The first time I spoke to rock legend Steve Harley he was livid with me.
But the man I grew to know was as kind as he was fragile
THE first time I spoke to rock icon Steve Harley, who died on Sunday aged 73, he was apoplectic with rage. It was 2011 and I had written a piece for The Mail on Sunday about my brother, Nick, who had just passed away aged 62.
Nick was a talented guitarist who had once been in a very famous band called Cockney Rebel, I wrote, yet in later years had become a recluse and died a penniless failure in a council flat.
It might have been different, I went on, had the lead singer of that band — Steve Harley — been nicer and allowed Nick to dine off royalties from Cockney Rebel’s huge 1975 hit, Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me), one of the most played records of all time.
Alas, Nick and Steve had fallen out and my brother, bitter and unfulfilled, always called him a ‘c**k’ who had ruined his career.
Harley was furious. He emailed my editor, and then me. ‘Liz. I know you are prolific, writing so many pieces every day, so no wonder you make mistakes, but you need to check your facts. I wrote the song and therefore your brother wouldn’t have been entitled to any royalties.’
I should have been more careful. Steve was known for taking no prisoners. When, in 1974, his bandmates wanted to write songs, too, he told them it wasn’t part of his masterplan.
‘I started the band, and I auditioned you, and I told you the deal at the time. We’re not moving the goal posts,’ he recalled in an interview.
The lyrics of that famous song are further proof of Steve’s steel. A teenage me, in raptures watching him on Top Of The Pops, with his shaggy coat and shiny mullet, thought the song was about a woman being invited up to his hotel room. All his girl fans did.
He was a working- class boy from South-East London, after all, and many of us, including me who came from Chelmsford, Essex, felt he wasn’t as unattainable as, say, David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. He was flamboyant, known to wear eye liner, but not as otherworldly as contemporaries David Bowie and Marc Bolan.
But the song wasn’t about sex at all. Steve was far too cerebral for that. It is about the original band splitting up and deserting him.
‘You spoiled the game/No matter what you say/ For only metal, what a bore,’ he sang, metal in this instance meaning money.
I apologised to him for my illadvised piece. I said my brother was pugilistic and argued with everyone. And so Steve softened, our talk transporting him back to the Camden of the 1970s, playing in pubs and clubs.
He said he was sorry Nick had died, and told me he always called my brother ‘the shoe gazer — on stage he never looked up, he just kept his eyes on the floor.’
Steve and I kept in touch, and in 2018 he emailed to say he was staying at the luxurious Swinton Park Hotel in Ripon, Yorkshire, and would I like to meet him to do an interview.
I turned up, wearing a tank top in an insane 1970s tribute. Steve, then 67, was dapper in a tweed three-piece suit, leaning on a cane, angry he could no longer wear the leather shoes he had bought bespoke in Milan because the soles were too slippery. He was immobile and seemed in pain.
Steve had contracted polio aged three. It was noticed he was clumsy playing football. He ached, was lethargic. One night, his dad went to check on him in bed; Steve was sweating, and mum was called. Steve couldn’t feel his leg. A GP was summoned. She said, ‘Call an ambulance. Now!’
He was rushed, with police outriders, to hospital — and spent four years in and out of it.
He was lucky never to be forced into an iron lung (polio can cause paralysis, even death), but he did endure painful surgery when metal rods were inserted into his good knee to stop it growing, so his legs and body would become more evenly balanced.
‘I wanted to end my life,’ he told me. It was just two years before a vaccine was introduced. If only, he went on, he had been born that little bit later.
He was lame, and inevitably bullied at school: a huge part of the reason he became a rock star was so girls would fancy him.
We didn’t realise during his appearances on TOTP, but very often he would have been leaning on something for support.
His big fear was falling. ‘Soon as it snows, all my life, there has been that fear,’ he told me.
When we met at Swinton, he was recovering from a recent fall. He’d been visiting friends, and had stepped on a rug on a slippery surface. As he went down, he thought: ‘Oh, f**k!’
He waited nearly four hours for an ambulance and thought his career was over. Hospital staff asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten.
‘I’ve been used to a lifetime of pain,’ he replied. ‘It’s a one.’ They put him on morphine anyway.
I wondered why he was in Yorkshire alone. He was devoted to his wife, Dorothy, whom he’d married in 1981. He told me he loved to stay in luxury hotels, on his own, enjoying the good things in life.
‘I drink a bottle of wine each evening — it’s ridiculous to say we should only drink 14 units a week.’ No one would dare tell Steve what to do. I stupidly mentioned: ‘Oh, your song was used in the glam rock film Velvet Goldmine. I watched it last night!’ And he snapped, prickly, ‘What do you mean, Your song? I wrote more than one hit record you know!’
He did — and made a multimillion pound sum selling his back catalogue of 147 songs, including Make Me Smile, to a music company last year.
Until then he was still touring. When I went to see him a few weeks later, at Yarm High School in North Yorkshire, he performed the whole gig while sitting on a stool, and was helped on and off stage by a roadie.
He really was proof that success is hard, back-breaking, painful.
While at Swinton we talked about his other passion: racehorses. His eyes lit up when I said I owned a rescued thoroughbred. When we shook hands to say goodbye, I told him I was weak at the knees. ‘Did you fall off your horse?’ he said, concerned. ‘No! It’s because I met you!’
He was eager to hear about my Fleet Street career: you could tell he was jealous — of me! He had
He had a bitter fall-out with my brother
started out as a trainee reporter on local papers in Essex and was slightly cheered when I told him I had applied for a job on the Essex Chronicle but didn’t even land an interview.
He gave up journalism, he said, when his editor wanted him to write a story about an old lady being prosecuted for stealing a can of baked beans. He would not humiliate her with publicity, and walked out, never to go back. He was so much better than me.
He loved art and books. He fell in love with literature in hospital as a child: his English teacher sent him D.H. Lawrence which ‘ was life changing’. ‘ Without polio, I wouldn’t have discovered a love of poetry,’ he said.
And above all, he enjoyed nature, especially bird song. He knew I was deaf, so I told him I’d got hearing aids. ‘Now you can hear the dawn chorus!’ he said. ‘Amazing!’ He felt that was music, not anything he could conjure up.
He texted me a few times after that. Once to invite me to a gig. When I told him I was at a vegan retreat, he admitted that would be his ‘worst nightmare’.
When he sold Make Me Smile to advertise Viagra, he texted to say he was a bit embarrassed. We almost met for lunch a few weeks ago, but he cancelled. I had no idea he had cancer.
Twitter exploded on Sunday at the news Steve had died at home, having taken a break from his relentless touring to undergo chemotherapy.
I feel as though my brother has died all over again. That murky, brown world of 1970s North London, with its cowboy boots, sticky floors and joss sticks, its angry railing against the post-war conventions of our parents, is gone for good. I miss it.