Sunday Music – Anthem

Today’s music video is ‘Anthem’ from the Scottish band The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

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This video was posted to You Tube by cojwat

I’m always looking around for songs to play that people may not readily recognise, and because the era when I became aware of music was such a fertile one, there are just so many songs to choose from.

In this lead up to Christmas, I was thinking back on songs that were released in the lead up to that time, across the years, whether they are Christmas themed songs or not.

Today’s featured song is one of those, and it has something about it that was a bit of an oddity.

As you can notice from the song, it is quite long at more than seven and a half minutes.

Because of that, it very rarely received any airplay at all.

Despite that, it became a fairly large hit in the local area where I was at the time it was released, in 1974. All we had here in Australia at that time was AM Radio, and that’s why there was the propensity not to play long songs at all. A local DJ heard the song and liked just part of it, so he truncated the song and played just the last section of the song, which neatly fitted in with the ‘nothing more than three and half minutes’ which was the case at the time.

That part he truncated and then started playing was the last section of this song, from the 4.50 mark of the song, which effectively meant the song was now just less than three minutes long, which was ‘acceptable’.

This section of the song is entirely Instrumental, with the bagpipes slowly coming up in volume, and mixing with the guitars, keyboards, and the soaring vocal accompaniment without lyrics.

This truncated version of the song started to be played ‘on air’ in early December, and once played, the announcer got some feedback from the public, all of it positive, mainly along the lines of ….. “Can you play that bagpipe song again.”

This was only on one of the 4 local radio stations, and soon, the other three also caught on that it was popular locally, and it received quite widespread airplay on all 4 Stations, and in fact was quite a big hit locally, although it rarely charted anywhere else across the Country.

Because it was being played in December, it was erroneously thought of as a special ‘Christmas song’.

It was catchy and although it was popular, it was just something I heard on the radio, and never really paid all that much attention to.

Then, later in December as the song started to drop in airplay, I was listening to late night radio on an ‘out of town’ Station, not one of the 4 local Stations that was playing the song.

The on air announcer mentioned how it was a minor hit, and that it had been truncated, and he was going to play the whole song right through.

I was intrigued, and it started out in much the same way as the shortened version, but then it changed, and changed considerably. This gave the song a completely different context to what was roundly thought about the song.

I was ‘into’ clever guitar work, and this was evident in this song, with some wonderful guitar playing.

The vocals were from the leader of the band, Alex Harvey, and as is quite obvious, he has a very distinctive voice.

It placed the whole song in a completely different light for me, and I actually went out the following week and purchased the album, just for that song alone.

The band is from Scotland, and while popular locally, they never really ‘made it big’ outside of Scotland. They had a dedicated following but it was nothing in the scale that could be referred to as huge.

Alex Harvey was a long time ‘journeyman’ in music, and had come up via jazz, then into the Blues, then R and B, and then into what was referred to in those days as ‘glam rock’, nothing to do with the music, but more for the way the band appeared dressed on stage.

The band’s albums sold reasonably well, enough for them to make a comfortable living, and to ensure a good round of ‘gigs’ to play at, but they were never really a huge name band outside of Scotland.

Sadly, Alex died in 1982 of a massive heart attack, aged barely 46.

This song effectively covers just so many different styles, all in the one song. The soaring vocal accompaniment is from Vicki Silva, in much the same manner as Clare Torry’s vocalising on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ from that monster album ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’.

Zal Cleminson plays the wonderful lead guitar breaks in this song, and the keyboards are from Hugh McKenna.

While the sound ‘seems’ to be bigger, there are in fact only the 2 Pipers playing here, and they are from the London Scottish TA Regiment.

The lyrics are somewhat ‘dark’ in nature, which is seemingly at odds with the shortened way that the song was originally played on air.

It’s a wonderful song for so many different reasons.

Tagged: Music, Music Video, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Posted in: Music, Videos