Steve Harley is deep into a set of Spring and Summer live dates with his acoustic band, a fair few ‘sold out’ signs outside venues before his arrival, having recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the band that helped make his name, Cockney Rebel.

This stalwart singer-songwriter continues to make new music and take fresh approaches to his craft, and as his latest press release suggests, ‘For Steve, life on the road is more than just a job: it is almost his life’s blood.’

This time around, he’s joined on stage by long-standing bandmate, violinist/guitarist Barry Wickens, plus Oli Hayhurst on double bass, and Dave Delarre on lead guitar. And as the main man insists, five decades of live performance down the line, the thrill of another night in another place to another audience has not dimmed.

“I still get a buzz when boarding the tour bus, like I did all those years ago. There’s still that magical feeling. It has not diminished at all.”

Steve’s acoustic sets on this tour include songs from 2020’s Uncovered, his sixth solo studio album – comprising re-recordings of a couple of his songs plus nine others he always wanted to perform. As he put it, ‘selected from those I have performed and sung privately at home for many years and wished I had written.’

There will also be a selection from the vast and eclectic Harley songbook, most likely including 1975 hits, ‘Mr Raffles (Man It Was Mean)’ and ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’, the latter seen by The Times as ‘one of the most beloved songs of the modern age’, 1974 top-10 hits ‘Judy Teen’ and ‘Mr Soft’, and the previous year’s epic ‘Sebastian’.

And all the songs are reproduced in acoustic style on what promises to be an intimate night in the presence of a great and still impassioned musician, one that Rod Stewart, who covered Steve’s ‘A Friend for Life’, described as ‘One of the finest lyricists Britain has produced’.

Besides, as Mojo wrote, ‘Harley creates rock songs that are proud, lyrical and full of yearning,’ and Record Collector added, ‘Harley’s eloquent, on-the-edge shows never fail to impress,’ this Acoustic Festival of Britain lifetime achievement award-winner and British Academy of Composers and Songwriters gold badge of merit holder remaining busy, rarely off the road it seems.

“Yes, that’s about right. We work a lot, and when I work, loads of people work. The theatre works, the staff work. Otherwise, theatres are dark, and no one’s got the job. And when the musicians work, the crew work… I love all that. I’m at a stage of life where I can afford to share and give a lot of it away, as it were. And that’s satisfying.”

The last time I saw you was at The Platform in Morecambe in April 2019…

“We’re coming back there too {tonight, Thursday June 15^th}. We’re also playing Blackburn’s King George’s Hall, which was added late, and we’ve just come back from seven completely sold-out shows – raving, wonderful times.

“But people are buying late. I think with inflation and all the other worries, they’re kind of looking at the bank statement, I think, and thinking, ‘We can do it after all.’ That’s what it appears. We’ve sold a lot of late tickets in the last few weeks.”

Last time I saw you, it was just a trio, yourself and Barry Wickens joined by keyboard player James Lascelles. Is it a case of putting the calls out and seeing who’s available?

“No, this is the quartet – without keyboards. It’s nothing against my dear friend, James, or keyboards. It’s a case of… I can’t stay in a rut. We made a record, the new album – well, I’m calling it new, it was released three years ago, but the pandemic hit, the door slamming about three weeks after it was released, so we never promoted it for nearly two years. But I’m very proud of it…”

Quite right too. Uncovered. I went back to it last night, and I wanted to mention the opening track, ‘Compared To You (Your Eyes Don’t Seem to Age)’, a new take on one of your own songs, reminding me what a fine song ‘(Love) Compared To You’ is. And there’s a rather poignant third verse there now.

“Yes, the third verse at last! Ha! We went to Rockfield {Studios, Monmouthshire, South Wales} to record that, and it’s just strings – guitars, violin, viola, double bass, and a string quartet. No keyboards at all, no electric notes. And that’s how I’m touring, plugging this album, playing four or five songs from it. And the songs evolve, they develop, it’s really thrilling, and the band are such great players.

“It’s funny how the muse comes and sits on your shoulder for inspiration. You can wait years. And with that third verse, I’d been trying to write it for many, many years, and then I was down at Rockfield in the sunshine at the beginning of July 2019, and I went out into the meadow. My dad died two weeks earlier, and he was being cremated at 8.30 in Bury St Edmunds, about 250 miles from where I was. I was in the meadow while someone was cooking breakfast, looking at the horses and the trees and just enjoying nature, thinking about my dad.

“And when I walked back in at nine o’clock I said to my engineer and friend Matt Butler, who had been hassling me to write it, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve done it. What do you think of this?’ And he just said, ‘Spot on, well done.’ Very weird. My dad was passing through, yeah.

“It needed a third verse. It was a bit of a cheap shot, just two verses and repeating one of them. What happened there?”

Incidentally, when I came to The Platform (with my review here), we were late turning up and you were playing ‘(Love) Compared to You’ as we arrived.

“Ah… I think the set’s going to be quite different this time.’

Back to Uncovered, and your version of ‘Absolute Beginners’. I feel that’s a David Bowie song that’s not often celebrated, but so powerful all the same. Perhaps because it didn’t really fit in with a lot of his other material.

“It is a bit standalone, isn’t it. I mean, he was committed to write the music for that film, which wasn’t much cop.”

Agreed, but the soundtrack’s not bad, is it.

“That’s right. I said on stage the other night it’s the best five minutes of a very mediocre film. It’s a good song, and it’s got some lovely chords.”

There is some lovely stuff on that soundtrack, from Sade and Working Week to Ray Davies and The Style Council. But it was a waste of a good book, really.

“Yes, indeed, there you are. Different art forms… But I’d known the song forever and was playing it for many years on the guitar at home, while practising, and it’s got some lovely chord changes that musicians like.”

As for ‘Emma’, don’t take this the wrong way, but I get the feeling you’re covering David Essex rather than Hot Chocolate there. Perhaps it’s an early ‘70s thing. It’s got the vibe of ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ and ‘Stardust’, maybe. And both acts take me back to a happy childhood in rural Surrey.

“Well, I wouldn’t have noticed that. The whole point of that album is that my engineer Matt said to me, ‘How do you want it to sound?’ and I said, ‘Look, these songs have got to sound like I wrote them.’”

I get that, I just wonder if you’d put yourself back in the moment of when that song was made, subconsciously or not.

“Not at all, I was just being me. Absolutely, just me. I just wanted them to sound like I’d written them. That’s why we don’t call them covers. We call them interpretations. I tried to make them my own, Malc. I don’t see the point of a cover song if it’s almost the same as the original.”

We were chatting last time about The Wedding Present’s take on ‘Make Me Smile’, and that’s a great example. Anyone who covers a classic song and doesn’t bring anything new, that’s just lazy really. What’s the point? Just shifting more units.

“Yeah, that’s right, and the Weddoes really made it their own.”

Your interpretation of Cat Stevens’ ‘How Can I Tell you’ works so well too, and you definitely make that yours. That’s one of my two contenders for favourite song on the album.

“Yeah, What a wonderful song. We sent it to him, and he wrote back to me the kindest words. It’s hard to know what to say, but he’s a very eloquent man, I’ve known him a long time, and he just said he couldn’t have imagined it being interpreted that way, with the string quartet and the way I’m stabbing at his lyrics. He said, ‘You got to the heart of it.’ That meant the world to me. I knew exactly what he meant. It’s a great song and it deserves not to be ruined. Ha ha!”

Taking you back to around the time you broke through, were you more a Pin-Ups or a These Foolish Things covers LP fan? Bowie or Bryan Ferry? Or was there something else along those lines around then that inspired you?

“I don’t remember Pin-Ups at all. ‘Friday on my Mind’, I remember. I like that a lot. But I really do plough my own furrow, Malc. I don’t get influenced very easily. I don’t listen to much. I really live in my own private world, to be honest. You know, I’m on a tour bus with five guys, and they all mix in the business, mixing with musicians all the time. But I don’t, I come home, I’m way out of the music industry when I’m not playing on that stage.”

Well, that’s a good place to be.

“Yeah, and I just wanted to perform songs I wish I’d written, and it may not sound like I did. Which is an exercise in instrumentation, totally acoustic and with strings.”

One more example, on that front, The Beatles’ ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’. I think if Paul McCartney did a version of that again now, it would be more like your version than the original.

“Well, he does it on stage now… and after he’d heard mine. I sent it to him, and I know he got it. He didn’t respond yet. That’s fine. I don’t expect that. I sent copies to all the writers, to show them I’ve done this nod in their direction. And to my knowledge, I can’t speak for him but I understand Paul’s heard it, then suddenly it pops up in his live set, which is a bit of a nice nod to me, I think.”

That’s great, and it’s an inspired interpretation. Were you listening back to Help, or was it something stuck in the back of your mind that resurfaced while noodling around on guitar?

“It’s one of those songs, like all of them – plus about 20 others that were not on the album – that I play a lot at home, to keep the fingers in shape and keep the skin nice and hard. It was just another song I used to sing to my grandson when he was 18 months old and started dancing. I’d sing it and used to make him laugh and jump, and I realised what a clever lyric it is. It’s not as slight as some people think it is. It’s very clever, full of serendipity.

“When he sings, ‘Had it been another day, I might have looked the other way and I’d have never been aware, but as it is I’ll dream of her tonight’… you see, serendipity, chance.”

And it’s genius to make something sound simple when it’s perhaps not.

“Yeah, McCartney was also the master of narrative. I write narrative. Not many people do. He was the master. Listen to ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ for instance. Just brilliant narrative work, and this is too. It’s the story of falling in love with Jane Asher in 1965, and we turned it into a ye high kind of jig.”

And it works so well. Does that song take you back to a certain time and place? Are you back there in 1965 when you first heard that?

“Well, yeah, that’s when I first heard Help! And Rubber Soul, and Revolver. I got them all on the day they were released, the same as all the Dylan albums, the moment they were released. Funnily enough, another song on the album, which at the moment we’re ending set one with, because the whole audience sings, ‘Baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time.’ You can’t help yourself, it’s a magnetic chorus, and that’s ’66, that song No.1 from Chris Farlowe when England were winning the World Cup.”

A Jagger-Richards classic for sure, in your case with a neat ‘Honky Tonk Women’-flavoured intro. And that UK singles chart was so strong at that moment in time.

“God, yeah, classics!”

Born in 1951 in South-East London, Steve was the second of five children to a milkman and a semi-professional jazz singer, started out in journalism in 1968 at the age of 17, this Daily Express trainee accountant going on to become a reporter, training with Essex County Newspapers, working on various Essex titles before a stint at the East London Advertiser. But I’m guessing you felt inspired by all that going on around you in the capital to write songs and become a performer. Was that you on your way, hearing all that?

“Yeah, when I was 15 and 16 at the times you’re talking about, I was always going to be a reporter. That was my big dream from the age of about 12. I fulfilled that, I did four years, three years training. As a news reporter, I didn’t cover reviews and music as people like to think I did. And then I started to play in the folk clubs a bit, with these songs I was writing that went on The Human Menagerie.

“And yeah, I was drawn inexorably towards the spotlight. Couldn’t explain it. I even changed my name, my real name being Nice. I changed it because when I was on stage, I realised early on when a light was on me anywhere, I wasn’t Mrs Nice’s little boy anymore. I was taking on a different persona as I was singing those weird songs. I thought, ‘I’m not Steve Nice anymore. Not at that moment. I’m very proud to be Mrs Nice’s little boy and I’m very proud of my background and who I am, but professionally, I just needed to get a new persona.”

Did the Small Faces have an influence on veering away from the real name too? Hearing them singing ‘Here Comes the Nice’?

“Oh no, ha ha!”

You mentioned The Human Menagerie and those early sounds from the street, as The Jam later put it, first performed on the folk and busking scenes. And then, barely eight years after ‘65 and hearing Help! you’re in the studio working on an album of your own with Geoff Emerick in the control room.

“You got it. That’s weird. I mean, I was only 22 and we’re working with The Beatles’ engineer. And he was a genius, Geoff, the sounds he made for us. I had written and was busking ‘Sebastian’, and it’s just three chords. But it’s dramatic and the producer at the time, Neal Harrison, the EMI staff producer, got EMI… I don’t know how he did it… to give him a blank cheque, so we had a 40-piece orchestra come in, and a choir, with Andrew Powell arranging it.

“It opened a lot of doors to people. Andrew had never worked like that before, but then went on to work with Kate Bush straight after me. Yeah, it was an amazing period.”

There were two tracks on that album using the orchestra, I seem to recall (the other being majestic finale, ‘Death Trip’)..

“Yeah, but it was expensive… certainly for a debut album without a hit single on it. EMI had a lot of faith in my writing, and the band.”

I got the impression at that at stage there were a few styles incorporated, as if you were trying to find your own direction. For instance, ‘What Ruthy Said’ sounds like you’d been listening to Roxy Music coming through, and there’s a real mix of stuff on that album.

“Again though, I never was influenced by Roxy Music. I only ever really got ‘Virginia Plain’. What you’re finding, I think, with all these references, Malc, is that we were all of our time. And there are certain instruments… the synthesiser had just become polyphonic. We were all twiddling and making noises like Brian Eno was. We were at Air Studios for most of The Human Menagerie, and in the studio behind Geoff’s back was George Martin’s synthesiser, which was like a telephone exchange. And that’s the one he used on ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and other tracks on Abbey Road. So we were all of our time, I suppose slightly theatrical.”

Returning to the Uncovered album, there’s also a duet with past WriteWyattUK interviewee Eddi Reader on ‘Star of Belle Isle’, and then there’s ‘Lost Myself’, my other contender for favourite track, how did you stumble upon Longpigs? Was it through discovering Richard Hawley and going backwards?

“Interestingly, the first show that Richard ever went to was to see me at Sheffield Leadmill. He told me that. He didn’t write that song though, that was written by Crispin Hunt, ‘Lost Myself’. They had a hit single with it in the mid-‘90s and were on Top of the Pops on a vid. I saw that twice and thought, when I was breaking the lyrics down, there’s more to this than just this punk thrash that they’re doing. Richard plays a wild guitar solo, and they’re kind of new wave/post-punk, and I just thought the song was something else.

“I sent it to Crispin, he got the mp3 and went on a plane to go to New York with his son for a few days. He wrote straight back to me, said, ‘Steve, I’m on a plane. I’ll hear it when I get to my hotel room later tonight.’ And then he wrote back in tears, saying, ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done to my song. It’s wonderful. How did you see all that in it?’

“I say that on stage some nights if we do it. I’ll say, this is the most heartbreaking story I’ve ever sung of Crispin’s. It’s about heroin addiction, it’s a terrible picture, but maybe he got around the madness of his imagery, probably with a true story, by giving a thrash rock feel. But I toned it back down, using a string quartet.”

You exposed it.

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to do, to expose it to show the world what he’d really written.”

Here’s a bit of a quiz for you. After ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) topped the UK charts for a fortnight in 1975, do you remember what replaced it at the top?

 “Oh God, how can I ever forget? It was a nightmare. I mean, without that bloody piece of rubbish, that novelty record by an actor, I’d have had four weeks at No.1. We were No.2, out-selling everything else for a couple more weeks. Yeah, that silly Telly Savalas nonsense got played on the radio, and people bought it. I wasn’t happy. Ha ha!”

As it was, Telly Savalas’ ‘If’ was then followed by six weeks at the top for the Bay City Rollers’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’.

“Yeah… but we got our No.1, and they can’t take that away. So that’s alright. I’m not bothered.”

Well, I never tire of hearing that song. And it’s one of those songs that comes up on the radio more than I play it these days, much as I also love The Best Years of Our Lives album it features on. And that’s another LP that takes me back to a time and place.

“You were a very young man then, weren’t you?”

I’ve got older brothers and sisters, the oldest born in 1956, the youngest five and half years ahead of me in 1962. And there was always good music around the house.

“Much the same for a lot of us. In the late ‘50s, I would only have been eight or nine years old, but I was mad on Buddy Holly. I had cousins that I used to visit a lot along the road. They were older than me and actually buying the 45s – they were buying Buddy Holly, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and Elvis. And I was loving all that American music as well as Cliff at that time.”

We talked some more at that point about other chart acts of the time of his mid-‘70s commercial pomp (not least with me talking Slade, while working on the final stages of my book about the band (set for publication in late September) but I got a similar response to before.

“You’ve got to understand, as I said earlier about ploughing my own furrow… I’m sociable – if someone comes and knocks on my dressing room door, they’re welcomed in and I’m absolutely fine to have some small talk or mutual backscratching. But I didn’t go around knocking on doors. I didn’t mix. I mixed with my people. I would have been doing the Telegraph crossword or something like that to kill the time or read the racing pages. That’s what I’ve always done.

“So I don’t really know anybody. Although I did meet Les McKeown a couple of times. We shared a couple of women in Los Angeles when I was living there in ‘79. And we met up again a few years ago, because a female friend of mine – my friend’s wife – was a huge Tartan Army type. Les and his band were in town where they lived in Cheshire, and I said, ‘I’m coming up for a photo session in Cheshire. I can take Judy, my friend, to see Les. She can meet him.’

“It blew her mind! She met her childhood teenage hero. And Les was wonderful with her, so kind, and he was fine with anything she wanted to talk about. She was overwhelmed. He was a lovely guy. I’m so sorry for his loss.”

I find time and again – not just with ‘60s and ‘70s breakthrough acts, but beyond that too – the competitive music business rubbish is out of the way for artists now, who see each other on the circuit and realise they had so much in common. There can still be competition, but it seems far healthier.

“I think if you meet guys that have been around as long as you have yourself, the longevity speaks volumes! You do have things in common if you’re still doing it.”

I hate to bring it up, but now you’re 72, is that just a number? Are you still 22 when you get up on that stage?

“Yeah, I’m still 35 on that stage. Nothing else crosses your mind. You get into the zone, and it’s a special place to be, I can promise you. And when they keep saying, ‘Are you going to give it up?’ I could afford to – I don’t need to do it for money – but as I said, when I work, other people work, and they’re good people. I like a bit of the craic, Malc.”

I can tell, and at The Platform I felt you were quite quiet at first, but by the halfway stage you were really into it, chatting away, with some great tales.

“Well, all things in good measure. Yeah, I don’t prepare stories or anything, but this is an intimate show and people expect at their age – having known me for 50 years professionally, some of them – they’re very happy to sit there and spend three minutes while I reminisce or tell them something that they didn’t expect me to tell them.

“And I’m letting cats out of the bag now, because I’m just old enough not to care very much! It’s easier than it ever was, to be honest.”

For this website’s previous Steve Harley feature/interview, from March 2019, head here.

Tickets for the remaining shows on the Steve Harley Acoustic Band’s Spring/Summer 2023 UK tour are available via this Gig Cartel link, with dates at: Morecambe Platform (Thursday, June 15^th), Barrow Forum (Friday, June 16^th), Sunderland Fire Station (Saturday, June 17^th), Lytham Lowther Pavilion (Monday, June 19th), Kings Lynn Corn Exchange (Thursday, June 29^th), Newark Palace Theatre (Friday, June 30^th), and Blackburn King George’s Hall (Saturday, July 1^st). For further information, head to http://www.steveharley.com/ and visit Steve’s Facebook and Twitter addresses.