Although I said I didn't want to turn this blog into an obituary column, I probably need to recognise that the road is about to run out for most of the significant names from my teens and twenties. I try my best not to give in to nostalgia but there's ample evidence now that biology plays a part, too, and that's less easily shurugged aside.
Even if that wasn't true, I am literally sitting here typing this while looking at a visual reminder. There's a faded satin scarf strung across the wall behind the monitor that's been there since we moved into this house thirty years ago. Most of it is obscured now by stacks of books but the part still showing reads "Steve Harley And Cockney R..."
Steve Harley died yesterday at the age of 73. It was a shock in a way although as I said in reply to my ex-wife, who sent me a link to the news, I'm always a little surprised when any old rocker makes it past sixty. They really didn't hold back in the seventies and eighties and it catches up with most of them eventually.
In my teens, Cockney Rebel came very close to being my favorite band. I first heard them through the scratchy, fading signal of Radio Luxembourg in 1973, when the band's first single, the magnificently overwrought epic Sebastian, became a hit all across Europe.
It was then and remains now one of my favorite songs of all time, although as with all such favorites, I almost never listen to it. The more you listen, the less you hear. You have to pace yourself if you want to live with a song forever.
I bought the first album as soon as it came out a few months later and played it incessantly and melodramatically, as we all did with our favorites in those days. Cockney Rebel came several times to play in the city where I lived over the next couple of years. Bands, even quite successful ones, used to come round and round on a kind of musical conveyor belt back then, which is one reason I rarely found it necessary to to travel far to see any of them. If they couldn't be bothered to come to me...
The first time they played, I saw a card on the noticeboard of the super-hip record shop I was almost too nervous to go into, asking for volunteers to come hump gear for the band in return for a free ticket and beer. I was a bit too young for that but I've always kind of wished I'd offered my services anyway. It would be a story.
The next time, they'd had a few hits in the UK and had upgraded from clubs to concert halls. I went to that one. The thing I remember most about the gig isn't anything from the performance. It's the row of stalls outside the venue selling scarves and tees and badges and who knows what else.
It was the first time I'd really noticed anyone selling "merch", as we definitely didn't call it then. I imagine it was beneath the likes of Hawkwind, Yes or Pink Floyd, the kind of bands I was used to going to see. By their standards, Cockney Rebel was almost a pop group.
So I bought a scarf. I mean, why not. I doubt I was even being ironic. And I wore it for the gig and when the band got to Tumbling Down, the epic number (All Steve Harley's songs were epics) that ended with the whole audience singing the chorus for what seemed like hours, I held my scarf above my head and swayed from side to side along with everyone else.
I'm not going to say it was magical. But it was.
The whole sound of the band (The second iteration of Cockney Rebel, after he sacked most of the first line-up) had changed almost out of recognition, from Bowiesque glam to a funkier groove that somehow managed to feel dry and swamp-ridden all at the same time. Out of all expectation, I loved it.
Cockney Rebel released five studio albums in the 1970s before calling it a day until Steve got the band back together a good few years later, when they recorded one more. The first two were released under the band name alone, the others as Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel.
Of those six albums, the first - The Human Menagerie - is an acknowledged classic, while the rest are generally considered at best hit or miss. I like the second (The Psychomodo) and the third (Best Years Of Our Lives) a lot but they aren't entirely coherent. They each have a couple of his best songs but also some undeniable filler. The fifth, Love's A Prima Donna, is not great and the much later sixth album I have never heard.
The fourth, Timeless Flight, was not well-received at the time and I'm not sure what its critical reputation is now. It is, however, one of my favorite albums. I listened to it a very great number of times back when I used to play vinyl but unlike The Human Menagerie, which was the first album I bought on CD, I never thought to upgrade.
I have, however, listened to some of the tracks online, now and again, and relatively recently (By which I mean in the last decade.) and I think it stands up pretty well. I have All Men Are Hungry on in the background as I type and it sounds great, still. What it's about I have no more idea now than I ever did although I do now realise it has something to do with Hemingway...
That's the thing with Steve Harley. He was a striking lyricist, famous for it, and yet rarely did I know what he was trying to say. He was so fin de siecle you couldn't make out the meaning for the brocade.
It didn't matter. It never mattered. As he once said of Sebastian, "It's poetry. It means what you want it to mean... I can't define its meaning. It's like most poetry, it's a lovely word." He made his method even clearer in another interview "'Sebastian' is possibly a sort of Gothic love song, possibly not: I'm not really sure to be honest."
If Steve didn't know what his songs were about, I don't know why we should be expected to. What always mattered with his work was the imagery and the emotion. That was a powerful narcotic to an adolescent and it hit me hard enough the bruise hasn't faded yet.
Thanks for all the memories, Steve. Like your songs, they've lasted well.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment