Why Steve Harley was a Big Big Deal

Sorry to hear that Steve Harley has died, aged 73.

‘Big Big Deal’, a solo single released in 1974 after the original members of Cockney Rebel (bar the drummer) had left the band, is still one of my favourite singles from that period.

Even though it wasn’t a hit, and I didn’t have a record player, I bought the 7” vinyl after I heard it on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

(I can still remember turning up the volume in the kitchen before I left to catch the bus to school.)

Harley subsequently recruited new musicians to replace the departing band members, and Cockney Rebel became Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.

He then enjoyed the biggest hit of his career, the million-selling ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’, which is rarely off the radio even today, and whose lyrics were allegedly a dig at his former colleagues.

As a regular reader of NME throughout the Seventies, I kept scrapbooks of cuttings that unfortunately ‘disappeared’ after my parents moved house.

Harley, a former journalist himself, featured prominently in the paper for several years until his star began to wane, so I remember how articulate (and occasionally big-headed) he was.

As it happens, the two Cockney Rebel albums I bought were not the early, critically acclaimed records featuring the original band, but the final two albums that were less well received and failed to produce a top 30 single - Timeless Flight and Love’s A Prima Donna, both released in 1976.

Funnily enough, the latter was responsible for one of the lowest moments of my life when I played it during a social evening at an outdoor activity centre on the west coast of Scotland and after several tracks one of my school ‘friends’ not only demanded to know “What is this shit?” but refused to let me play side two.

In hindsight it’s fair to say the album is an acquired taste but at the time it wasn’t very nice to have it critiqued so publicly and so brutally!

Nevertheless, if I was compiling a Steve Harley playlist today I’d still include the title track plus the cover version of ‘Here Comes The Sun’, a top ten hit in the ‘sizzling’ summer of ‘76.

I’d also include ‘White White Dove’ and ‘Black Or White’ from Timeless Flight. And to that I would add some early album tracks, ‘Make Me Smile’ (obviously), and ‘Big Big Deal’.

RIP.

See also: Steve Harley: 1970s Cockney Rebel who took risks and wrote hits (Guardian)
Farewell to Steve Harley, the impossibly glamorous Cockney Rebel frontman who made us all smile (Telegraph)

Comments

[KJP]

Sebastian?

[Simon]

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