Alex Harvey

A veteran British rocker, Alex Harvey achieved only fleeting mainstream acclaim in the mid-1970s after enduring decades of obscurity. Raised in Scotland, he first embraced music during his late teens and belonged to a skiffle group by 1955. That ensemble had developed into the Alex Harvey Big Soul Band by 1959. In the early 1960s Harvey brought the unit to Hamburg, West Germany, where he cut his debut album, Alex Harvey and His Soul Band, during autumn 1963; the record contained no contributions from the band itself. The musicians made their London bow in February 1964, and Harvey also completed The Blues that year, an essentially solo project. He disbanded the Big Soul Band in 1965 and returned to Glasgow, yet resurfaced in London two years later to form the short-lived psychedelic outfit Giant Moth. While employed in the pit band for the stage musical Hair, he documented Having a Hair Rave up Live from the Shaftsbury Theatre. Harvey issued his first solo album in five years, Roman Wall Blues, in 1969. Up to that juncture none of his recordings had drawn significant notice. In the early 1970s, however, he enlisted the Scottish group Tear Gas—whose members were Zal Cleminson, Chris Glen, Hugh McKenna, and Ted McKenna—and named the resulting five-piece the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

Their opening releases, Framed (1972) and Next (1973), failed to register commercially, yet The Impossible Dream became Harvey’s first U.K. chart album in autumn 1974 and briefly appeared on American listings in March 1975. Tomorrow Belongs to Me arrived the following spring, reaching the Top Ten while Harvey’s theatrical reading of the Tom Jones hit “Delilah” also entered the Top Ten singles chart. Next subsequently charted after a delay, and in September Sensational Alex Harvey Band Live climbed to the U.K. Top 20—also entering the U.S. Top 100—while “Gamblin’ Bar Room Blues” attained the Top 40 singles listing. Momentum persisted into 1976 as Penthouse Tapes entered the album charts in April and peaked inside the Top 20, “Boston Tea Party” reached the singles chart in June and likewise placed inside the Top 20, and SAHB Stories followed in July, finishing just outside the Top Ten.

During 1977 Harvey and his colleagues recorded apart: the band, billed as SAHB without Alex, delivered Fourplay while the frontman issued Alex Harvey Presents the Loch Ness Monster. Their last joint effort, Rock Drill, preceded the group’s dissolution. Harvey reassembled a New Band in 1979 for the album The Mafia Stole My Guitar, yet the commercial window that had opened only after prolonged struggle had already closed. He nevertheless continued performing and was touring Belgium when he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982 shortly before turning 47.