From MARSHWOOD VALE Magazine

STEVE HARLEY AT POWDERHAM CASTLE - AUG 3

Amidst an eclectic line-up at Powderham Castle, which includes the seductive Irish band The Corrs and the seasonally-orientated Slade, Steve Harley catches the eye, a singer-songwriter whose idiosyncratic slant adorned another era.

Harley and his group, Cockney Rebel, enjoyed success in the early Seventies, when the pomp and often embarrassing excesses of Glam Rock were at their height. But although the group might have allowed themselves to be shoehorned into outfits of dubious taste, the intelligence and integrity of their music ensured they bore little comparison to the lightweight acts that suffocated the charts of the day. "For every Rubettes," Harley reflected, "there was a Roxy Music; for every Mud, a David Bowie."

Whilst Glam Rock is often remembered - without fondness in some circles - for it’s silver eyeliner and platform soles, its influence was far reaching. Emerging as a movement from the debris of The Velvet Underground, artists such as Bowie, Harley, Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan injected brio into the tired denim of the late Sixties and their sartorial individuality and keyboard-driven sound inspired punks, androids and New Romantics in equal measure.

A former journalist, Harley formed Cockney Rebel in 1973. His avatar was Bob Dylan, about whose ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ he said "We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew it changed everything" and his enthusiasms were catholic. Stax, the Four Tops, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin melded with the novels of Hemingway and Steinbeck, the poetry of Eliot, Pound and Donne and the art of the Impressionists to lend his work its signature.

From their earliest songs Harley developed a distinctive phrasing, his vocals swinging between anger, pride, cynicism and despair, often within the same verse. His lyrics were allusive, often elliptical, their cascading imagery and wordplay reminiscent of the Beat poets and by his own admission he often "only made sense of them after they were recorded."

Although his first single, the atmospheric ‘Sebastian’ failed to chart, he announced himself with a pair of hits, ‘Judy Teen’ and ‘Mr Soft’, that combined quirky lyrics with cabaret vocals and a stabbing, carnival keyboard to establish the Cockney Rebel sound.

But if his early, earnest, introspective lyrics were encapsulated by the title of his first major album, ‘The Psychomodo’, so success seemed to mellow him. ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ included his classic number one, ‘Make Me Smile’ (Come Up And See Me), which was sufficiently iconic to reach the top forty twenty years later on the back of a Carlsberg commercial.

It was to prove the high watermark for the group. Although they enjoyed chart success with George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Mr Raffles (Man, It Was Mean), a final studio album, the mellifluous ‘Love’s A Prima Donna’, was drowned out by the sonic assault of punk. Sensing the wheel had turned Harley disbanded Cockney Rebel and emigrated to Los Angeles.
A solo album aside, he re-emerged into the Top Ten and the public eye in 1986 duetting with Sarah Brightman on the title track of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’.

Although astonished to be overlooked for the leading role (in favour of Michael Crawford), it was perhaps no surprise that his edgy individualism, whilst appropriate for the part, could not be incorporated into such a populist production.

That writing songs "gets harder as you get more comfortable" may account for the relative dearth of new material in the Nineties. But he has not been idle, regularly touring in both acoustic and electric formats, mixing Seventies hits with selections from his solo work. A literate, compelling performer, sensitive to his legacy, Steve Harley remains an authentic voice in a synthetic age.