1.
Vambo Rools, O.K.?
2.
It's hard to know exactly who Vambo was. A superhero, without the slightest measure of doubt, and one certainly possessed of the most important quality that a superhero can have; Vambo was always "coming to the rescue". That, in the end, is what we want from our masked protectors, isn't it? We all know that, sooner or later, we'll end up in terrible trouble. What if there's no-one who can help, or, far worse, no-one that cares to.
Vambo would always care. As Alex Harvey sang in "Hot City Symphony Part 1: Vambo";
"Vambo, he coming to the rescue. Vambo cool all situation."
3.In 1978, Alex Harvey's management company prevented him performing songs from a concept album he'd written about Vambo's homeland "Vibrania". To my knowledge, those songs were never released, or if they were, I've loved to know about it.
The facts and the clues that must be there in those songs!
4.
We do however know that Vambo was the Ambassador of Vibrania, and that Vibrania herself was a state unlike any other on or beyond this world of ours. One listen to the cod-reggae fade-out of "To Be Continued" from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's "Tomorrow Belongs To Me", for example, assures us that Vibrania is a chilled, just, peaceful and smart place to be.
We know that Alex had very little time for the avarice of big business or the cant and incompetence of the great modern nation-state. As such, we can assume that Vibrania was neither a socialist paradise or a reactionary's utopia. Vibrania was surely no great centre-driven monster of rules and laws/ Nor was it a lightly-regulated fleecing ground where the privileged permitted the dregs of their wealth to trickle down to the undeserving masses. Vibrania must have been a country characterised by respect and compassion and the willingness of its citizens to take a stand in the cause of justice whenever it was necessary.
Justice.
Alex Harvey hated violence and he hated bullies.
"Hail Vibrania".
5.It's not that Alex Harvey was any soft-headed idealist. He believed in peace, but he also believed in consequences. A discussion with several police officers once involved Alex expressing a tentative blueprint for a just society which would allow every citizen the right to make one serious mistake where the law was concerned. One mistake was something to learn from, but a second would trigger the death penalty. Paradise, argued Alex Harvey that night, wasn't going to be something that was easy to establish or maintain.
6.
What did Vambo look like? The reports from Harvey's concerts indicate that our superhero looked every bit the same as Alex Harvey typically did on stage. Bumble-bee t-shirt, biker's leather jacket, broad belt with a huge metal pirate's buckle, jeans and boots. Vambo, however, as most true superheroes do, both hid and celebrated his identity, and did so with a stocking mask pulled over his face.
It's quite appropriate that Vambo should disguise himself in the way that the UK's armed bank robbers traditionally had. There was always the threat of violence where Vambo walked. Vambo was no middle class superhero. He followed no law beyond that of Vibrania. His ambition was to stop the imposition of suffering, and yet Vambo knew that big sticks and gentle words came hand-in-hand. He was far, far more of a threat to the status quo that any shotgun-toting bankrobber.
Vambo would have done something about the Great Crash of 2007.
7.
The photograph which appears at the head of this piece comes from the front cover of John Neil Munro's "The Sensational Alex Harvey". Mr Munro has done us a considerable service by collating all the evidence he could find of Mr Harvey's life, and publishing a great deal of it. That he's edited out some material for the sake of good manners and kindly restraint may disappoint the prurient, but it's a gracious gesture which it's hard to believe that Alex wouldn't have appreciated.
Could that photograph on the front cover of Mr Munro's biography possibly be Vambo? Alex is wearing a highwayman's mask, not one made from a woman's stockings, so I suppose that it's definitely not. Perhaps this is a shot instead of Alex as he dressed to sing "The Tomahawk Kid", for example, or as he took some other role on stage. Yet I can find no photograph of him in his Vambo stocking mask which would look suitable at the top of the page, and so I've gone for this one, which may well be on the one hand quite inappropriate, while on the other capturing the spirit of kindness and swash-buckling heroism that I associate with Vambo himself.
And I would like to think that this is Vambo's ceremonial costume when on duty as the Ambassador Of Vibrania, just as I also like to imagine that Vambo dons this formal wear not when in the presence of Kings and Generals, but of nurses and doctors, of good-hearted teachers and generous dinner ladies, of fine neighbours and hard-working engineers of all stripes.
An Ambassador to the many courts of the People.
8.
Alex Harvey loved comic books. A political radical, a fierce pacifist, and yet loved superheroes and tin soldiers and tales of Imperial military derring do. One of his band's finest singles was titled "Sgt Fury", and Alex was absolutely thrilled to meet Stan Lee during SAHB's first American tour. Lee turned up at a party being given for the band at New York's Plaza Hotel in 1974., causing Harvey to declare "Can you imagine ... Any man like that who would just come to my party, well it's fantastic ... I've got so many of those comics."
Alex Harvey looked hard as nails, and sounded hard as nails, and he was hard as nails, but he was also one of us. He knew his superheroes from his fictional fellow travellers.
And so, we must imagine, did Vambo.
9.
Vambo was a Scottish working class hero. There's nothing of the middle or upper classes in him. There's certainly nothing of the English, beyond the fact that the dispossessed and the alienated of both nations had in Harvey's eyes a common cause, and a common humanity. But Vambo's experience of the world, and his reading of it, is rooted in a Scotsman's experience of work and struggle, fighting and longing. Vambo "sweat and labour", we're told. Vambo is there when the "Machinery overheat".
Vambo's not polite so much as direct. Vambo expresses himself in Scots, with those rolling vowels and that sense of joy, or is it mocking or even menace, under every straight-faced commonplace. In being so parochial, Harvey's work applies to everyone. Because we're not numbed by a trans-Atlantic accent and banally commonplace imagery, we're forced to listen to make sense of what's going on, and to then consider how what we're hearing applies to us.
Vambo expresses ambitions for social justice which are untouched by embourgeoisement. His work isn't concerned with a private home for all and cheap consumer goods to fill it up with. Such things are of course essential components of a secure and modern-day existence, but Vambo is concerned with what comes before, or should come before, a culture embarks upon a mad dash for personal wealth and status. Peace, respect for each other and the ecology, self-sacrifice, a willingness to help others; Vambo's values come out of an experience of a very real poverty, and of the fact that decency can flourish there just as crime and degradation can. Values before luxury, community before individual advancement, that's where Vambo's head and heart seems to lie.
Vambo's sincere, but not polite, compassionate, but not deferent, committed, but not patronising.
No bullshit, unbullshittable.
"There's nothing you teach Vambo about the streets and its people." as Alex put it.
10.
Vambo's appearance on stage, from what I've read and glimpsed, would involve, as time passed, a brickwall prop and various cans of paint spray. "Vambo Rools!" would be the graffiti that the great man would paint all around him to establish that the city was his, the rules were his, the millennium had come.
The brickwall props would be demolished by the mighty Vambo too.
It's an odd business, this graffiti, this destruction. Alex was one of the first ecologists in rock music, and he loathed vandalism in all its forms; "Vambo never vandal be, Vambo never cut down tree." Yet Harvey was also keenly aware that a lack of education could never stifle the need of the disadvantaged to express themselves, and that graffiti was one way in which such self-expression could be achieved. In that, he was ahead of his time, as well as opposed to himself. Yes, graffiti was, in a sense, a way in which the dispossessed of the city could assume responsibility of and control of the wild environment around them, but the kicking down of walls is harder to contextualise. Still, superheroes do kick down walls. That's one of the many things that superheroes do. It's a contradiction, of course, but it's a powerful one, like the superhero itself.
But then, how do the disadvantaged express themselves in a culture that largely excludes them? Through graffiti, through slang, through violence, through music and the arts, through unseen kindnesses and solidarity, through unions and churches and crime, all paths as open to abuse as the status quo is? Harvey knew that whatever generated power generated corruption. It was up to the individual, he believed, to create some kind of honourable response that didn't involve ultimately replacing one boss with another. How to think of such a programme, and such a world? "Vambo" itself is written is the form of pidgin English, in a playful and forceful approximation of a street language which anyone might be able to understand and frame resistance in terms of, if they cared to make the effort to;
"Over shaka, shake her fast
Even old marble eye go past him"
Flashes of the Mississippi Delta and the Gorbals snake through the pidgin-sloganeering of Vambo.
11.
How hard was Vambo Marble Eye? How relieved would we be if the worst occurred and Vambo appeared by our side? Let me tell you;
"Even dead fear marble eye"
12.
What did Vambo want?
Vambo wanted justice, as he would, but not in any way that involved handing over responsibility to someone else who might then disappear over the hill and find pragmatic and respectable reasons not to help the suffering. Vambo, as a consequence, was involved in far more than simple crime-fighting, Vambo "save child running wild", we're told, he "never never steal from neighbour".
Harvey's loathing for those that would prey on their own is obvious from the way he swallows the second "never" in the lyric, as if the very idea of stealing from a neighbour was too appalling to even discuss.
13.
Vambo's mission was not to be the master, but to "teach mastery".
Don't thieve. Protect the disadvantaged. Take a stand. Tell "me no lie".
In this, Vambo is as perfect a superhero as might be imagined. He has his identity, his own specific locale, he has his mission, his distant home city, his right to act, his ceremonial function, and his clearly defined principles; he's the Scottish Superman. And just like Clark Kent, he has no desire to lead, as Harvey himself would declare; "Vambo ... He's an example, not a leader. There's no place for leaders."
Vambo rools, you see, but he doesn't rule. It is, of course, a vital distinction.
14.
This loathing for the powerful, matched with an understanding that everyone who's not must assume responsibility for their lives, is exactly what might be expected from any superheroic creation of Alex Harvey. His loathing for abuses of power could lead him into swift but shocking fracas, and yet, he'd also add to his tour programmes messages which asked his audience not to "smash any windows or throw any rubbish".
It's not that Harvey was any kind of paragon, not in any way. He would never claim to be.
But then, that was Vambo's job.
15.
"One of the things I hate in life, something I can't fucking stand, is someone trying to be bigger than someone else. Trying to assume power and spitting on people. Balls to that." Alex once said.
There's a temptation to flesh out Vambo's character with reference to whatever can be found of Harvey's words and deeds. It's tempting to reach out to his songs and presume, for example, that the Faith Healer was an arch enemy, a snake oil salesman peddling religious pablum to the poor while appropriating their cash. Could the confused narrator of "Give My Compliments To The Chef" be Vambo himself, overwhelmed by our world's constant habit of rewriting its past in order to justify yet another brutality and atrocity?
Religions can be born this way. Mix this text with this text, because it's obvious that the one informs the other. Where there's so little evidence at hand, great stupid churches can be built.
Vambo would tear down any Church of Vambo brick by brick and piss on its foundations.
16.
Alex Harvey repeatedly said that Vambo was part "Santa Claus and Captain Marvel". By Santa Claus, we can assume that he meant that Vambo was utterly reliable, that he gave no one any favour because of privilege, and that he brought good things with good cheer with him. By Captain Marvel, I assume Harvey means Billy Batson's alter ego, a character he'd have encountered during his Glasgow childhood, either as the Fawcett comics were offloaded into the city's great port as ballast or in the British reprints of the character's adventures. It's often forgotten how well known and loved Captain Marvel was on this side of the pond, and Alex's fondness for the two characters, old Shazam's replacement and Father Christmas, surely tell us that he intended Vambo to be marked by an essential patriachal kindness and concern for others.
At other times, Harvey would offer "Spider-Man" instead of "Captain Marvel" as a key influence on Vambo. Harvey loved the energy and good-heartedness of Stan Lee's work. The Marvel of the Sixties and the first half of the Seventies felt to its readers as if it were allied not with its own corporate identity and advantage, but with a counter-cultural resistance to the traditional and the inert and the quite frankly immoral.
And yet most importantly, it should be noted that Alex's widow Trudy believes that Vambo was born in considerable part from the games her husband would play with their son. That paternal love would certainly explain the desire Vambo has to protect us and educate us, so that we can flourish when he's compelled to return to Vibrania.
17.
Vambo was not alone nor could he ever be too proud to accept help. Around him he had his sensational band. No one was safe from them, unless they deserved to be, I'm sure. (Vambo couldn't fight everyone, of course, unless they were all gathered in the same place at the same time. Then he'd give 'em, as is obvious, a damn good thrashing.) But sometimes when I'm driving with a SAHB album on, it's easy to imagine that Vambo's Sensational Band had been gathered under his lead to hunt down our world's equivalent of Alex and his droogs and give them a good talking too.
If the droogs would not listen to reason, then Vambo and his Band wouldn't be relying on chairs and restraints and classical music to solve the problem.
And if the droogs were particularly unlucky, Vambo would leave their fate to the Pierrot-like and terrifying Zal, Harvey's guitarist and Alex's sidekick, and sometimes-antagonist, on-stage. Zal knew no bounds, accepted even Vambo's authority with some ill-feeling at times, existed outside the traditional bounds of acceptable behaviour. God help them droogs.
18.
Vambo expresses what every superhero of note and value expresses; the fact that we must try to do what the state can't or won't until the state will. We must look after everyone else until everyone else looks after each other. The superhero is an eternal figure in democratic societies because no democracy can or will ever fulfil its many responsibilities, and often in significant part because the people themselves don't want their government to do so. "Stick together" could be Vambo's motto just as it might be that of Grant Morrison's Superman, and be responsible might be a follow-up exortion, if they each could find a way of saying so that wasn't pompous. These are thoughts which underpin the following advice offered by Alex to an American audience during a concert in 1975, as observed by the estimable Charles Shaw Murray;
"You're 200 years old this year ... right? You've got every race, creed, colour, nationality and culture that's ever been. You're the biggest, strongest and most powerful nation that's ever been ...
Don't fuck it up."
19.
Don't greet, bairn, as my Grandmother really did used to say. Alex foresaw his own leaving, but he playfully prophesied his alter ego's return;
"Vambo he go on him way
He come back some sunny day
He go home now
Hail Vibrania!"
20.
I recognise Alex Harvey and I recognise Vambo too. I see them to a greater and a lesser degree in my Parents and in my memories of my Aunts and Uncles and cousins too, even as we've all become divorced through the years from the force of that proud, unashamed proletarianism that marks Alex out as a creature of another time.
When I hear Alex Harvey, and his intelligence and aggression and concern, when I hear his ability to both bullshit and educate in the same breath, a peculiarly Scottish trait, and when I see his rage co-exist with compassion, I recognise a country I grew up in, and left just early enough that I could both believe it had actually existed, and that it might still.
Hail Vibrania!
I've ben collecting bits and bobs about Alex Harvey and Vambo for a few years now, having come to the singer, his band and their work decades after the event. Oh, to have seen SAHB in their pomp in Glasgow in 1975! But 99.9% of the material and inspiration for the above comes from the records, of course, and especially from the masses of information in John Neil Munro's "The Sensational Alex Harvey", a work of considerable love and value, and from www.wunnerful.com, which has an archive of articles about SAHB from the Seventies as well as a host of various and fascinating Alex-artifacts. Buy his book, visit that site. I hope that both sources will forgive me using their work in the above in my attempt to show my respect for the great Mr Harvey, as I hope the various individual uploaders of the photos will, especially the fine little gallery at http://www.music.kngine.com/artist.ashx?id=AA:1169703&tab=Photos
Thank you, you who have reached this point. Please do have a splendid day, and do remember, as is traditional to wish here, to "Stick together!"
.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét