Steve Harley (1951-2024)

What a loss. Not so well-known in the U.S., Steve Harley was a modest sized rock star in the UK in the early to mid-1970s, principally through a number 1 hit song, "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" which I fondly remember from my childhood. A lovely acoustic ditty tinged with a hint of his snarly cockney affectation,with bits of Dylanese sprinkled in, it was everywhere in the 1975 and covered a million times by more contemporary people, including Duran Duran and Erasure. The song was billed under Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.

But if you dug deeper, you might have stumbled upon a pair of his early '70s albums, billed under Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie (1973) and Psychomodo (1974) which were the bastard child of Johnny Rotten (still to burst into the world of pop) and David Bowie. I think Steve Harley had aspirations to make a grand statement of an album like Sgt. Pepper but the ones he did release still stand up as full-on attempts to produce a truly 1970s album, one denuded of any hints that the '60s happened at all. There's the obvious androgyny and glamness of it all, a hat tipoff to decadence and self-gratification, the full-on unapologetic cadence of his working class English accent, and of course, that sneer, half Dylan and half Bowie and half still-to-be-created Johnny Rotten. Yes, three halves is what makes Cockney Rebel slightly off-kilter, not really fitting into anything, a bit off the rails, a true anomaly in the history of '70s pop. Oh, one more thing, at least on his early albums, Harley sought to disavow the guitar completely (too '60s), and so the sound becomes something both baroque pop and almost proggy.

My favorite track off The Human Menagerie is this, "Mirror Freak," a tour de force of sexy imagery and decadent descent into debauchery, the drums cracking like broken elbow bones. I guarantee there was nothing like this in 1973, no, not even Bowie.

The Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends

 

The sweet spot of my nostalgia is really the '90s, or more to the point, something like 1988 to about 1999. In that period, I aged from 23 to 33, and that sounds about right in terms of how nostalgia fixes itself onto one's twenties. My failing, if I can call it that, was that even as I was experiencing it, I felt a sense of nostalgia about what I was experiencing, something described once by Fredric Jameson as 'nostalgia for the present.' Ever since I was a young boy, I've had an acute sense of the passing of time, that its inexorable, unstoppable, and irreversible qualities gave it a particular bittersweet taste; a kind of big tragedy, perhaps even a farce in the grand vista of life. I'm not sure I had the words to describe this feeling at the time but I remember feeling aware of 'The Past' as an object of lament and loss, even when I was about ten or eleven. I have a memory of reading Neil Young's quote in Decade's liner notes (supposedly from Bob Dylan): "Now that the past is gone," which seemed to distill all those tensions into a pithy quote.

I don't have any particular memory of the Sundays' "Here's Where the Story Ends" but I do definitely remember listening to it in 1990. The music gently evoked the Smiths but not in any kind of gratuitous way but rather more as homage and affectation. That year, especially, was a year of confusion for me. I wouldn't say turmoil (which was 1991) but still not stable. My academic future was in doubt, my girlfriend was interested in others, and I did a lot of drugs. But I did have a very active social life with people whose names I've mostly forgotten. And I absorbed a galaxy worth of new music from every corner of the universe. But even then, the Sundays' track seemed to perfectly soundtrack the feeling that something was ending (as it was) and that "a terrible year" was either just gone, or happening, or around the corner.

I'm sure the fact that the voice was a woman's was an important factor - a waif-like English woman who seemed to inhabit a landscape produced by a Cure-damaged sensibility. In other words, someone, if she was real, I might have had a crush on, or at least been interested to talk to at a party.