I’m a rebel and that’s why life still makes me smile
Steve Harley took the world by storm in the 70s before concentrating on his family – but now he’s roaring back, as he tells Nick Dalton
COCKNEY rebel he may be but Steve Harley is very much a family man. He’s been married 39 years and his wife and children have always come first which is why, perhaps, he’s not quite the name on everyone’s lips that you might have imagined he’d be when he preened and posed his way through (Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile.
That record, by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, topped the charts 45 years ago this week, and sounds just as infectious and exuberant today.
Life still makes Harley smile, both professionally and personally. There’s a new album, Uncovered – his first studio set in a decade – and he’s playing more than 100 shows this year, from intimate performances with an acoustic trio to major venues with his five-piece Cockney Rebel band.
“Playing live is my life,” he says, adding quickly: “After family, it’s everything.”
Harley hit the big time in 1975 but never equalled the success of Make Me Smile. The rock star life propelled him to the end of the decade but, he says, “I went through a long slump where I was pretty cavalier. My heart wasn’t in it, there’s no question. The 70s were so exciting maybe I wanted to taper off.
“I went to live in America and was perhaps influenced by mainstream people I wasn’t used to. I had a long sabbatical in the 80s.”
He did, however, return to fame in 1986 when he was signed to be the star of a new musical… Phantom Of The Opera.
Harley spent three months in rehearsals, and his duet with
Sarah Brightman on the title track made the Top 10. But then he was dumped in favour of jolly, middleof-the road Michael Crawford.
“He came out of the woodwork and they ousted me,” Steve says defiantly. “When I lost Phantom someone asked how long it took me to get over it. I replied ‘About five minutes’, the time it took to find a good contracts lawyer.”
Things were sorted out amicably with producer Cameron
Mackintosh. “I like Cameron a lot,” says Harley, who turns 69 on Thursday. “They invited me to the premiere – and I haven’t stopped touring since.”
The experience changed his life – in a good way. “I had three months with Hal Prince,” he says. The American director was one of the legends of stage musicals thanks to shows such as West Side Story.
“He was the first genius I’d met,” he says. “I adored him. He changed me as a person, therefore as a performer. He taught me to look into my own eyes. I do this every performance, doesn’t matter where I am I’ll find a mirror and I have to look in there before I go on stage to say ‘You can do this’.”
It’s a self-belief evident on stage, Harley heading his esoteric rocking, rolling band in two-and-a-half-hour shows, despite leading from his chair, having limped on stage with a cane.
Harley barely survived polio as a child. “They told my dad ‘Stephen is passing away’ when I was three and a half so I must have been close. My Auntie Gertie told me what happened, my dad never did.”
He believes this experience prevented him from drifting into a drug-fuelled life in the 70s. “That time was mayhem and affected my judgment as a writer and recording artist,” he says. “But I knew it wouldn’t kill me – I’ve a phobia about hypodermics down to the years I spent in hospital. Being woken up all through the night to be jabbed, more morphine, so I was never going to be a junkie.”
The South London-born milkman’s son actually had a job at the Daily Express on leaving school, working in the advertising department in Fleet Street. He then studied journalism and worked as a reporter in Essex and the East End. “My last year was at the East London Advertiser, 1972, the Krays had only just been put away. We saw some life over there.”
But music had become his muse.
He performed in folk clubs, and attempted to busk in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, but playing the strange, off-kilter songs that became the first Cockney Rebel album, The Human Menagerie.
“I made nothing!” he laughs. “It was all Americans who wanted songs like Yellow Boxes and
Blowing In The Wind – I went down like a lead balloon.
“The first money I earned was because of David Bowie. I was at Beckenham Arts Lab, the club he was running with Angie, on Sunday nights.
“When Space Oddity became a hit he was off doing the Mecca ballrooms, skinheads throwing things. Thanks to that my career took off. I led the Arts Lab, depped with a couple of blokes playing bongos and violin and got 15 quid. Right place, right time.”
The new album, Uncovered, is a nod to the past, almost like Bowie’s own Pin-ups covers album of records that inspired him.
Almost but not quite. “We don’t call them covers, they’re interpretations,” says Harley, genially but firmly. “Each is a song I wish I’d written.”
The album includes Bowie’s own Absolute Beginners alongside Paul Mccartney’s I’ve Just Seen A Face, recognised as the Beatles’ first acoustic track, from Help! There’s Cat Stevens’s forgotten How Can I Tell You?, the Stones’ Out Of Time and even Hot Chocolate’s Emma, all done in a delicately acoustic yet powerful, edgy manner with a tight band.
MEANWHILE, Harley’s world continues to expand. He’s already set up the celebration for his “big birthday”, when he turns 70 next February, with a 3,000-seat concert in Glasgow.
Other shows are less dramatic, such as a string of dates starting Thursday in the petite jazz venue at Pizza Express in London’s Holborn.
“When we first did it. Someone bumped into my wife in Waitrose and said ‘Dorothy, I see Steve’s playing Pizza Express’. She turned and said ‘Aah, but he’s doing three nights.’”
Harley’s life revolves around his home in Suffolk with two acres of land, a close-knit family affair involving son Kerr, 37 (a lawyer but who plays piano with him) and daughter Greta, 34.
Says Harley reflectively: “My son used to come home from school in the late 80s when I’d started touring again and he said the boys at school say ‘Your dad’s away a lot’. So I said, well tell them your dad is also home a lot…”
● Uncovered (Comeuppance Records) is out March 6. Steve appears tonight at the Palace Theatre, Newark, with regular dates all year (steveharley.com)