Music like Steve Harley

Steve Harley (born Stephen Malcolm Ronald Nice; 27 February 1951) is an English singer and songwriter, best known as frontman of the rock group Cockney Rebel, with whom he still tours.

Harley was born in 1951 in Deptford, London, as Stephen Malcolm Ronald Nice, and was the second of five children in his family. His father was a milkman and his mother a semi-professional jazz singer.

During the summer of 1953, Harley contracted polio, causing him to spend four years in hospital between the ages of three and 16. He underwent two major surgeries in 1963 and 1966. After recovering from the first operation at the age of 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 inspired him to a career of words and music.