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Preview of the upcoming show at Powderham Castle, Devon
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.