Steve Harley Cockney Rebel frontman who had a worldwide hit with ‘Make Me Smile’

Steve Harley, the singer-songwriter, who has died of cancer aged 73, was the frontman of the 1970s glam-rock band Cockney Rebel. Despite being neither a Cockney nor much of a rebel, he had several hits including the supremely danceable Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me), which reached No 1 in the UK charts in 1975, featured on the soundtrack of The Full Monty (1997) and is perennially popular.

Harley formed Cockney Rebel in

1973 and after only five club dates they were signed to a three-album deal by

EMI. Their first album, The Human Menagerie, included the orchestral single Sebastian, which was No 1 in the Netherlands and Belgium. Judy Teen reached No 4 in the UK in May 1974; Mr Soft, which was later used in television advertisements for Trebor softmints, made No 8; and the rather creepy Mr Raffles (Man, It Was Mean) peaked at No 13, its title a reference to EW Hornung’s fictional thief AJ Raffles.

But Harley was not prepared to share the limelight. Cockney Rebel split in

July 1974 at the end of a torrid tour to promote their second album, The Psychomodo, which catapulted Harley to stardom but resulted at one point in a near-mutiny on stage.

Fellow band members felt they were being treated arrogantly by Harley as mere sidemen rather than as equals. Harley told Record Mirror magazine that he would be back with “the greatest rock ’n’ roll band ever heard”. To his many fans he did just that with a new line-up, adding his name to the billing as Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. The first single under the new name was Make Me Smile, which has since been covered by more than 120 acts, including Duran Duran.

Harley later told an interviewer that the lyrics (“You’ve done it all/ You’ve broken every code/ And pulled the rebel to the floor/ You spoiled the game/ No matter what you say...”), were “a finger-pointing piece of vengeful poetry — it’s getting off my chest how I felt about the guys splitting up a perfectly workable machine”.

Harley went on to sing a duet with Sarah Brightman for a then-unstaged Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera, that put him back into the top 10 in 1986. He was offered the lead role in the West End production, but was mysteriously replaced by Michael Crawford after three months of rehearsals.

In 1981 Harley married Dorothy Crombie, an air hostess. She survives him with their son and their daughter.