"It's huge over most of the world. I hear it everywhere I go": How a Steve Harley song that dissed his bandmates became an all-time classic

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel photographed at London Airport arriving back from New York.

By the summer of 1974, Cockney Rebel were primed to become one of the biggest bands in Britain. Latest album The Psychomodo was tearing up the chart; two singles - Judy Teen and Mr. Soft - had made the Top 10; they’d embarked on a sell-out UK headline tour. Then the wheels came off. Following the final show, at Manchester’s Hardrock in late July, band leader/frontman Steve Harley was confronted by the band’s keyboard player Milton Reame-James.

“He came to me and said that we [the rest of the group] want to write songs for the next album,” Harley told Classic Rock in 2004. “We were doing rather well with me in charge, I thought, so what are they worried about? We’ve all come out of obscurity into this.