Steve Harley was no one-hit wonder

Celebrity deaths range from the ‘tragically young’ (Amy Winehouse) to the ‘I thought they’d gone years ago’ (Peregrine Worsthorne) and the monumental (Michael Jackson). But there’s another type: a more low-key one that knocks you a bit, as much as the death of a stranger can. Steve Harley, whose death was announced this weekend by his family, was one of those. 

Everyone knows Harley and his Cockney Rebel band’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. But Harley was no one-hit wonder: dig a little deeper than that 1975 song and it’s clear to see what a brilliant and underappreciated musician he was. 

Vanishingly few endure in the pop music sphere. Steve Harley blazed through the decades, with five remarkable albums. He had a strange vocal delivery that came from the meeting point of Bob Dylan and Foghorn Leghorn, with the addition of being unable to pronounce his r’s. The five Cockney Rebel albums, released from 1973 to 1976, contain tune after tune after tune – sometimes almost suffocatingly grandiose and over the top (‘Sebastian’, ‘Cavaliers’), sometimes comedic and deceptively trivial (‘Mr Soft’), but all of them transcendent.