LIZ JONES: The first time I spoke to rock legend Steve Harley he was livid with me

LIZ JONES: The first time I spoke to rock legend Steve Harley he was livid with me

LIZ JONES: The first time I spoke to rock legend Steve Harley he was livid with me. But the man I grew to know was as kind as he was fragile

The first time I spoke to rock icon Steve Harley, who died on Sunday aged 73, he was apoplectic with rage.

It was 2011 and I had written a piece for The Mail on Sunday about my brother, Nick, who had just passed away aged 62.

Nick was a talented guitarist who had once been in a very famous band called Cockney Rebel, I wrote, yet in later years had become a recluse and died a penniless failure in a council flat.
It might have been different, I went on, had the lead singer of that band — Steve Harley — been nicer and allowed Nick to dine off royalties from Cockney Rebel's huge 1975 hit, Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me), one of the most played records of all time.

Alas, Nick and Steve had fallen out and my brother, bitter and unfulfilled, always called him a 'c**k' who had ruined his career.
Harley was furious. He emailed my editor, and then me. 'Liz. I know you are prolific, writing so many pieces every day, so no wonder you make mistakes, but you need to check your facts. I wrote the song and therefore your brother wouldn't have been entitled to any royalties.'

I should have been more careful. Steve was known for taking no prisoners. When, in 1974, his bandmates wanted to write songs, too, he told them it wasn't part of his masterplan.

'I started the band, and I auditioned you, and I told you the deal at the time. We're not moving the goal posts,' he recalled in an interview.

The lyrics of that famous song are further proof of Steve's steel. A teenage me, in raptures watching him on Top Of The Pops, with his shaggy coat and shiny mullet, thought the song was about a woman being invited up to his hotel room. All his girl fans did.

He was a working-class boy from South-East London, after all, and many of us, including me who came from Chelmsford, Essex, felt he wasn't as unattainable as, say, David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. He was flamboyant, known to wear eye liner, but not as other-worldly as contemporaries David Bowie and Marc Bolan.

But the song wasn't about sex at all. Steve was far too cerebral for that. It is about the original band splitting up and deserting him.

'You spoiled the game/No matter what you say/ For only metal, what a bore,' he sang, metal in this instance meaning money.
I apologised to him for my ill-advised piece. I said my brother was pugilistic and argued with everyone. And so Steve softened, our talk transporting him back to the Camden of the 1970s, playing in pubs and clubs.

He said he was sorry Nick had died, and told me he always called my brother 'the shoe gazer — on stage he never looked up, he just kept his eyes on the floor.'

Steve and I kept in touch, and in 2018 he emailed to say he was staying at the luxurious Swinton Park Hotel in Ripon, Yorkshire, and would I like to meet him to do an interview.

I turned up, wearing a tank top in an insane 1970s tribute. Steve, then 67, was dapper in a tweed three-piece suit, leaning on a cane, angry he could no longer wear the leather shoes he had bought bespoke in Milan because the soles were too slippery. He was immobile and seemed in pain.

Steve had contracted polio aged three. It was noticed he was clumsy playing football. He ached, was lethargic. One night, his dad went to check on him in bed; Steve was sweating, and mum was called. Steve couldn't feel his leg. A GP was summoned. She said, 'Call an ambulance. Now!'

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