid being lumped in with the glam rock thing. Alex liked the way we achieved that. He found his own things to wear as well, but he managed to keep the torn jeans, the pump-up shoes and the t-shirt thing. It made us different.
Once and for all the gap between Alex and Tear Gas had been bridged. There was a gang on stage, and while there had always been plenty to watch with the frontman doing his thing, there was even more to it now. The interplay between Alex and Zal became a mainstay of the show, with each fighting the other for the limelight. Both characters fed off it and became the larger for it. And for sheer domination factor, it was hard to beat Chris, Alex and Zal with their left feet on the monitors, leering into the crowd as they thundered through Midnight Moses. They looked huge, they looked hard, and you didn’t dare take your eyes off them. All these elements came together in the set-pieces between songs; and musical set-pieces came into the show early too. There was a big slow dramatic opening to St Anthony, after which Alex would open his book to tell the audience a story; and meanwhile Chris and Zal came up from behind and took their places on either side of him, staring the crowd out, daring them to stop paying attention. In another opener the frontline boys would hit a chord then march one step forward, hit another and step forward again, and keep going until they were at the front of the stage – by which time the audience had taken the same number of steps back.
TED: We did one gig and at the end there was nothing but almost total silence – we’d known something was going on because the audience hadn’t taken their eyes off us the whole show. It was a long walk to the dressing room but soon after we arrived, Dick, our tour manager, said, you’d better get back on – they’re going wild. It wasn’t until we’d left the stage folk turned round to their mates and said, what you think of that – wasn’t it brilliant? We didn’t even have Faith Healer at the time, but it was really beginning to work.
This was the show that hit the road in February 1973, and found itself supporting Mott the Hoople for five dates. Ian Hunter’s outfit were at the top of their game and SAHB fitted in perfectly to the show. It was a huge step up in terms of audience size, and the guys made the most of their opportunity.
Zal remembers Mick Ralphs inviting him up to join in Mott’s encore at the Birmingham Town Hall. Chris remembers wondering why the city of Birmingham didn’t have a city hall. Ian Dickson, a photographer who was to work with SAHB in an official capacity several times in the future, remembers offering a very grateful Alex some pictures of his dead brother: ‘I turned up at the gig with a boxful of prints of Les and said, I’d like you to have them. He was very touched.’
By now SAHB were hungry for a real challenge, and it came in the form of supporting Slade on a UK tour. If Mott had been at the top of their game, Slade were at the top of everyone else’s. It’s difficult to describe how big Noddy and co were in mid-73. They’d been at the forefront of the glam look, they put a lot of fun into their show – and, more importantly, they could play like fuck. No one else dared to take the support slot.
SAHB, naturally, jumped at the chance.
ZAL: The audience were young and they loved rock, and they were there to see Slade from the beginning of the night. It wasn’t the type of audience who went for a drink while the support act were on – they were up for it the moment the doors opened. So when we started playing there was a buzz – love you or hate you, it didn’t matter…
CHRIS: We knew them from Ambrose Slade when they’d been skinheads. Great guys, and a great band. But our music wasn’t exactly compatible… their fans were covered in glitter and top hats with Skweez Me Pleez Me written on them, and they just didn’t want us. So Alex said, let’s antagonise them. And they loved it! They were throwing things and Alex was squirting them with water pistols. When we played Blackburn he filled the pistols with his own piss, and the front rows were standing with their mouths open when he squirted them… But it was all more like pantomime – there’s wasn’t any real violence…
TED: I think that was our first front page: ‘Fans pelt Harvey’ in the Melody Maker…
Ian Dickson was the only photographer in the pit at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. ‘I remember the hail of debris flying over my head,’ he says. ‘Alex asked me, have you got your crash helmet with you? But the band were just standing there as bottles and bits of chairs came flying at them, ducking out the way if a bit of metal came at them. I don’t know how they stood it… They really were the greatest live band I ever saw. They were very visually striking, and the interplay between them was great. It was a feast for the eyes and the ears.’
Scottish music journalist Billy Sloan first encountered SAHB at this point, at Green’s Playhouse (which later became the Apollo). ‘They got booed on and cheered off,’ he recalls. ‘Anybody who looked that gallus had to be good. They were the best – bar none.’
ZAL: Alex instilled in us this idea of being sensational, of aiming to be the greatest band on earth, and that’s how we delivered the show. Once you had that attitude it didn’t matter who you were supporting, because we were going on to tear the place apart. If the headline band were better than you it didn’t matter, because they were supposed to be… But after Slade there were stories about people not wanting us to tour with them because there was that risk. Unless they all just thought we were too crazy… But of course when we went back out six months after Slade the places were full of their fans, saying, we thought you were great but we were at the back of the audience… You could see it panning out – that people would either love us or hate us.
The summer festival season kicked off for SAHB at Buxton – interestingly, the only time they shared a bill with Nazareth. Chuck Berry, Canned Heat and the Edgar Broughton Band were also there, along with Roy Wood’s Wizzard, who decided it was too wet to play. Attendees of the show, who revelled in the sonic pleasures of seven 600W speaker towers, had more than the weather to deal with, though – Hells Angels were out for trouble.
The story goes that the Angels made a nuisance of themselves from the early hours, stealing drink and fighting anyone within slipping distance in the muddy field. Once they’d run out of money they began demanding 10p from everyone they met, and even jumped the stage to start raking through performers’ pockets while they played. Towards the end of the day, Chuck Berry saw the writing on the wall and began to teach the Angels how to do his trademark walk, patiently demonstrating it again and again until it took him the edge of the stage, at which point he bolted for his car and was gone. It’s said he always demanded payment up front.
Alex, meanwhile, turned the opportunity to his advantage.
CHRIS: This big fight kicked off while we were on, and Alex stopped the band. We were so tight he just threw his arms out sideways and, chunk, we all stopped. Then he jumped down into the audience and broke up the fight. It wasn’t till a few days later it hit me how badly that could have gone – that was really scary. It could have turned into a riot – you’re taking your life in your hands when you do these things.
TED: I saw him watching the Angels from early on. I think he saw the opportunity to do what he was going to do, because it was all about getting attention. He jumped off the stage and started talking to the ringleader as if he was a 12-year-old schoolboy. Later I asked him what he’d said – he’d mentioned the names of a few chapter leaders, and told the guy they wouldn’t be happy about him bringing the name of the Angels into disrepute. After that the Angels started coming to all our gigs. Bill was unhappy because he was worried about us becoming a biker band – and we could have done, actually, if we’d stayed on the track Framed had put us on.
But the classic tones of Framed were slipping into the past. Interviewed the week ex-squatmate David Bowie announced he was retiring from music, Alex seems to have been considering the Next situation and how it differed from Framed. ‘The last album was a disappointment – at least that’s how I see it now,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of depth and feeling put in but it didn’t show because it wasn’t produced properly. But we just wanted to get the songs we had down on record. It was a relief to get them down.’
Regarding the Slade tour he commented: ‘After that I don’t think there’s anything we couldn’t take on. The reaction we got was electric and it was perfect for us because it was real emotion. Noddy Holder could be one of the most powerful trade union leaders in the country if he felt like it.’
As they began to work on their second album, Alex had decided from early on he wanted to work closely with Hugh, and they were creating material even the most ardent SAHB Angel might have to think twice about.
HUGH: I was always the most qualified musician in any of my bands. I never had to work out drums because Ted has a good ear, but I’d work out the bass part, guitar parts, vocal parts… It made me feel valued – I was helping make things as musical as they could be, and as we all know everyone needs to feel valued.
Alex had all these 40s and 50s influences first-hand but I had them through my parents, and of course I had the music-hall influence too, so I think that’s why it made sense to Alex that he and I work together so closely. I don’t think he thought I was capable of writing any better than Zal or anyone else – just that I had a bigger bag of tricks.
It was never hard to create but it could be demanding work. There were some very intensive sessions. But in all my time writing with Alex we didn’t often struggle for ideas. Sometimes I would take something Zal had had lying about for a while – like on Teenage Idol, that was a riff Zal had come up with in the Tear Gas days. So some things took longer to work out, but it was never arduous.
TED: Hugh’s musical ability was like a paintbrush for Alex.
ZAL: He’s the musician in the band, the one with a broad range. To a guitar player anyone who plays piano is a real musician – you could ask him to play a minor ninth and he’d play one… Ah, so that’s what a minor ninth is… Alex and Hugh would go off together and we’d stay at home and cook. They’d come back and say, we’ve got a bunch of songs, and we’d add the meat’n’potatoes to try to get a writing credit.
While the work was underway, the band left the confines of the studio to make their first appearance at the Reading Festival. It was to be a historic moment: the sun was setting, the lights came on and 30,000 people’s jaws dropped as SAHB unveiled a song they’d written about two weeks previously: The Faith Healer.
ZAL: The whole focus of the day seemed to turn on us. The festival up till then had been the way festivals are, with lots of different things going on, but just at that point, sunset, they brought all the stage lights and the floodlights on, and suddenly the whole place turned round and looked at us.
HUGH: The moment Alex put his hands up in the twin V-sign pose and sang ‘Let me put my hands on you’, I just knew it was going to be magic. Magic’s the only word for it. I had a premonition, the one and only one I’ve had in my life. As soon as we came off I told the guys, wait till you see the press next week, it’s going to be all about us. I was absolutely certain we were going to cop all the press. Rod Stewart was on, Status Quo were on – big big names, but we absolutely slew everybody.
ZAL: It’s the band’s best-known song and it rolls everything together for me: Alex’s creativity and the way Tear Gas wanted to play… it’s a masterful song, and playing it for the first time at Reading was magical. The first three songs of the set were where we got them – Faith Healer, Midnight Moses and St Anthony. That’s the way it always was with us: this is what we do, if you don’t like it you can go home now, and if you stay you’re getting more and more of it.
People often ask each other where they were when they heard about JFK, or Princess Diana, or the moon landings. But the first performance of Faith Healer on 25 August 1973 is easier to discuss, because everyone you’re talking to knows exactly where you were (Reading) and what you were doing (gaping like a demented hypnotised zombie).
Journalist David Lewis lived through the moment. ‘The blatant violence hits an audience in the face, grabbing it by the throat and provoking reaction,’ he wrote. Alex told Lewis: ‘Reading was like the end of the first phase for us. The Slade tour toughened us up a lot – when we played with them in Glasgow the crowd gave us stick, but it got the adrenalin going. There were three rows flattened and six seats went missing – somebody said they ate them!’
Three weeks later, when SAHB returned to the London Marquee, the word had got out; and, indeed, it seemed as if phase two of the band’s media onslaught was underway, with a noticeable change in writers’ attitudes. Sounds explained: ‘The fact that Harvey is now regarded with a great deal less suspicion than he was previously is in ample evidence. The set opened with a manic version of Crazy Horses which Harvey delivers with a strange menace, the same kind of bitter sweet inflections he seems to inject into everything he does. For the occasion Big Bud’s Brass augmented the basic five piece. Their inclusion added a lot of punch, especially on Dance to the Music. Zal Cleminson has become even more pointed and direct in style and pianist Hugh McKenna has improved immeasurably on all counts, the mainstream jazz instrumentals in which McKenna takes all the leads being an excellent example of his understanding. The Harvey Band are undoubtedly among the best live acts currently doing the rounds.’
If anyone needed any further clarification as to how settled, confident and up for it SAHB now were, Next was it. The album was produced by Phil Wainman, who’d developed the glam sound and had been brought in to commercialise SAHB’s sound; but if he took some of the terrifying rock edge off the band’s noise, he let loose the gigantic creative arc they squeezed into their second LP. Faith Healer had stolen the headlines as a live performance: it was about to do it again as a cult recording. The main feature of the track was the Tootalbug Drone, a strange monolithic rhythmic device invented by Ashton Tootal, the flautist from Hair.
ZAL: Ah, the Tootalbug Drone… I remember going with Alex to get it fixed. Ashton lived in this wee flat in St Albans. His bedroom was like a garage, full of electronic gear all round the walls, and Alex got it fixed, and back came the Drone. Doo–doo–doo–doo–doo–doo… Okay what else can it do? Doo–doo–doo–doo–doo–doo… What about setting three? Doo–doo–doo–doo–doo–doo… Let’s go with that one then, shall we?
TED: Alex just wanted something he could play his guitar to – it had foot pedals and you could change the pitch. Nowadays people would use drum machines. He had to dig it out for Next, and after that we used it for the rest of the band’s career.
ZAL: Yeah, I wonder why he didn’t impose it on us sooner… he must have been planning to!
CHRIS: The reason Faith Healer became cult is the length of the intro. The reason it’s so long is we didn’t have enough material to properly fill a cassette so Phil stretched the intro out, with Ted’s percussion effects speeding down and up. The original intro was about fifteen seconds but Phil turned it into two and a half minutes.
TED: I hated it. I couldn’t get what Phil wanted me to do, and I didn’t know what was happening. It felt strange. In retrospect it worked – there were lots of interesting ideas. To this day you go into clubs all over the world and you hear it being played. It’s a great song, one of the best lyrics Alex wrote.
CHRIS: But Phil had a very clear idea of what he wanted, and you ended up sometimes with a very commercial backing track that didn’t work with what we played. LIke with Giddy Up A Ding Dong, you could take off Alex’s vocals and put Mud or Sweet over it. You could sing Tiger Feet over it… We did get away with some things, though.
TED: Next was an idea Alex had. I don’t know if he’d done it before; but we took a lot of time getting the arrangement. We had to develop and orchestrate it with a rock lineup, make it into something that would carry the lyric. We came up with a big powerful thing. It was our first real heavy statement, the first time we really started to bend things out of shape.
ZAL: It was strange from where we’d come from, trying to use such a small guitar sound and all. Alex’s part was everything about it. It was a strange thing for us to be doing, but everyone seemed to think it was a good idea.
Meanwhile, Alex delved into the world of comic-book superheroes for the first time, with an early outing for Vambo. This version, Vambo Marble Eye, was more street gang than crimefighter, but the seeds were sown. The story goes that Alex’s son Tyro woke him up in the middle of the night to tell him about a dream he’d had: ‘Daddy, I’ve seen Vambo Marble Eye’. The rest became history – and was to continue doing so.
ZAL: Alex was a real bookophile. He had a marvellous collection of books. He loved the Tarzan books, the Boys’ Own type of literature, and he took that into the songs. Good titles, good storylines.
Next is still seen as a classic rock album, a maelstrom of genius arrangements, daring forays from the norm and challenging, demanding originality. Brian Hogg observes: ‘The band are very very hungry – they’ve decided they’re going to make a go of it. The whole SAHB manifesto is established on that album. Next itself is breathtaking for the power of Alex’s delivery. It has the whole spirit of Brel’s original but sounds nothing like it – there’s even more menace than Brel. It’s almost as if Alex was singing from the viewpoint of the army officer – all that evil, while Brel sings from the point of the sad victim who’s had to live through it. And one of the really nice things about SAHB doing Giddy Up A Ding Dong is that the original was by Freddy Bell and the Bellboys, which was the first American rock’n’roll band ever to play in Glasgow.’
ZAL: Giddy Up A Ding Dong? Shite!
If 1972 had ended in a spirit of quiet confidence, 1973 closed with an attitude of superconfidence. In the space of 18 months SAHB had changed from a halfbaked coalition of two nearlys into the next big thing; and transformed from a ‘journeyman blues singer’ and a group of introverted overplayers into a triumph of performance that quite literally had to be seen to be believed.
ZAL: It was meteoric… One minute there were 100 people coming to see us, then there were 500, then there were 2000 people a night, every night.
EDDIE: They WERE sensational. This is a band that had played thousands of gigs, and a guy who’d had a lifetime of experience in music and theatre. It’s brilliant to think about even in retrospect. This band would turn audiences around. People who wanted to kill them would come back and see them. That’s talent. One night in a really rowdy venue Alex told the audience to sit down – and they all sat. Total dominance! That’s why we’re still talking about SAHB today.
