Arena Homme+ | by Michael Collins
The Old Grey Whistle Test 1973
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ said a hoarse Steve Harley. ‘I won’t forget you, if you don’t forget me.’ He was on stage bellowing above a chanting crowd at Hammersmith Odeon on a Monday night in April 1975.
(Pulling those numbers together and writing down that year makes me realise how ancient we are, those of us who remember it, and how alien it is to those born years afterwards who take little from it. If they return to that era, as trends in music and fashion tend to, it’s to the following year, when the outlook of a rebellious rising generation changed. Anyone could be in a band, and anyone could look as though they were.) The previous month, during which Harley celebrated his 24th birthday, the single from his then current album, propelled him into the stratosphere by reaching the Number One slot in the UK for a fortnight. Harley and his band Cockney Rebel were at a hotel in Los Angeles. They jumped into the pool, fully clothed, on hearing the news ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ had reached the top of what we fondly remember as ‘the charts’. It was more him than tossing a television into a pool, which was very rock and roll, which he wasn’t. He was too smart, too literate for that.
As a child spending many months of many years in hospital, having contracted polio two years in, he found consolation in books, and eventually the classic output of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. (‘I’d read Lawrence and needed a thesaurus by the bed with such a rich vocabulary. Then you read Hemingway and it’s like a man talking to you in everyday language.’) Long after chart success went the way of record sales, Harley produced a single that took as it’s title Ernest Hemingway’s shortest ever short story: ‘For Sale. Babies Shoes. Never Worn.’ Taking it’s cue, and certain lyrics from a Virginia Woolf novel, he dedicated ‘Riding The Waves’ (1978) to her. In 1975, ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ scaled the heights previous releases failed to reach, and defined Harley forever, in the absence of further sales on a similar scale. According to the Performing Rights Society it is one of the most played records in British broadcasting. It had been covered more than 120 times, decades after Harley ditched the affectations that first drew us to him by way of his voice, his words, his wardrobe. He was a more traditional vocalist and songwriter by 1976, when it could not have been less fashionable. He got married, became a parent, moved to a contented life in Suffolk, where he remained until his death in March this year. As he put it in an early lyric, while he prepared for the success he was sure would be his: ‘I can't hope to keep the pace I have made / Maybe I'll settle in the country and fade.’
When he sang ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ earlier in the evening that Monday in April 1975, he could have been speaking about himself, with so much coming to him relatively young. In 1968, aged 17, he left his native New Cross in south London and made the move across the water to share a flat in Chelsea, a part of the capital that was still in the swing of things. He was training to be a journalist on local newspapers, with his patch being Whitechapel in east London. The Krays were arrested and sentenced that year. A budding local entrepreneur had introduced the concept of ‘Cockneyland’ with the hope it would expand beyond a market stall to become London’s brand of Disneyland. You would presume that Harley’s band name came from a connection with his native city, and his sojourns to the east end, but it was the title of a poem he wrote years earlier, while hospitalised in a ward where images of The Beatles were on the wall; where The Rolling Stones visited the young and the sick; when Bob Dylan was on his mind. He left the job. He later signed on the dole, took up busking, wrote the songs that would appear on the first Cockney Rebel album under the influence of LSD. These were given an airing on the streets of London: at Hyde Park corner, at Leicester Square. A band was formed and signed after five shows. Two years on, with a massive single to his name, a chanting crowd before him at Hammersmith Odeon, the band was on its third album: ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’.
It was a song title that spoke to those of us present that night. (The previous month I too had a birthday, having amassed fourteen years.) There were female fans in the audience who dared to have a crush on a heterosexual man in make-up, even though the A Clockwork Orange bowler hat, and one eye circled in glittering shadow that Harley opted for on Top Of The Pops the previous summer with ‘Judy Teen’, was absent. There were fans of his own age and older, who picked up on the acoustic roots of his busking year, when he also played folk clubs. Even though he went on to front a band in which a violinist replaced a rhythm guitarist, and enlisted the services of a 40-piece orchestra for the lengthy epic ballads on the first album. These ageing attendees had dragged the hippy mantle from another era into a year that saw big Biba close on Kensington High Street, and Fiorucci arrive on King’s Road. They were responsible for the scent that permeated the balcony at the venue, and reached where I was standing. In limbo between infancy and adolescence - I was a late developer - I had no idea the scent was marijuana. I had no awareness of hard or soft drugs; no knowledge of literature, as I didn’t read; absolutely no understanding of sex or self-defilement. When Harley sang of the ‘Hemingway staccato’ and mentioned masturbation, it was lost on me. While other lyrics, to one gripped by the agony that puberty brings, stirred by the ecstasy pop music promised, reached out and touched me: ‘You think it’s tragic when that moment first arrives / Oh, but it’s magic, it’s the best years of our lives.’
Members of the audience were on their feet, with many standing on their seats. Some of us waved polyester scarves purchase in the foyer, with the band logo from the first album emblazoned across them. ‘The Human Menagerie’ was released in November 1973, by which point the trend for heterosexual men in make-up, playing gay and being fey, in satin and tat, was coming to an end. Yet Harley was one of the chosen ones in a canon that included Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks, and for a time, Lou Reed. Lawrence of Felt has described him as ‘the Dylan of glam’. On the day of Harley’s death, Danny Baker tweeted that he listened to the first two Cockney Rebels albums as much as anything from Bowie’s oeuvre. When Cockney Rebel began to attract attention, one music critic wrote of Harley: ’By the way Steve, when you’re finished with it, David Bowie would like his voice back and Bryan Ferry his vibrato. You can keep the clothes.’ Harley maintained that he ploughed his own furrow, and the first album was simply ‘theatrical’ with songs written around a group of characters, like Muriel the actor and Ruthy the model. Whatever influences he incorporated were available to his contemporaries who shared a similar sensibility. The first two albums have hints of Brecht & Weill, the Berlin of Cabaret and British music hall. The lyrics are not as non-sensical as his critics suggested, and pitched between the Burroughs cut-up technique of Bowie and the word play Brian Eno was toying with. Harley’s voice brought together Dylan, vaudeville, cockney and camp. Even though the punk movement was an anathema to him, his influence was evident in the method of Howard Devoto of Magazine, perhaps even John Lydon, and certainly Damon Albarn and Brett Anderson years later. Harley anticipated the change that would occur in music three years before 1976, during his first major interview: 'God, the kids must need something new by now. They must be tired of screaming guitar licks that say nothing. They must be after getting a buzz from something other than an electric guitar or synthesiser.’
For the cover of the debut alum, and the shows the group performed to promote it, they forked out close to a thousand pounds for customised outfits from Granny Takes A Trip on King’s Road. They dressed in matching pale blue satin and black velvet outfits, bow ties, and girlie shoes. Harley, as though underlining his role as the ‘guvnor’, as he put it, is in a similar outfit but opting for pink, and looking slicker and sexier in make-up than his colleagues. Within months, Cockney Rebel played Biba’s Rainbow Room - weeks after the New York Dolls appeared there - with its art deco oval ceiling lit by the colours of the rainbow, kentia palms, and an audience of Chelsea models, Kensington market trendies, and gay boys from nearby clubs like ‘Yours or Mine’. Throughout the performance an unknown Janet Street-Porter reputedly shouted ‘rubbish’, while young Iain Cameron Williams had a sublime experience. Writing in 2020, the author recalled: ‘When the luminous arc from the spotlight caught Steve Harley's profile, Nijinsky looked down from the gods, and the band was his Diaghilev ballet. I recall thinking how I would always remember this night as being one of the most perfect of my life. If I could travel back in time, I’d revisit Biba Rainbow Room on the very night Cockney Rebel played there. To hear one more time, the most mesmerising concert that ever decorated the art deco wall of the old Derry & Toms building, January 29, 1974.’
One year later, that night in April 1975, I had a similar epiphany. It’s a state Virginia Woolf aptly describes in the posthumous essay collection ‘Moments Of Being’, with which Steve Harley was familiar. Woolf writes of the moments in childhood that leave you paralysed with elation: ‘I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture.’ They are moments in which everything familiar falls away, and as she points out, you become a vessel for the sensation. A pop experience can do that to an adolescent. The final song of the concert was the final track on the second Cockney Rebel album ‘The Psychomodo’, a darker, more menacing outing than the debut, with perhaps a touch of Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’. In defending it, Harley again declared he was ploughing his own furrow: ‘On that album you’ve got ‘Ritz’, ‘Tumbling Down’, ‘Cavaliers’, and I’d like to go to my grave believing no one in the world could have written those songs but me.’ The refrain from the epic ‘Tumbling Down’ brought us to our feet, and resulted in a collective bout of singing that grew stronger and louder (‘Oh, dear, look what they’ve done to the blues.’) until the band stopped, and Harley told the crowd: ‘It’s your show’. One of Woolf’s moments of being overtook me, for the first time, as though an out of body experience. I caught myself, fourteen years in, alive, present, enraptured, aware of the brilliance of this combination, and all that youth offered and promised. (But then Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. ‘The haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock,’ Virginia Woolf writes elsewhere. ) I stepped outside of the self in a young life preoccupied with pop and fashion; where I suffered the slings and arrows from straight-laced south London school boys who smelled of fags, sweat, spunk and spearmint, or sulked when Sparks slipped down the charts. As Woolf pointed out: ‘Moments of being were scaffolding in the background; were the invisible and silent part of my life as a child.’ The best years of our lives?
Jump forward almost twenty years. I’m walking through Soho, explaining that adolescent experience to Steve Harley, much to my embarrassment and his. We’d talked of Virginia Woolf, we’d covered the creation of his biggest hit single, which he described as ‘a good day’s work’. The proceeds enabled him to send his children to private schools, he said. ‘And so much more,’ I added. He talked of his love for the countryside, having left his native city, and the nearby landmarks of his busking days. On Carnaby Street he pointed out where The Beatles short-lived Apple boutique once stood. We stopped at the window of Red Or Dead, which was pushing t-shirts carrying the words of the sandwich board man Stanley Green who, from 1968 until his death that year, 1993, walked along Oxford Street holding a placard urging people to resist protein and sitting down, as these pastimes fuelled lust and anarchy.
I was writing links for a late night television show featuring performers famous for one notable song. Harley agreed to participate if he could perform a current composition as well as ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. A technical hitch put us at a loose end, and so we went walkabout through streets familiar to us as Londoners. I’d brought the director a copy of ‘The Human Menagerie’, as he planned to use an image of Cockney Rebel from years before. Harley hated it because it placed him within a glam canon he never felt comfortable with; because he was a middle aged man more interested in his present than his past. I disappeared for an assignation elsewhere, returning to a darkened studio hours later. Harley had left something for me in his dressing room. Propped up against a wall, under the light from a lamp, was the album cover. Across the image of his glamorous younger self he’d written: ‘For Michael. After All these years!!!! Love Steve x.’
Jump forward almost thirty years to a Sunday morning this spring. I picked up Virginia Woolf’s essays to remind myself of those moments of rapture she felt the need to describe. I returned to a book I’d published twenty years ago, to remind myself how I’d written about scenes witnessed in my youth. A particular sequence stood out. It referred to my native neighbourhood in south London in 1974: ‘No one ventured far from these thoroughfares. An older girl, with a bob the colour of beetroot, made it to Kensington for shoplifting trips to Biba. On the housing estate, in the clubroom disco, dancing to ‘Judy Teen’, she looked like Gatsby’s love, Daisy Buchanan, in white gloves and a wide-brimmed hat that hid her face like a surprise, and was more suited to the cocktail hour in another time, another place. Another class’. Hours later Google informed me Steve Harley had died. Over the following days he was newsworthy again, along with the song that summed him up to the many, but not the few. The latter were among those writing eulogies and obituaries, noting that he was undervalued and overlooked, and that we should never forget him. How could we? We made a deal.