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.