Steve Harley, ‘Make Me Smile’ singer, dies at 73

Steve Harley, the British rock star of the 1970s who topped the British charts with the single ‘Make Me Smile’, died on Sunday. He was 73.

He died in his house, his family said on Facebook. No reason was given, but Mr. Harley had announced last month that he would be stepping off stage to undergo cancer treatment and had previously canceled several concerts for this year.

Mr. Harley was the frontman of the band Cockney Rebel, which he founded in the early 1970s.

His biggest hit was the 1975 single ‘Make Me Smile’, in which Mr. Harley crosses over instrumentals with the optimistic sound characteristic of bands of that era. The song reached the top of the British charts February of that year.

Other songs found success outside Britain.

“Sebastian,” a single featured on the band’s 1973 debut album, “The Human Menagerie,” was released, according to Mr. Harley’s a number 1 hit in Belgium and the Netherlands. website.

In 1986, Mr. Harley and singer Sarah Brightman perform the original “Phantom of the Opera” for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the same name.

Steve Harley was born on February 27, 1951 in London and was the second of five children, according to his online biography. His mother, who sang jazz and swing in the 1940s, offered Mr. Harley one of his first exposures to music.

“She sang around the house when we were kids,” he said an interview from 2022 for the Tim Quinn YouTube channel, in which he compared his mother’s voice to British singer Anne Shelton.

When he was a child, his mother sang along to Buddy Holly and other 1950s pop singers playing on the radio, he said in the interview.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

An illness and surgeries left Mr. Harley in and out of the hospital as a child. At age 12, while recovering from surgery, Mr. Harley found an affinity with the works of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and other authors and developed a taste for the music of Bob Dylan, according to his online biography.

These artists led a young Mr. Harley to realize that his life would likely be “taken up by words and music,” according to his website.

Indeed, he became preoccupied with words in the late 1960s and early 1970s as he pursued a career in journalism and worked for several newspapers in Britain.

Around the same time, his life as a singer was born in London nightclubs, where he performed for free and met his eventual Cockney Rebel bandmates, with whom he signed the band’s first recording contract in 1972.

A prolific recording artist, Mr. Harley’s singing days extended into his final years. He wasn’t on the podium until 2023.