About Steve Harley
Stephen Malcolm Ronald Nice , known by his stage name Steve Harley, was an English singer-songwriter and frontman of the rock group Cockney Rebel. He had six UK hit singles with the band in the mid-1970s, including "Judy Teen", "Mr. Soft", and the number one "Make Me Smile ".
Harley was born on 27 February 1951 in Deptford, London, the second of five children. His father Ronnie was a milkman and semi-professional footballer; his mother Joyce was a semi-professional jazz singer.
During the summer of 1953, aged two, Harley contracted a severe case of polio and the doctors told his father he was going to die. He survived, but spent four years in hospital between the ages of three and 16. He underwent major surgery in 1963 and 1966. After recovering from the first operation, aged 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 pointed him to future careers involving words and music. While in hospital he wrote poetry, finding inspiration in Dylan's ballads.
From the age of nine, Harley took classical violin lessons and he played in his grammar school orchestra. Aged 10, he began learning the guitar after his parents had given him a nylon-string Spanish guitar for Christmas, and he started to write his own songs.
Harley was a pupil at Edmund Waller Primary School in New Cross, London. He attended Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School until the age of 17. Aged 15, he took his O-level exams in his hospital bed. He left school without completing his A-level exams.
In 1968, at the age of 17, Harley began his first full-time job, working as a trainee accountant with the Daily Express, despite having gained only 24% in his mock O-level maths exam. From there he progressed to become a reporter, having wanted to be a journalist since the age of 12. After being interviewed by several newspaper editors, Harley signed to train with Essex County Newspapers. Over three years, Harley worked at the Essex County Standard, the Braintree and Witham Times, the Maldon and Burnham Standard and the Colchester Evening Gazette. He returned to London to work for the East London Advertiser , where he covered the story of the Kray murder at The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel. At the age of 21, unwilling to write a story about a woman who had taken two tins of food from a shop, Harley determined to get sacked, an objective he achieved by not wearing a tie and growing his hair long. Among Harley's peers who made successful careers in national journalism were John Blake and Richard Madeley, who took over Harley's desk at the ELA in 1972.
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