Steve Harley's star may have faded quickly, but his songs have stood the test of time. Harley talks to TONY CLAYTON-LEAabout his short-lived life in journalism, paying the bills and classic pop
GATHER ROUND, children, for you are about to hear of a once very well known British rock singer who created a blueprint and then lost the plot.
These days, 59-year-old Steve Harley spends Monopoly money figures on independently creating a new album; he also potters about his rustic English home, with its acres of protected woodland and squirrel traps.
“It’s nothing flash,” says Harley. “I never broke America, so I’m not exactly ‘Sting’ rich, I haven’t got the millions that some of my peers have earned, but I’m very fortunate. I’m lucky in that I have the wherewithal to be able to invest a large sum of money into my new album. I can’t go to EMI or Sony anymore and get £100,000 out of them. That isn’t going to happen, is it?”
Clearly not, but back in the early to mid-1970s, Harley and his band, Cockney Rebel, were able to play the game and break some rules. Harley's initial teenage dream was to become a successful journalist, and he reminisces about his mid-late 1960s apprenticeship at the Daily Express("banging out copy on Remington typewriters, totally absorbed with the world of reportage and journalism") with a reverie that's difficult to interrupt. Inspired by the poetry of DH Lawrence and the lyrics of Bob Dylan, journalism turned sour for him.
Harley subsequently went on the dole and started busking in the subways at the London Underground stations of Marble Arch, Hyde Park Corner and Leicester Square. Come the early 1970s, after a rather less fraught apprenticeship in music and just a handful of gigs, Cockney Rebel signed to EMI.
Even for the times that were in it, they were an eccentric lot. “Glam rock” was the pigeonhole they were shoved into because they wore make up and dressed rather extravagantly in satin and velvet, waists wrapped with cummerbunds and wrists as limp as week-old daffodils.
Cockney Rebel shone brightly if shortly, however, and within two years – from 1974 to 1976 – they went from being the toast of the music industry to just toast. Yet, in the way that makes pop music almost as odd as the people who populate it, their several inventive, virtually avant-pop hit singles have really stood the test of time. Judy Teen, Mr Soft, Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)and Mr Raffles (Man, It Was Mean)pretty much constitute their fondly remembered back catalogue.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Harley and his career dipped, traipsing from a dalliance with Lord Webber's woeful Phantom of the Operato a long-term relationship with relative obscurity. In the interim period, there have been sightings of Harley in both a solo capacity and in his Cockney Rebel guise (notably via the use of two CR songs, Make Me Smile .. . and Mr Softin television ads for, respectively, lager and mints), but none that would make any real difference to his moderate profile. This month, however, he is touring his 13th original studio album, which he has overseen in a stringent lock, stock and barrel capacity.
“Steve Harley,” he asserts none too delicately, “is paying the bills and running the business. I’m the producer and I’m clock-watching.”
And yet it’s arguable that all but the avid Harley fan will be interested in hearing anything but the Cockney Rebel tunes. This doesn’t irk him at all, he says, although the ongoing durability of the 1970s songs constantly surprises him, considering that more than often the memories are better than the songs.
"I think it's do with whether or not they sound dated, don't you think?" he ponders. "I was driving in the car the other day, listening to the radio, and the likes of Pickettywitch's That Same Old Feelingand Brotherhood of Man's Save Your Kisses for Mecame on, and they sounded so dated. Awful pop music! Everything about them was of their time. Now, there's no way I'm taking credit for anything here, but I don't think you can say that about some 1970s songs of mine. I hear Make Me Smile. . . all over the world and it'll come on, and I'll think 'yes, that sounds good'.
“There are lots of elements about it that make it stand out to this day, and I’m bemused by it a lot of the time. It certainly doesn’t owe me anything, that’s for sure.”
An offbeat bloke is Steve Harley; polite with an undertow of cynicism, smart with a veneer of regret, a pragmatist with a show of vanity. “All I wanted to do all my life was to get on a bus or an airplane, and get on a stage and play. After family, it’s the number-one issue in my life. Give me a spotlight and I’ll sing to people.”
Steve Harley Cockney Rebel perform at The Academy, Dublin, May 23rd, and Spring Airbrake, Belfast, May 24th. Stranger Comes to Townis out now
