RIP Steve Harley

 One of the most enjoyable bits in the research for Shock + Awe was doing Cockney Rebel. 

What an odd anomalous sound they had! (I shunted them into a chapter called Baroque 'n' Roll, alongside Queen and Sparks)

And what a peculiar, driven, super-self-conscious frontman / leader, in Steve Harley! 

I grew to really like The Human Menagerie and Psychomodo. And was surprised to discover that "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" was 

A/ titled like that, and not "Come Up and See Me", the first line of the chorus, which was how I'd  always mentally filed it.

B/ not a sweetly suggestive, sexually inviting song, as the chorus could lead to you think ("come up and see me, make me smile...  do what you want, running wild")  but a classic of meta-music and insta-self-mythology, seething with spite and bitterness. 

Here are some of my favorite Harley / Cockney Rebel tunes interspersed with excerpts from the Baroque 'n' Roll chapter. 

Initially besotted with Dylan, he was jolted out of folk-singer mode by Bowie, who showed the possibilities for a new rock theatre – one that took place not just on the stage but in the pages of the pop press.  Harley had observed the successful unfolding of the MainMan masterplan– “talk like you’re already a star, act like you’re already a star, and you’ll become a star”. Launching Cockney Rebel, he followed the Bowie / Defries play-book page for page (while also taking style notes from Bryan Ferry).  When the band played at Biba’s Rainbow Room, Harley introduced himself as “Mohammed ‘Arley” – funny, but also spot on. His brazen boasting and put-downs of the contemporary scene really did recall the former Cassius Clay’s pugilistic patter of self-hype and goading of his adversaries. 

For Cockney Rebel’s first major feature in November 1973, Harley came out swinging, telling Melody Maker that “we’re rehearsing music now which is so hard and tough it knocks me through the roof. There’s a buzz in Cockney Rebel saying we’re on the brink of being big, being leaders not followers, a musical force that others will follow.”  Muhammed Ali is sometimes mentioned as a pioneer of rap; like rising hip hop MCs aiming diss rhymes against established rappers, Harley launched his career by squaring up against the biggest name in the biz, as if they were already on a par. “I hope that when Bowie hears Cockney Rebel it’ll knock him sideways and he’ll say ‘...I’ve got to step on it to stay at the top’. I’ll chase him until I either fall flat on my face or make him run. He needs someone like Cockney Rebel… There’s no one around to kick him up the arse.”

The music papers ate up this kind of thing.  Harley knew how to give good quote partly because, says Cockney Rebel keyboardist Milton Reame-James, “he read every single line of every single music paper every week. He was really good at following the trends, and he knew the journalists, what to feed the press so that they hadn't really got to think about writing an item — Steve had written it for them.” It was also because Harley had himself been a journalist before he’d picked up a guitar: not a rock writer, but an experienced reporter on local newspapers like Braintree and Witham Times and Colchester Evening Gazette. Working his way up from tea boy to sports editor, he eventually got a brief taste of Fleet Street – including six weeks on the Daily Express, Harley claimed in an early feature– but then gave it up, he said, because he was becoming cynical and ruthless in his pursuit of a story. 

.... Learning first from Dylan and then from Bowie, he developed the knack of writing floridly imagistic lyrics – teeming with bitches crucified, suicide streets, painted faces, lips like morgues - that conjured a sense of hidden depths and cutting angles.  

Anticipating postpunk bards like Howard Devoto, Elvis Costello, and Kevin Rowland, the tone was often see-through-you scornful,  jousting with unidentified enemies or  passing panoramic judgement. Unreality rhymed with vanity, Schemeland with Dreamland, ego with Quasimodo, and Nero got a namecheck too. The title of the debut Cockney Rebel album The Human Menagerie gives a sense of how Harley viewed the world – a stew of corruption, fakery, self-deception, bravado and betrayal.  Underneath it all bubbled  bitterness about the hand – or rather leg - the world had dealt him.  Yet the prettiness of the melodies and the quirky, playful arrangements concocted by Harley and his bandmates made the whole package attractive.  

.... The single most divisive thing about Steve Harley was not his grandiosity, but his voice. Like his right leg, it lacked strength and stability, yet by sheer force of will he fashioned its weak ‘r’ and wobbly vowels into a mesmerizingly quirky instrument  - all fey chirrups, goblin sneers, and shaky soars of would-be operatic emotion.  The effect was vaguely repellent… yet gripping....  Harley had learned from Dylan about how you could use phrasing to make something out of a voice that that lacked range and power. 

“I was overawed, enraptured,” Harley said of his first encounter with Dylan’s work, which propelled him into a pre-Rebel career as a Dylan-casualty playing for free in folk clubs and busking, doing the whole “harmonica holder and the nasal bit.”  It was during this phase that Harley hooked up with violinist Jean-Paul Crocker, the first of the components that made up Cockney Rebel’s unusual sound.. At the age of seventeen Crocker picked up a fiddle for the first time. Applying five years of studying classical guitar to a completely different instrument, he came up with a style that blended elements of rock’n’roll and bluegrass, heard to captivating effect on tunes like “Hideaway” and “Crazy Raver”. Crocker “was able to create this enormous sound that moved and rocked” says Reame-James. The keyboard-player’s own background took in training as a concert pianist, playing for a youth orchestra, and writing music for theatre.  Like Crocker, Milton Reame-James “approached the keyboard from the perspective of the classical tradition. I was also very influenced by the jazz players who were using electric piano. That's why I chose the Fender Rhodes – I really admired what Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were doing at that time. Writing my parts I borrowed from classical music a lot, in a disguised way, changing the notes a bit. Quite often in Cockney Rebel, I’d be playing the left hand from one piece and the right hand from a different composer, a completely different piece!”

Although the rhythm section – bassist Paul Jeffreys and drummer Stuart Eliot – corresponded to the rock-pop norm, the kind of rhythmic structures Harley’s songs followed often seemed more like European vaudeville or folk-meets-cabaret. Factor in the presence of violin and the classical-infused piano, and the absence of electric guitar, and the Cockney Rebel sound amounted to one of the real curios of the British 1970s. 

Harley made a huge rhetorical deal about having a guitar-less sound.  In interviews, he railed against the cult of the guitar-hero that had ruined rock from 1968 onwards, saying that the Kids “must be tired of screaming guitar licks that say nothing.” He wrote a song, “Tumbling Down”, whose long fade features the sing-a-long chorus “oh dear! Look what they’ve done to the blues, blues, blues.”  Guitarists had no place in Cockney Rebel, with their “rude noises” that “couldn’t do anything for my songs”. 

But knowing Harley, it seems like the decision not to have a lead guitarist was as much to do with not wanting to share the limelight with a Ronson-type figure. “I wasn’t going to take on anyone who was likely to upstage me,” he recalled of the group’s formation. This only-room-for-one-star-here stance carried through to the songwriting, which was his province entirely. “They had to be guys who didn’t think they could write better songs than me.... I laid it on the line.... I’m the guv’nor and everyone knows it. Five heads are never better than one.” Harley added that it was tricky at first because “I had to find guys I could brainwash into joining me on the strength of my songs”, not having any money to pay for their acquiescent participation in the project. “They had to have total faith in me and the belief I could make them stars.”

Having no guitarist became Harley’s way of upping the ante on glam’s first wave. He picked up on Bryan Ferry’s patter about the lost art of songcraft and talked loudly of being “basically old-fashioned. For me the greatest works of contemporary song writing were by Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter.”  He took the “carry yourself like a star” classiness further too. He boasted about how Cockney Rebel would “spend all our earnings on a good hotel to look fresh” on tour. He claimed that at a time when rock bands came onstage looking like roadies, Cockney Rebel’s roadies looked as smart as the band. “We have the cleanest roadies in the business. They come in, shower or wash and change like us. They’re special, they’re not the average roadies,” Harley solemnly informed NME. At some early gigs, chief roadie Terry Pinnell wore top hat and tails and carried drinks onstage on a silver tray, like he was Cockney Rebel’s butler....  

Their debut single “Sebastian” looks like a conscious attempt to situate the band as “glam”, but only in terms of the lyrics, not the music. A symphonic epic, drawing on a 40-piece orchestra, a choir, and the full largesse of EMI’s budget, the song feels like a throwback to the progressive late Sixties, when groups first started integrating quasi-classical elements into the music. The heavy phasing effects that make Harley’s wobbly vocal even more wavering hark back even further to psychedelia. Harley has spoken of the song being influenced indirectly by his LSD experiences, a period when he “blew a lot of brain-cells” with acid and speed. 

“Sebastian” doesn’t sound anything like a hit single in 1973’s context. But what did make the single timely and glammy were the elliptical hints of bisexual passion in the lyric (a passing reference to a paramour who’s “oh so gay”, images of a pallid angel-faced seducer with green eye-shadow) combined with the swooning languor of Harley’s vocals. The title itself is a name so overloaded with layered gay associations that it’s become a self-perpetuating tradition: Saint Sebastian, icon of homo-erotic passion; Sebastian Melmoth, the alias adopted by a disgraced Oscar Wilde after his release from gaol; Lord Sebastian Flyte, the decadent aristocratic heir and wastrel of Brideshead Revisited;   Sebastian Venable, the aesthete torn apart by rent-boys in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer.... Yet according to Harley “Sebastian” means whatever you want it to mean: its “six minutes of Gothic poetry” dated back well before glam, to his busking days at the start of the Seventies. 

Sonically at odds with the times, “Sebastian” flopped totally in Britain. But it became a #2 hit in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and did well in Germany.  This success convinced EMI that Cockney Rebel really were potential second-wave glam superstars. Alan Parsons, who had trained under the Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, was lined up to produce the group’s second album The Psychomodo .  

Before the LP was finished, though, Cockney Rebel scored a #5 hit in March ’74 with the non-album single “Judy Teen”.  A rare moment of pure gaiety in the Harley songbook, this reminiscence of adolescent sex rides an odd pizzicato rhythm, at once lilting and stilted. The herky-jerky un-rock feel is matched by Harley’s scansion (“all hanky panky” is rhymed with “seldom she bored me”) and the singer’s gelatinous warble, a cross between Fagin from Oliver! and Noël  Coward. 

The Human Menagerie had contained one or two really eccentric tracks, most notably “Death Trip”: a ten minute, tempo-shifting piece that suggested an alternate world where all music had followed the direction pointed by “A Day In The Life”. Psychomodo plunged deeper still into grandiose experimentalism. Reame-James recalls the sessions as crazily creative, with himself playing atonal stuff on the keyboards and violinist Crocker off on “a wacky trip... doing all sorts of weird things with his bowing...  and getting into gizmos - anything with a foot pedal, anything he could do to modulate the sound. We called him the Gizmo King”.  Stuart Elliot, meanwhile, laid down super-syncopated breakbeats on “Singular Band,” a song that flipped back and forth between solo drums and sung verses.  

The heart of Psychomodo is a challenging stretch that starts with the last track of side one (the droning seven minutes of “Ritz”) and recommences with the first track on side two (the droning nearly-nine minutes of “Cavaliers”). NME reviewer Charles Shaar Murray grudgingly praised “Ritz”, comparing it to Last Year At Marienbad:Alain Resnais’s spatially and temporally disjointed dream-drift through the corridors and gardens of a Central European chateau,  which is described, in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s incantatory script, as “this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, lugubrious hotel... salons heavy with ornamentation of a bygone era.” 

“I think ‘“Ritz’ is literally to do with ‘putting on the ritz’,” says Reame-James. “It’s about glamour.”  The sound itself is like a sepia-tinted mist of Old World elegance, a haze through which Harley intones heady lines about the eyeless gaze of “clowns in drag” and “the twisted tale of man”. 

 

The sense of decay and corruption intensifies with “Cavaliers,” an uncharacteristically heavy song for Rebel (featuring electric guitar for once, distorted with pedal effects, as were Reame-James keyboards) that rolls out like an endlessly cycling portent of doom. Suicide, masturbation, blow-jobs, absinthe, and crucifixion all figure in one of Harley’s most garish lyrics -  a jaundiced panorama of modern times in the vein of “Desolation Row” .  What the concept of the cavalier signified to Harley is unclear: a history buff, he may well have seen the parallel between the dandy Royalists and glam’s decadents. The song’s choruses proposed Cockney Rebel’s following as cavaliers, invited them to testify, but the tone was vaguely taunting, with the Dylanesque “how does it feel now you’re testified?”

Cockney Rebel now had a fervent following, after the Top 5 success of “Judy Teen”, and another oddball hit taken from Psychomodo, “Mr. Soft” – a sort of Brecht-Weill polka.  Their new disciples copied the singer’s penchant for wearing a bowler hat; some threw them onstage. As the group embarked on a 40-date tour in the early summer of 1974, a real Rebel-mania was brewing: an increasingly paranoid Harley, jittery about the crowds, hired extra security. But then it all came tumbling down.... 

.... In Harley’s own account of the dispute, the band demanded to write songs for the third album; he wanted to continue the existing set-up of himself as sole songwriter for at least one more album after Psychomodo. Crocker, Reame-James, and Jeffreys refused and announced they would quit after the completion of the 40-date tour. 

Harley understood how crucial it was to control the narrative and went straight to the music press, which accepted his framing of the schism – making him both the injured party and the victor. The July 27 1974 issue of Melody Maker reported that “it was entirely Harley’s decision to disband” Cockney Rebel, that he’d been aware of undercurrents of insubordination within the group, and called a meeting to confront them. 

“Steve made out it was him who’d split up the band,” recalls Reame-James. “But we left him. In that Melody Maker piece, he actually repeats the same things he said to us: ‘I don't need you guys. I could stand there with four cardboard cut-outs and I'll still be a star.’ And we said, ‘If you don't need us, we're going. That's it. Bye.’ I think Steve genuinely believed that he didn't need us, that he'd be able to get some session guys and it would carry on exactly the same as it was before.”...

Possibly smarting from the fact that Reame-James and bassist Paul Jeffreys had joined the rising post-glam band Be-Bop Deluxe, Harley was still ranting in November when he did a big interview with NME, that perpetual thorn in his side. The piece was tied to his first solo single “Big Big Deal,” on which he played all the instruments except the drums (handled by Stuart Eliot, the only Rebel who’d opted to stay).... 

When “Big Big Deal” left no impression on the charts, Harley funneled all the unattractive emotions displayed in that NME feature into a supremely appealing song -- “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” – that became a career-saving smash: #1 in the UK for five weeks, a million-plus copies sold world-wide, and to date around 120 different cover versions. 

Most people took “Make Me Smile” as a sweet, sexy tune, hearing the beguiling chorus title phrase with its suggestions of assignations and afternoon-delight. In fact, the song is “a finger-pointing piece of vengeful poetry,” in Harley’s words - an acrid and very public (if somewhat veiled) kiss-off to the group who “betrayed” the singer’s trust. The song was written within days of the split, with the first verse, Harley has said, probably emerging from a swamp of brandy-soaked self-pity. The lyric indicated just how fearfully Harley had contemplated the abyss of going back to being a nobody again. 

Rallying his resources of spite, Harley retaliated with the song that would ensure his pop immortality and (as he put it) pay him a handsome pension.   “Make Me Smile” is basically “The Ballad of Cockney Rebel”, a self-reflexive anthem. Harley accuses his erstwhile bandmates of bringing the Rebel “to the floor”, taking everything away from him. And all for the lowest of motives: “metal, what a bore”, meaning money (as if the other Rebels were a trade union striking for a pay-rise).  The cooing chorus-refrain about coming up to see him and making him smile was – Reame-James believes - a private message to the band, referring with a sort of soured fondness to the lost camaraderie of the band’s early days.  “Steve lived in an upstairs flat in Chelsea, with an entry phone, and we’d always turn up at his place before going off to gigs.” Before buzzing them in, Harley would always answer with a Mae West-like “come up and see me sometime”. “It was his little joke, and we’d hurl abuse into the entry phone. It’d make him laugh.” 

Harley himself has said the chorus was simply a taunting anticipation of future triumph: one day you’ll know you blew it, one day I’ll laugh in your faces....  

Muhammed Harley reigned supreme as champion:  “Make Me Smile” was a bigger hit than his role models Bowie and Ferry had achieved at that point, while Harley’s enemies were in disarray (Reame-James and Crocker did not last long in Be-Bop Deluxe), cut off from the success he’d promised and predicted if only they’d follow his leadership....

Bonus beat: interesting reading here from George McKay, from his book Shakin' All Over: Popular Music and Disability, looking at how contracting polio as a child and the consequent corrective surgery affected Steve Harley. He detects traces, or perhaps uncanny echoes is better, of the trauma and its lifelong effects  in the idiosyncratic rhythms of many Cockney Rebel songs - even in his odd style of singing - as well as some of the lyrical themes (the very title Psychomodo with its echo of Quasimodo) and moods.

"The 1970s English pop singer Harley spent three-and-a-half childhood years in hospital, after contracting it in 1953... His long-term impairment consisted of atrophied right leg muscles, related limping gait, and chronic uncertainty of balance....

"Steve Harley’s repertoire included a vocal delivery and lyrics and musical arrangements that drew on tics, pauses, an occasional stutter, masses of mispronounciations, nursery nonsenses. (These are elements of what I call his mal canto.) He limped on to stage to the accompaniment of pop music that could be strikingly rhythmically unusual, driven by a percussive centre that was more than slightly off-beat. Hit songs like ‘Judy Teen’ and ‘Mr Soft’, each a top ten single in the British charts in 1974, were peopled by eccentric characters, and voiced with stutters and echoes, but their rhythms are notable too, for the punctuated or broken stops and silences, and most of all their alla zoppa stepfulness.

"At his commercial peak in the mid-1970s, after glam and before punk rock, Harley presented an image of pomp and disturbance with albums like The Psychomodo and The Human Menagerie, playing the poppy madman and decadent, singing songs of suicide and ‘mild schizophrenia’, as he put it. Although he told me in 2005 that he did not consciously explore any personal sense of disability during the songs of the peak Cockney Rebel years, it is possible to trace some such recurring interest, even from the modest freakery of the album titles alone.

1974’s The Psychomodo presents a fictive figure of combined cognitive and physical impairment, a conflation of the psychotic Quasimodo, who is mad and hunchbacked. Judging by the front cover which shows a bare-shouldered, wide-eyed Harley with a tear rolling down his cheek, fans were invited to identify the body of Harley himself with the doubly disabled Psychomodo character. In the chorus of the album’s title song the lyric sheet gives, in damaged grammar: ‘Oh! We was so hung up and wasted/ Oh! We was so physically devastated’."