Steve Harley, the Seventies British rock star who topped U.Ok. music charts with the one “Make Me Smile,” died on Sunday. He was 73.
He died at his dwelling, his family said on Facebook. No trigger was given however Mr. Harley had introduced final month that he would step away from the stage to bear remedy for most cancers and beforehand canceled a number of concert events scheduled for this 12 months.
Mr. Harley was the frontman of the band Cockney Insurgent, which he fashioned within the early Seventies.
His largest hit was the 1975 single “Make Me Smile,” by which Mr. Harley’s even-keeled vocals and melancholic lyrics cruise over instrumentals bearing the optimistic sound distinct to bands of the period. The track hit the highest of the British charts in February of that year.
Different songs discovered success exterior of Britain.
“Sebastian,” a single featured on the band’s debut 1973 album, “The Human Menagerie,” wound up being a No. 1 hit in Belgium and the Netherlands, in response to Mr. Harley’s website.
In 1986, Mr. Harley and the singer Sarah Brightman recorded the unique “Phantom of the Opera” for the musical of the identical identify by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Steve Harley was born on Feb. 27, 1951, in London and was the second of 5 kids, in response to his on-line biography. His mom, who sang jazz and swing within the Forties, supplied Mr. Harley one among his earliest introductions to music.
“She sang round the home once we have been children,” he mentioned in a 2022 interview for the Tim Quinn YouTube channel, evaluating his mom’s voice to the British vocalist Anne Shelton.
When he was a toddler, his mom would sing alongside to Buddy Holly and different Nineteen Fifties pop singers who would play on the radio, he mentioned within the interview.
A full listing of survivors was not instantly out there.
An sickness and surgical procedures saved Mr. Harley rotating out and in of the hospital as a toddler. At age 12, whereas recovering from surgical procedure, Mr. Harley discovered an affinity for the works of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and different authors and took a liking to Bob Dylan’s music, in response to his on-line biography.
These artists moved a younger Mr. Harley to appreciate that his life would possible be “preoccupied with phrases and music,” his web site mentioned.
He certainly turned preoccupied with phrases within the late Nineteen Sixties and early Seventies as he pursued a profession in journalism, working for a number of day by day newspapers within the U.Ok.
Across the similar time, his life as a singer was born in London nightclubs the place he would carry out free and met his eventual Cockney Insurgent bandmates, with whom he struck the band’s first report deal in 1972.
A prolific performer, Mr. Harley’s singing days stretched into his last years. He took the stage as not too long ago as 2023.