Framed

Pull up a chair, Zoo Freaks, because the Zoo Crew has got a story that starts in a Glasgow tenement and ends with a man in a leather jacket telling a packed hall he did not do a thing. The record on the turntable is Framed, the title cut from the 1972 debut by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and if you have only heard it as a hard-rock shuffle you have missed the theater that made it dangerous. Alex Harvey did not invent the song. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote it for the Robins back in 1954, a comic courtroom number with a sharper tooth underneath. Leiber later said the joke was riding on top of something uglier, the way a legal system could swallow a man who had already been judged. Bill Haley cut it. Ritchie Valens cut it. Harvey had been singing a version of it since his Hamburg days in the early sixties. When he finally put it on an album with a young Glasgow band, he turned the plea of the framed man into a whole stage character.

The album itself was cut fast at Morgan Studios in London and issued on Vertigo in December 1972. Harvey sang. Zal Cleminson played guitar in the white face paint that made him look like a mime who had wandered into a biker bar. Chris Glen held the bass. Hugh McKenna sat at the electric piano. Ted McKenna drove the drums. They knocked the record out in a matter of days, which tells you something about the nerve of the thing. Framed opens the set, a Leiber and Stoller number stretched to nearly five minutes, and the rest of the album walks from gangland boogie to Scottish witch lore. Hammer Song and Midnight Moses were older Harvey songs. Isobel Goudie ran past seven minutes and sounded like a campfire story told by somebody who had read too many court records. There is a Willie Dixon cover in there too, I Just Want to Make Love to You, which Harvey had already been worrying at for years. Brian Hogg, writing the history of Scottish rock, called the album basic and exciting at the same time, hard rock with a surrealist thumbprint. Cleminson later said Framed got them off the ground. He was right. It did not chart. It did not have to. It gave them a show.

And the show is where the song got its legend. Harvey would slick his hair back with beer, pull on the leather jacket, and plead his innocence while the band locked into that rolling riff. One night at a festival in Oslo he licked a pair of nylon tights, stuffed them in his cheeks, and pulled them over his head like a bank robber, arms out, still singing that he had been framed. Drummer Ted McKenna told a writer about a night in Berlin when Harvey went further than the rest of the band wanted. They asked him not to. He went on anyway with his hair brushed to one side, a moustache made of gaffer tape, and a swastika marked on the jacket, then delivered the same line. I did not do nothing. I was framed. The German kids swayed. Harvey thought the whole thing was crazy. At the end of one of those performances he made the point plain, growling that Hitler was a bastard and that if any fascism came their way they could send it to him. Sound man Dave Batchelor, sitting out in the crowd, said he did not know how it would land and that it could have gone wrong in exactly the wrong city. It did not. Harvey knew the edge he was walking.

He played the other side of the same coin at Reading, coming out dressed as Christ, carrying a cross, and shouting that he was framed. The polystyrene cross ended up in the pit and caught Radio 1 man Alan Freeman on the head. From teddy boy to that Berlin costume to the cross, all inside the same song. Zal Cleminson remembered another night at the Glasgow Apollo, three sellouts, the band stopping dead while Harvey muttered that he did not do nothing and you could hear a pin drop in a room of thirty-five hundred. Somebody at the back yelled that Harvey had shagged his sister in 1974. The place collapsed. Harvey burst out laughing and called the concert off. That is the song. It is a plea, a joke, a threat, and a piece of street theater, and the band never played it the same way twice.

Years later Nick Cave told Bobby Gillespie that his first band was basically an Alex Harvey cover band. They did Framed, Isobel Goudie, Faith Healer, Midnight Moses, the lot. Cave wore jeans and a tight cropped shirt. The guitarist wore clown makeup like Zal. Their first gig was a battle of the bands in a country town, they opened with Framed, and they came second. Cave said it had been downhill ever since, which is the kind of line only a man who loved the record would bother to tell. The Birthday Party carried those songs into the clubs. Cave later cut Hammer Song himself. So the debut that barely registered on the charts in 1972 was still teaching singers how to stand in a room twenty and thirty years on.

If you want to know how a man gets to a stage like that, you have to go back to Kinning Park in Glasgow, where Alexander James Harvey was born on the fifth of February, 1935. Working-class streets. He tried carpentry. He waited tables. He carved gravestones. By 1954 he was in skiffle groups, which in those years was the cheapest way onto a stage if you could borrow a guitar. In 1956 or 1957, depending on who is telling it, he won a talent contest and picked up the tag Scotland's Tommy Steele. The prize was tours in a wartime car and potatoes lifted from fields when the money ran out. The name stuck longer than the pin-up career. He opened a show in Alloa in 1960 for Johnny Gentle, whose group that week was the Beatles, still with Stuart Sutcliffe. Then came the soul band, the Hamburg grind after the Beatles had already left town, and an album, Alex Harvey and His Soul Band, that got kind words and left him broke. He spent stretches in the pit band of Hair, the London hippie musical, which is a long way from a Glasgow talent show and somehow exactly the training a man would need if he later planned to walk onstage as a gangster, a detective, or a street saint.

The break that mattered came after real loss. His brother Les, guitarist with Stone the Crows, was electrocuted onstage in 1972. Around the same time a bingo-hall man named Bill Fehilly, who had already put money behind Nazareth, matched the thirty-seven-year-old Harvey with Tear Gas, a young Glasgow hard-rock band going nowhere in particular. Cleminson, Glen, and the McKenna cousins were in their early twenties. Harvey was sixteen years older and already worn in. He said later that his experience and their enthusiasm went well together. They took the name the Sensational Alex Harvey Band in August 1972, kept the costumes strange on purpose, and went out behind Slade when other bands were nervous about the slot. Framed was the first album, on Vertigo rather than on Fehilly's own Mountain label. The singles that finally dented the British chart, a tongue-in-cheek Delilah and The Boston Tea Party, came later. By then the rooms already knew who they were. Harvey died on the fourth of February 1982, a day short of forty-seven, on the road with a later band. The debut record is still the cleanest place to hear what he and those Glasgow kids sounded like before the myth got bigger than the man.

We keep a light on for this kind of record over at THE ZOO, where the Crew still spins the deep cuts for the Freaks and lets the story ride along with the groove. The old band site that used to carry the name has gone quiet and will not answer a browser, so we are not sending you down a dead road. The living rooms are the fan circles. The unofficial gathering SAHB FANS ON FACEBOOK is where the old stories and the ticket stubs still get passed around. The players who still take the songs out, with a nod from Zal Cleminson and from Chris Glen, keep a door open at The Sensational Alex Harvey Experience. No tidy official Instagram or X account turned up that a modern browser could trust, and we would rather hand you a room that is actually lit. Put Framed on. Listen for the moment the band drops out and one voice says he did not do a thing. That is Alex Harvey, still pleading his case, still framed, still running the room.