collisionwork | Entries tagged with steve harley

An email from me this morning to two good friends of the musician/music geek variety, with an emphasis on Bowie and music from within that early/mid 70s stylistic form of Rock sometimes known as "Glam" or "Glitter":

Hey guys . . .
Pardon me for just throwing this out to you, but I'm in a very curious zone right now and not getting a straight answer from the intarweb.
What do either of you know about Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel? I've just downloaded the 1975 album
The Psychomodo and am currently downloading the 1974 album The Human Menagerie, and I'm trying to find out more about these albums (and trying to understand why I've never heard of them before), but I keep finding incomplete or outright contradictory info online.
You possibly don't know any more than I'm finding - especially as I keep doing searches while I'm writing this and finding more and stranger-but-interesting dead ends, but just in case you do, I'm really curious.
I first heard of Cockney Rebel when their song "Make Me Smile" was used over the end credits of
Velvet Goldmine - I thought it was a new song written and produced for the movie "in the style of glam," and, I thought, though a good song, not all that well-done as a "period pastiche," as it sounded way too modern in its production and instrumentation. Of course, it was an actual UK hit single from 1975, so . . . so much for my usually-good ear for such things.
Now I just got
Psychomodo and discovered that another song from Velvet Goldmine, sung by the faux-Bowie character as his big farewell, "Tumbling Down," originates on this album. I had thought this was a well-done Aladdin Sane-era Bowie pastiche written specifically for the film, with just the "right" kind of occasionally clunky-but-charming lyric ("Hail to the Monkey/We're having a funky/Reunion . . ."), but no, it's from an actual post-Glam album (don't know if anyone has defined that as a genre, but it seems to have the same relation to Glam as "post-Punk" does to Punk, so it seems right). The original, even more than the film version, REALLY tries to out-Rock-n-Roll-Suicide "Rock n Roll Suicide" in the grand pompousoid rock-Camp department.
The source I'm downloading these from lists Roy Thomas Baker as either producer or arranger (mentions his string arrangements but nothing else), and that would make sonic sense (it sounds a bit like RTB, who would have been producing Queen at this point, doing a
Berlin-era Bob Ezrin). But in looking up credits, there's no mention of this in the credits for these albums, or in RTB's credits (though I discovered that RTB was an engineer on Electric Warrior, didn't know that). Alan Parsons seems to be behind the production for these (and Harley is the singer on one of Parsons' projects, I, Robot). Some other familiar names are in the booth (eg; Geoff Emerick). Notes on the '74 album note that one song is about Marc Bolan, and I see that Harley sings backup on the title track of Dandy in the Underworld.
So my main question I guess is Why haven't I ever heard of this guy and band before? I mean, I know there were plenty of faux-Bowies at the time, and most of them weren't all that good (though I enjoy the one Jobriath track I have), but Harley's a bit more individual and better than that. And he's still working.
Okay, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as Scott Walker's never really made it across the Atlantic, but I'd HEARD of HIM.
Ah, just skimmed through the '74 album - and it's not nearly as good as the '75 one. The earlier one is a weird mish-mash of the folkier side of T-Rex, with a bit of early Roxy Music (the longer, jammy stuff from the first two albums), and the string arrangement from "Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud." With a bit of MOR pop. And one song that has an intro that's not quite the intro of "Running Gun Blues" at double speed, but it's close enough. So maybe this is why I haven't heard of him - he wasn't all that good except on one album and a single or two . . .
Do you anything about Harley/Cockney Rebel of any interest? As mine is piqued, and even his own official site is just kind of annoying and seems to assume you know him and his work well if you're visiting.

Just wondering,

IWH

Okay, I need to listen to Harley/Cockney Rebel some more, in full, now. The brief "skimming" I mention above didn't do him justice. I was about to write a paragraph here about how disappointed I was to hear more of his stuff after liking the first things I'd heard, but now I'm listening to the first album again, and it's better than I'd thought. So . . . I'll listen to both of them in full and see what I think then.

At this point, for some reason, what's coming to me now is that he has the same relationship to "Glam" as Arthur Lee's Love did to late-60s L.A. hippie-rock -- a kind of after-the-fact of the BIG WAVE summation of the "dark/destructive side" of the period that is OF the style without being fully IN the style. Interesting . . .