Enjoy Celebrity Radio’s Steve Harley Interview ~ Cockney Rebel…..
Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel are an English rock band from the early 1970s.
Their music covers a range of styles from pop to progressive rock.
‘Come up and see me – Make Me Smile’ has to be one of the best tunes of all time!
Steve Harley is the lead singer of Cockney Rebel.
Harley talks to Belfield about his life, career and new album…..
Harley was born Deptford, south London, in 1951, as Stephen Nice, and was the second of five children in his family. As a child, Harley suffered from polio, spending four years in hospital between the age of 3 and 16.
He underwent major surgery in both 1963 and 1966. After recovering from surgery at the age of 12, Harley was introduced to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, the prose of John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, and the music of Bob Dylan, which inspired him to a career of words and music.
At the age of 10, he had received a Spanish, nylon-strung guitar from his parents one Christmas. Harley’s mother was a jazz singer. Harley was a pupil of Edmund Waller Primary School in New Cross, London. He then attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham Boys’ Grammar School until he was 17.
Having taken classical violin lessons from the age of 9 to 15, he played the instrument with the school orchestra. He left the school without completing his advanced level exams and later took an A-level in English in his mid-30s
Recorded 2011 by Alex Belfield for Celebrity Radio & the BBC.
Leave a Reply