Song of the Day 3/18: Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)”
For all the similarities between the music markets in the U.S. and Britain, some acts just never cross over. For every David Bowie, embraced as a taste-setter in America, there’s a Steve Harley – someone who scored lots of hits in the UK but never made a dent on this side of the pond.
If you set the WABAC machine for the early ’70s, you might hear Steve Harley, who died last week at age 73, mentioned in the same breath as Bowie and Marc Bolan – mostly by Harley himself, who didn’t lack for sneering confidence. He started out singing in a folk duo, became a music journalist and then glommed onto glam rock around the time it peaked in 1973.
For a couple of years he almost lived up to the boasting, landing a few singles in the UK Top 10 and releasing two well-regarded LPs that, like most glam, drew on the music hall tradition as well as pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll. Harley’s delivery sometimes made him sound a bit like Ray Davies of the Kinks, another act that scored much higher in Britain than America, or a cross between Bowie and Bolan.
Cockney Rebel was an actual band for those first two albums, but tensions grew when Harley refused to share songwriting with other members, leading all but his drummer to quit the group. Harley got the last laugh, assembling a new backing outfit from studio musicians and scoring a monster UK No. 1 single, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me).” It sounds like a breakup song, but the lyrics are directed not at a love interest but his departed bandmates. It became one of the most-played records in UK radio history and was the only one of his records to chart in the US – at No. 96 on the Billboard Hot 100.
More than 120 artists have covered the tune, including Duran Duran and Erasure. Harley’s own favorite cover was by British pop-punk band the Wedding Present, because, he said, “They did a punk version and made it kick. They understood the venom in the lyrics.”
Harley had a long solo career and was still touring until he was diagnosed with cancer in December.
