Label: Disky Communications (Netherlands), SI 990322
Style: Classic Rock, Glam Rock, Progressive Rock
Country: London, England
Time: 72:37
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 506 Mb
Singer-songwriter, while not quite managing to elbow David Bowie aside, produced well-crafted hits topped by Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me).
Steve Harley was many things, but a man held back by modesty was not among them.
In his first big music press interview – before the appearance of Cockney Rebel’s debut album, when all they had released was a solitary single that featured a 40-piece orchestra, which had failed to make the UK charts – he proclaimed his band “a musical force that others will follow” and pitted himself squarely against the biggest names in British pop. Cockney Rebel, he suggested, would kick David Bowie “up the arse”: “he’ll say ‘I’ve got to step on it to stay at the top’.”
When it arrived, Cockney Rebel’s debut album featured a song called Mirror Freak that loudly announced he was going to supplant Marc Bolan – “too cute to be a big rock star” – in the public’s affections: “We can feel a change is on the way … a new man he appears to be winning … you’re the same old thing we’ve always known.”
Harley was given to dismissing any band that had a lead guitarist, a musician noticeably absent from Cockney Rebel’s line-up and on another occasion, he claimed the band were so good that divine intervention had to be involved: “I feel like God’s touched me and said ‘here’s a mission and someone’s gotta do it’.”
This was big talk that perhaps told you something about Harley’s background as a journalist: he may have only worked for local papers, but he knew what made for lively copy. The thing was, that for a moment at least, Harley appeared to have the goods to back up his more extravagant pronouncements.
Cockney Rebel’s first two albums, The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo, arrived alongside the first signs that glam rock was waning, or at least that its most artful practitioners were moving on – Bowie had killed off Ziggy Stardust, Bolan had announced the genre “dead” and “embarrassing” – and suggested the arrival of a fresh take.
Whatever you made of Harley’s thoughts on electric guitars, their relative, if not complete, absence from Cockney Rebel’s sound gave them a clear point of difference. Driven instead by electric piano and Jean-Paul Crocker’s electric violin, you could definitely make out the influence of Bowie and the kind of 50s rock’n’roll that was a touchstone throughout glam, but their sound also drew on psychedelia, Brecht and Weill cabaret, folk (Harley had done time in Britain’s folk clubs and as an acoustic guitar-toting busker) and, occasionally, classical music.
His voice was a mannered sneer that occasionally sounded a little like The Kinks’ Ray Davies and occasionally seemed to presage the arrival of punk – it was certainly the perfect fit for his lyrics, which were both thick with lurid imagery – “hooked on absinthe and daffodils/telling tales of white gardenia” – and big on withering disdain.
(full version: theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/17/steve-harley-1970s-cockney-rebel-whose-talent-was-almost-as-big-as-his-ego)
01. Make Me Smile - Come Up And See Me (04:03)
02. Love - Compared With You (04:23)
03. Judy Teen (03:43)
04. Mr. Raffles - Man, It Was Mean (04:36)
05. Mr. Soft (03:22)
06. Sebastian (06:58)
07. That's My Life In Your Hands (03:51)
08. Here Comes The Sun (02:59)
09. All Men Are Hungry (04:49)
10. Roll The Dice (03:28)
11. The Best Years Of Our Lives (05:47)
12. Star For A Week - Dino (04:39)
13. Rain In Venice (04:53)
14. The Last Time I Saw You (05:40)
15. Psychomodo (04:06)
16. Irresistable - Remix (05:12)
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