The first time I spoke to rock icon Steve Harley, who died Sunday at the age of 73, he was apoplectic with rage.
It was 2011 and I had written an article for The Mail on Sunday about my brother, Nick, who had just passed away at the age of 62.
Nick was a talented guitarist who had once been in a very famous band called Cockney Rebel, I wrote, but he later became a recluse and died penniless in a council flat.
It might have been different, I continued, if that band’s lead singer – Steve Harley – had been kinder and allowed Nick to dine with the royalties from Cockney Rebel’s huge 1975 hit, Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me), one of the most played records of all time.
Alas, Nick and Steve had fallen out and my brother, bitter and dissatisfied, still called him a “c**k” who had ruined his career.
Liz Jones’ brother Nick was guitarist in the rock band Cockney Rebel with Steve Harley (pictured above with Liz), who died on Sunday aged 73.
Cockney Rebel were a rock band that achieved success in the early 1970s in London. Their music covered a range of styles from pop to progressive rock.
Harley was furious. He emailed my editor, then me. ‘Liz. I know you are prolific, writing so many articles every day, so no wonder you make mistakes, but you need to check your facts. I wrote the song so your brother wouldn’t have been entitled to any royalties.
I should have been more careful. Steve was known for taking no prisoners. When, in 1974, his bandmates wanted to write songs too, he told them that wasn’t part of his master plan.
“I created the group, auditioned you and explained the contract to you at the time. We are not moving the goalposts,” he recalled in an interview.
The lyrics of this famous song are further proof of Steve’s steel. A teenage me, delighted to watch him on Top Of The Pops, with his shaggy coat and shiny mullet, thought the song was about a woman invited into his hotel room. All of his female fans did.
After all, he was a working-class boy from south-east London, and many of us, including me from Chelmsford, Essex, felt that he was not as unapproachable as , say, David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. He was flamboyant, known for wearing eyeliner, but not as outsider as his contemporaries David Bowie and Marc Bolan.
But the song wasn’t about sex at all. Steve was way too cerebral for that. This is about the original group breaking up and abandoning it.
“You ruined the game/No matter what you say/For just metal, what a bore,” he sang, metal in this case meaning money.
I apologized to him for my ill-advised article. I said my brother was a pugilist and argued with everyone. And so Steve mellowed, our conversation taking him back to 1970s Camden, playing pubs and clubs.
He said he was sorry Nick had died and told me he always called my brother “the shoe watcher – on stage he never looked up, he just kept his eyes on the floor”.
Steve and I kept in touch and in 2018 he emailed to say he was staying at the luxury Swinton Park Hotel in Ripon, Yorkshire, and that I would like to meet him to do an interview.
I arrived, wearing a tank top in a mad homage to the 1970s. Steve, then 67, looked dapper in a three-piece tweed suit, leaning on a cane, angry that he could no longer wear the leather shoes he wore. he had bought custom made in Milan because the soles were too slippery. He was motionless and seemed to be in pain.
Steve contracted polio at the age of three. He was noticed to be clumsy while playing football. He was in pain, lethargic. One evening his father went to see him in bed; Steve was sweating and mom was called. Steve couldn’t feel his leg. A general practitioner was summoned. She said, “Call an ambulance.” NOW!’
He was rushed, along with police officers, to hospital – and spent four years there.
British singer and songwriter Steve Harley photographed in the 1970s
He died on Sunday morning at his home in Suffolk after a short battle with cancer – having interrupted his current tour last month to undergo treatment.
He was lucky that he was never forced into an iron lung (polio can cause paralysis or even death), but he underwent painful surgery when metal rods were inserted into his good knee to prevent it from growing, so that his legs and body become more uniform. balance.
“I wanted to end my life,” he told me. It took only two years before a vaccine was introduced. If only, he continued, he had been born a little later.
He was lame and inevitably bullied at school: a big part of the reason he became a rock star was so girls would like him.
We didn’t realize it during his appearances on TOTP, but very often he would have leaned on something for support.
His greatest fear was falling. “As soon as it snows, my whole life, there has been this fear,” he told me.
When we met in Swinton he was recovering from a recent fall. He was visiting friends and had walked on a mat placed on a slippery surface. As he got off he thought, “Oh, damn! »
He waited nearly four hours for an ambulance and thought his career was over. Hospital staff asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten.
“I have been accustomed to a lifetime of pain,” he replied. ‘It’s one.’ They still put him on morphine.
I wondered why he was alone in Yorkshire. He was devoted to his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1981. He told me he loved staying in luxury hotels alone, enjoying the finer things in life.
“I drink a bottle of wine every night. It’s ridiculous to say we should only drink 14 units a week.” No one would dare tell Steve what to do. I stupidly mentioned, “Oh, your song was used in the glam rock movie Velvet Goldmine.” I watched it last night! And he replied in a prickly tone: “What do you mean by Your song? I’ve written more than one hit record, you know!’
He did so – and made several million pounds by selling his catalog of 147 songs, including Make Me Smile, to a music company last year.
Until then, he was still on tour. When I went to see him a few weeks later, at Yarm High School in North Yorkshire, he played the whole concert seated on a stool and was helped on and off stage by a roadie.
He was truly proof that success is difficult, grueling and painful.
At Swinton, we talked about his other passion: racehorses. His eyes lit up when I said I owned a rescued thoroughbred. When we shook hands to say goodbye, I told him I was weak in the knees. “Did you fall off your horse?” » » he said, worried. ‘No! It’s because I met you!’
He couldn’t wait to hear about my career at Fleet Street: you could say he was jealous… of me! He had started out as a trainee journalist at local Essex newspapers and was slightly encouraged when I told him I had applied for a job at the Essex Chronicle but hadn’t even gotten an interview.
Rock band Cockney Rebel’s album cover for The Human Menagerie released in 1973
Steve Harley wrote all of the band’s songs and didn’t budge when they asked him if they could write songs as well.
He gave up journalism, he said, when his editor wanted him to write a story about an old lady being prosecuted for stealing a can of baked beans. He didn’t want to humiliate her with publicity and left, never to return. He was so much better than me.
He loved art and books. He fell in love with literature in hospital as a child: his English teacher sent him DH Lawrence, which “changed his life”. “If it wasn’t for polio, I wouldn’t have discovered a love of poetry,” he said.
And above all, he loved nature, especially birdsong. He knew I was deaf, so I told him I had hearing aids. “Now you can hear the chorus of dawn!” ” he said. ‘Amazing!’ He felt it was music, not something he could conjure.
He texted me several times after that. Once to invite me to a concert. When I told him I was on a vegan retreat, he admitted it would be his “worst nightmare.”
When he sold Make Me Smile to advertise Viagra, he texted to say he was a little embarrassed.
We almost met for lunch a few weeks ago, but he canceled. I didn’t know he had cancer.
Twitter exploded on Sunday with news that Steve had died at home, after taking a break from his incessant touring to undergo chemotherapy.
I feel like my brother is dead again. That dark, brown world of 1970s north London, with its cowboy boots and sticky floors and joss sticks, its angry insults at our parents’ post-war conventions, is gone for good. I miss it.