Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel
“Judy Teen, the queen of the scene, she's rag doll amore
Verbal slang, American twang, you dare not ignore”
With my main love in music being the lyrics I find that different singers with their individual styles and intonation affect me in different ways. When I hear Freddie Mercury his voice comes across as an instrument in its own right, with Lemmy I get a sore throat if I listen too much, Nick Cave’s lyrics help paint a masterpiece and Ian Dury can always raise a smile with his use of words (yes even with the intro to Plaistow Patricia).
And what about Steve Harley? I love his diction, his use of words, the way he forms them and the clarity of his singing. I’ve always assumed that this all came from his background in journalism but if I think about it logically that can’t be the case otherwise we’d have the nightmare of people like Richard Littlejohn and Will Self performing on TOTP (however I would pay good money to see the two of them attempt a duet).
When I was growing up in the Glam Rock 70s I used listen to his songs trying to pull apart the lyrics and work out exactly what he meant – thirty years on I think I understand the first verse of “Come Up and See Me”, but then again I could be mistaken.
Steve Harley was born Steve Nice in Deptford in 1951 and had a childhood of intermittent hospitalisation. When he was 2 he caught polio and by the time he was 16 he had spent a total of four years in hospital and undergone major surgery twice in his early teens. With a lot of his education being received in a hospital bed it seems appropriate that his later choice of career would focus on words and music - more cerebral activities that physically demanding ones.
While music was a part of Steve’s upbringing (his mother had been a jazz singer) it wasn’t until he was 12 that he truly discovered his love of words and music. Lying in a hospital bed and listening to the radio he heard Bob Dylan for the first time and knew what he wanted to do. This was subsequently reinforced when the Rolling Stones visited his hospital that Christmas (1964) as part of a PR drive.
Steve took up the guitar and violin but on leaving school he moved towards journalism. Joining the accounts department at the Daily Express at the age of 17 he used this as his springboard and eventually became a journalist and had stints at a number of local papers before ending up at the East London Times.
While he had always wanted to be a journalist Steve had soon found that the reality didn’t meet his expectations. Looking for the way forward he took some guitar and piano lessons giving himself enough confidence to begin busking and singing for free at folk clubs. The response he received, and the need to express himself more fully than that possible on the folk scene, led Steve to form Cockney Rebel as a vehicle for his work. For a period this ran alongside his journalism but when the group were signed for a three album deal by EMI in 1972 something had to give and Steve left the East London Times.
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