Harley had written the piece as a slow blues track with a dark mood. The original vision for the song was vastly different from the one that was recorded. Harley began writing the song only days after the band's split. We're not moving the goal posts here.' They knew this, and they came to me demanding that they could write songs too, and I just said 'Well go and do it then'. They wanted to write songs for the third album, and I said 'Well you know I started the band, and I auditioned you, and I told you the deal at the time. Three of them came to me in a little posse with several ultimatums. I wrote it saying 'Look, you'll learn how well we're doing here, we're doing well, why are you doing this?'" He elaborated: It's getting off my chest how I felt about the guys splitting up a perfectly workable machine. On The One Show in October 2010, Harley called the lyric "a finger-pointing piece of vengeful poetry. In a television interview recorded in 2002, Harley described how the lyrics were vindictively directed at the former band members who, he felt, had abandoned him. Īfter the band split, only the original line-up's drummer, Stuart Elliott, would join the new line-up.
Harley, the band's sole songwriter, felt this was unfair as he had been the one to originally hire the musicians for his group, and explained the deal to them at the time. Jean-Paul Crocker, Milton Reame-James and Paul Jeffreys had approached Harley, insisting they could also write material for the group. On 18 July, the band received a 'Gold Award' for outstanding new act of 1974, and a week later they had split up over their disagreements. As the tour progressed, the band began facing growing tensions, which ultimately led to their split at the end of the tour in late July. īetween May and July 1974, Cockney Rebel embarked on a major British tour to promote their second studio album The Psychomodo. However, years later, Harley began to reveal the truth behind the band's split. For many years, it was believed that Harley purposely chose to disband the original line-up and embark on a new career path.
"Make Me Smile" described Harley's feelings on the band's split. In July 1974, the original Cockney Rebel disbanded, and Harley then assembled a new line-up later in the year. The song was the first single to be released under the name "Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel", as opposed to simply "Cockney Rebel".
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