I’d liked Cockney Rebel from the start but with this song Steve Harley achieved pop perfection. He really could have called it a day after this.

Make Me Smile not only went to number one in February 1975, it became one of those timeless classics. A standard. And it’s got that special thing you remember: the dead stop and dramatic pause.

It’s like a series of surprise endings before Harley comes back in with another verse, or the band come back in, or Jim Cregan comes in with his Spanish guitar solo, or the girls (two of them future stars Linda Lewis and Tina Charles) take us to the end with the doo-wop harmonies.

It’s just as dramatic to watch. Harley has clearly been to see A Clockwork Orange and adopted Alex’s bowler hat, teaming it with that extraordinary overcoat.

His extravagant wordplay is delightful, as ever and his phrasing is fantastic, despite taking his rhotacism dangerously close to Welease Wodger tewwitowy. With its sunny sound and cheery title, it’s no surprise that it’s remembered as a celebratory song – but it’s actually the opposite.

The lyrics are Harley’s bitter, sarcastic riposte to the break-up of his previous incarnation of Cockney Rebel, three of whom (Paul Crocker, Milton Reame-James and Paul Jeffreys) walked out on him after their Psychomodo tour in the summer of 1974.

As I remember it, probably via the pages of NME and MM, the band couldn’t deal with Harley’s arrogant, egotistical behaviour any more, though he has since told a very different story; one in which he, characteristically, is the long-suffering victim.

The way he tells it, they abandoned him after he turned down their demand to write some songs for what he saw as his band. He later described the lyric as “a finger-pointing piece of venegeful poetry.

“It’s getting off my chest how I felt about the guys splitting up a perfectly workable machine. I wrote it saying: ‘Look, you’ll learn how well we’re doing here – we’re doing well, why are you doing this?'”

He recalled: “Three of them came up to me in a little posse with several ultimatums. 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 – we’re not moving the goalposts 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 dilute it and Make Me Smile is saying: ‘Come back one day and I’ll laugh.’ It was arrogant but I knew they were wrong. They didn’t understand the group like I did.”

Anyway, it was the first single off the band’s third album – and first under the name Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, who consisted of Harley and Cregan, Duncan Mackay on keyboards, George Ford on bass and drummer Stuart Elliott the lone survivor.

It sold more than a million copies and gave Harley his only no.1, spawning 120 cover versions including another big hit for Erasure in 2003 – a breathless electronic take – though Harley’s favourite was The Wedding Present‘s rather punkier take on  his song.