Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel

Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)

At No.1, on “The Top 50 UK Singles Chart”, the week of my 3rd Birthday, is Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel with Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me).

What a song…

…to wind up the chart for the week of my 3rd birthday!

A track about defiance in the face of adversity, about how, no matter how hard everything seems, just hanging in there and keeping faith, no matter how far and fragile it seems, in the fact that somehow, someday, one day, things will get better again. I know that certainly rings true for me, even now.

This is the first taste…

…of Steve’s new musical outfit, released as a forerunner to the new album which is now only a few more weeks away, and which carries that same concept throughout its own duration.

Only last summer, things had come to an impasse with the original Cockney Rebel, who even though they’d been hired by Steve, and as a unit, had built up their success, even scoring a Top 10 hit with “Mr Soft“, most of the band began to disfavour the current dynamic set-up which had clearly been stated to them at the start, and who now demanded to contribute themselves to the songwriting side of things; but when Steve flatly refused, they left him high and dry. Hence when you take in the first verse of this hit, Steve himself describes the depressing tone of it autobiographically as feeling very sorry for himself at 4am with a bottle of brandy. However, the healing process began at that moment, as he began writing it all down (a hugely important process for anyone struggling mentally in my opinion); and it’s from there that this song began to evolve, continuing the lyric process and inviting those members who had left, to literally come back and see him, after they’d tried and failed, and make him smile with vindication.

At first, a very Dylan-esque personal dirge which he kept playing around with, all the while in the background, the record company EMI being fully behind him while he looked for new accompanists for this new output he was currently composing. It wasn’t until he got back into the studio with producer Alan Parsons that Alan began to sense a hit in the ether, and made some suggestions to shift it into a higher gear, and grow it from there. With the music becoming a refreshing cheerful contrast to the original arrangement, and even including a backing vocal harking back to The Beatles‘ “You Won’t See Me” The rest, as they say, is history.

Now I’ll be honest,..

…I don’t even remember this song either being a hit at this time or recalling it being played on the radio. I suppose I just sensed it being there in the background, in the air as it were.

To me, it’s always just been there. Probably the first time I consciously took notice of it, was when Simon Mayo used to play in on Radio 1, and he would fill in the silent breaks with (and in the vein of Python‘s Graham Chapman) very silly noises, old style car horns, or a boing or two, and I’d sit there, usually at work or in the car with a wry smile on my face; and of course its also featured in numerous films since, and even to this day is constantly on the radio.

As Steve has confirmed himself since,..

…the song has basically given him his pension. Even decades later, when the classic Top Gear trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James (Captain Slow) May and Richard Hamster, I mean Hammond, learned that Steve had been fined £1,000 and been slapped with 6 points plastered on his licence, for travelling at the standard 70mph speed on the M25, which for a particular section had been reduced to 40mph, they urged for anyone watching to download this song and help him settle the bill. The songs undercurrent of defiance in the face of adversity shining through against the unnecessary injustices of bureaucratic victimisation. It worked.

The song, as I mentioned earlier, with consistent radio airplay, amongst its other appearances, just keeps on going. As Steve sings, from words written when his own world seemed to be a lot darker, and with no easy way to emerge out of it…

“Can you ignore
My faith in everything?
‘Cause I know what faith is and what it’s worth”

…his was absolutely worth its weight in gold…and the song just keeps rolling along; and has now ultimately outlived its creator.

It may have once come from a dark place, but like the moment it entered the UK charts in the depths of winter early in 1975, it has shone down on everyone ever since; and many years later, he performed it at the Isle of Wight Festival, not that I attended I’m sorry to say, but I just love the fact that he came to the place where I now live and played in front of a happy throng of thousands, on the island which now call home; and that’s the perfect point to wind up this UK singles chart rundown on.

My own happy place.

The single…

…near the beginning of this month of February on the 2nd at No.33, from where it then shot up into the Top 10 last week to sit at No.9 before rocketing past every other single to become this week’s biggest seller and magnificently take the No.1 position at the top of the chart. When Steve and the band learn of this, while out on tour, and currently in LA, they spontaneously jump into the hotel swimming pool fully clothed.

From here…

…it succeeds for another straight week at the top before relinquishing its place and slipping down to No.2 at the start of March, before slipping another place to No.3. After that, the drops get bigger until it leaves after the 5th of April having collected 9 initial consecutive weeks.

Time will pass, seventeen years in fact, before the song, now coupled with Steve’s other Top 10 with the original Cockney Rebel, “Mr Soft” as its B side, enters the (by this time) Top 100 on the 19th of April 1992 and gets as high as No.46 before it fades out again after the 2nd of May, adding another 2 weeks to its tally.

Three more years later, and with the song being featured in a Carlsberg Christmas Advertisement, the song (now labelled as “Come Up & See Me, Make Me Smile”) once again enters the UK chart on Christmas Eve, and gets as high as No.33, adding another 3 weeks, before it’s off once again after the 13th of January 1996.

As the world passes through into a new millennium, it’s almost another ten years and then the song returns once again this time freshly remixed for its 30th anniversary, where it lands at No.55 for a week from the 26th of June, before ducking out, and then returning on the 5th of March for another 3 weeks, this time getting as high as No.67, before it departs once again after the 25th of that month.

The final time (so far) is due to the influence of the Top Gear broadcast, and that previously mentioned threesome suggesting everyone download the track to pay for Steve’s speeding fine. Enough of the viewers did just that, and so, adding one final week into the chart, on the 1st of February 2015, and exactly at the point in time that this original single was climbing the chart 40 years before, he lands at No.72 (personally a fantastic number for myself), and thus extends its tally of weeks to a grand non-consecutive total of 18 weeks overall.

And with that sort of success, just from this one song, and after his untimely passing in 2024, if we found a way that we can come up and see him, I’m sure he’s still definitely smiling.