Cockney Rebel

Best remembered today for the 1975 hit "Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)" — itself one of the masterpieces of British pop — Steve Harley actually boasts a couple of albums of absolute quality at the helm of Cockney Rebel.

After a brief stint as a music journalist, Harley recruited violinist John Crocker, who had recently made an unsuccessful attempt to join Trees, a folk outfit of some standing though unknown to the wider public. The two had known each other for years and had already played together from time to time, so it wasn't hard for them to sense a certain chemistry in putting a band together. It took just a few months, and by the summer of 1972 Cockney Rebel made their first live appearance.

Their music seemed to win over everyone in London's thriving underground scene, so much so that after just five gigs they found themselves with a contract from EMI and a mammoth budget at their disposal.

Neil Harrison, a young EMI talent scout on his first outing behind the mixing desk, was chosen as producer (he would later distinguish himself for his steady support of Bijelo Dugme, the band of Goran Bregović before he started making Balkan folk for tourists). Handling the arrangements was another rising talent, Andrew Powell, who would go on to become a regular collaborator of Alan Parsons, both on his own records and directing albums such as Al Stewart's "Year Of The Cat" and John Miles' "Rebel". Geoff Emerick, on the other hand, was a name with real experience as sound engineer, the perfect counterweight to easy youthful enthusiasm, coming straight from stints with the Beatles (from '66 to '69), the Zombies ("Odessey And Oracle"), Wallace Connection, Badfinger and others.

The staff, in short, was as good as it gets, and for their part Cockney Rebel were a band of remarkable technical grounding and a particularly original sound, with electric guitars replaced by Crocker's electric violin, Milton Reame-James's keyboards (electric piano in particular) and acoustic guitars.

The debut album, "The Human Menagerie", came out in November 1973, but seemed to go unnoticed. London's clubs were one thing, breaking through in provincial, working-class England quite another. The costs were covered regardless when a track, "Sebastian", scored a big hit in Holland and Belgium, climbing to number 2 on both charts. Nemo propheta in patria, one might say — except that with the following album, "The Psychomodo", the UK too would finally take notice of them.

It is "The Human Menagerie", however, that invents the magic formula, and shows it off fully formed from the start, with no apparent need for adjustment.

Cockney Rebel debuted in the year that glam rock seemed to have definitively conquered the country, and their sound bears the mark of that atmosphere. Steve Harley is an androgynous alien with one eye on Bob Dylan and the other on Marlene Dietrich. A description that could equally apply to David Bowie, were it not for the fact that such ingredients allow for a range of variations not to be underestimated. Cockney Rebel echo Bowie only very loosely, both because Harley's vocal timbre is different, and because of a sardonic tone that brings him closer, if anything, to Ray Davies, and also because the band, while offering a sophisticated, decadent pop rock, weaves in a Celtic component unheard of in that context, along with elaborate, sprawling structures that in several tracks bring them within a hair's breadth of progressive rock.

This peculiarity emerges right from the opening "Hideaway", under four minutes long yet unexpectedly dense. A brisk pace thickened by acoustic arpeggios and folk violin, tireless embroidery of Rhodes piano in the background, a hammering chorus, female backing vocals as garnish, with every element moving halfway between rhythmic drive and melodic flourish, seamlessly and without ever settling into a fixed shape. Harley's voice is slightly warped by a filter, as if it weren't already striking enough on its own.

"Crazy Raver" is even wilder, with the violin edging close to Fairport Convention, the boogie piano pounding away tirelessly, the wheezy saxophone, and the soul backing vocals. Listening to Harley's performance, you'd swear the Blur had passed through these parts.

The mood relaxes amid the danceable fluidity of "Loretta's Tale", with mandolin and electric piano delicately chasing each other, while "Muriel The Actor" plays the calypso-contamination card, confirming how closely Harley had studied the Kinks' moves. Not that the track lacks personality — quite the opposite, its absurd, contrary swagger and the singer's wordy patter make it an endearingly eccentric little oddity.

The true genius emerges, however, in the longer songs, which are also the ones where Harley excels most as a lyricist. The first side closes with the already mentioned seven-minute "Sebastian".

A multifaceted, tragic ballad that winds through piano, harpsichord, walls of orchestration and operatic choirs, sudden rhythmic surges and endless streams of melody, with Harley's voice filtered and warped into a kind of gothic mask teetering on the brink of nervous collapse. The lyrics, utterly inscrutable, have been subjected to every kind of interpretation over the years, from a description of a love gone wrong ("Radiate simply, the candle is burning so low for me. Generate me limply, I can't seem to place your name, cherie. To rearrange all these thoughts in a moment is suicide. Come to a strange place, we'll talk over old times we never spied") to a celebration of diversity, which is precisely what led the song to be read as a gay anthem by the dudes of the time ("And your view of society screws up my mind like you'll never know. Lead me away, come inside, see my mind in kaleidoscope. Somebody called me Sebastian. Love me sublime, mangle my mind, do it in style, so we all know, oh yeah!").

The second side opens with "Mirror Freak", with its limping gait and a violin recorded at a distance, overlaid by organ and electric piano melting into a lounge-flavoured sonic blend. Harley's lines skilfully mix ego celebration ("Oh you're too cute to be a big rock star, but if you're cool you may not push it too far. Oh just believe in yourself and take a tip from the elf") with a sense of impermanence ("And the new man he appears to be winning. Oh what a shame, such a bore").

Closing things out are the nearly ten minutes of "Death Trip", the ultimate chameleon with its solemn stride, absorbing and spitting back melodies and riffs, gurgling brass and dissonant strings, minuets and ostinatos, startling shifts and repetitions, moments of emptiness and instrumental walls of sound. The track is a journey into the unknown: prog that stops being fairy tale and becomes morbid fixation, the romantic ballad transcending into cosmic music, the dandy's self-destruction painted in a fresco of Wagnerian intensity, a form of rock theatre entirely its own, capable of breaking free from the script of the musical.

If all this should seem over the top, pay close attention to Harley's words, which mock precisely those singers ready to serve up rebellion on a silver platter, with crude slogans and cut-price ideology: "Someone's trying to fool us, maybe it's your daughters. Can you hear the Walrus offering a sad solution? He's calling out for teenage revolution. And can you think of one good reason to remain?".

Of course, at the time such a layering of sounds and symbolism may well have left more than one critic baffled — just think of NME's savagely negative review — but time has gradually done it justice, earning the record a devoted cult following. If only it were a little longer, it would be perfect.

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05/06/2016