Steve Harley 1951-2024 Cockney Rebel who took risks and could write a hit

Steve Harley was many things, but a man crippled by modesty was not among them.

- Alexis Petridis

In his first big music press interview - before the appearance of Cockney Rebel's debut album, when all they had released was a solitary single that featured a 40-piece orchestra, which had failed to make the UK charts - he proclaimed his band "a musical force that others will follow" and pitted himself squarely against the biggest names in British pop. Cockney Rebel, he suggested, would kick David Bowie "up the arse": "he'll say, 'I've got to step on it to stay at the top."

" When it arrived, Cockney Rebel's debut album featured a song called Mirror Freak that loudly announced he was going to supplant Marc Bolan - "too cute to be a big rock star" - in the public's affections: "we can feel a change is on the way... a new man he appears to be winning... you're the same old thing we've always known".

This was big talk that perhaps told you something about Harley's background as a journalist: he knew what made for lively copy.

Cockney Rebel's first two albums, The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo, arrived alongside the first signs that glam rock was waning, or at least that its most artful practitioners were moving on - Bowie had killed off Ziggy Stardust, Bolan had declared the genre "dead" - and suggested the arrival of a fresh take.

His voice was a mannered sneer that occasionally sounded a little like the Kinks' Ray Davies and occasionally seemed to presage the arrival of punk - "hooked on absinthe and daffodils/telling tales of white gardenia" - and big on withering disdain. He was both willing to take musical risks - The Human Menagerie's closer Death Trip stretched out over 10 episodic minutes and apparently capable of writing hits to order.