Cockney Rebel were the second headline band I ever saw live. At York University in June 1974.

I had gone to the gig because it was a rare chance to get out of the prison camp-like surroundings of my boarding school, but also because I had bought Cockney Rebel’s first single, Sebastian. Not many others had,

Their record label released it three times and while it was a hit all over Europe, the UK remained resistant to its idiosyncratic genius and lavish orchestral arrangement.

Ever since Cockney Rebel announced their 1974 tour to promote their second album, The Psychomodo, the still-strange, still-wonderful Judy Teen began rising up the charts.

By the time they reached York, its success had elevated them to the upper echelons of Glam, a genre they never quite fitted, but where they resided if only because singer Steve Harley enjoyed dressing up and wore make-up on the cover of the album.

Produced by Harley with Alan Parsons, Judy Teen displays all the idiosyncracies that made Cockney Rebel so unique: a fuzzy fade-in, a plucked pizzicato-style intro on a violin, a swirling fairground melody for the chorus. And Harley’s weirdly mannered vocal, alternating between precise pronunciation and a pwonounced rhotacism.

In most hands, his exotic lyrics would have simply sounded pretentious; somehow he made them work through sheer bravado and that idiosyncratic delivery, meaning that word might have come out as “brrrrra-VADO” or “BWA-vado” depending on how the mood took him.

And who could fail to be got by the echo reverberating through that final part of the chorus: “She made us HAPPY!”

What also made Cockney Rebel, and Judy Teen in particular, so unusual was Harley’s gift for extravagant lyrical wordplay, picked up no doubt at Harlow Tech’s NCTJ course – alma mater of esteemed journalism students to follow, including Piers Morgan and yours truly – and refined as a cub reporter on local newspapers.

“Judy Teen, the queen of the scene, she’s rag doll amour / Verbal slang, American twang, you dare not ignore”. It was a far cry from Can The Can and Tiger Feet. And the second verse: “Sacral blues in various hues, she capered to draw me / Me and Yankee, all hanky panky, seldom she bored me.” Remarkable.

By the time the gig came around in June 1974, Judy Teen had taken them to no.5 in the chart and there was feverish excitement about their appearance at such an intimate venue. A lot of the crowd were there mainly to see the support band, local Yorkshire heroes Be Bop Deluxe, and I was a big fan of theirs too.

When Cockney Rebel came onstage there was trouble in the crowd, with bottles being brandished in the front row among rival fans, many of them disappointed by the characteristically contrary Harley’s determination to draw heavily on debut album The Human Menagerie, with far from crowd-pleasing songs like the seven-minute Sebastian and Death Trip.

At the end of the tour two of Cockney Rebel – keyboard player Milton Reame-James and bass guitarist Paul Jeffreys, who would later be killed in the Lockerbie plane crash – left… to join Bebop Deluxe.

Harley, already notorious for his egocentric and stubborn nature, would hire himself a new set of musicians, promoting himself to the top of the bill as “Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel” and going on to have even more hits, including the chart-topping Make Me Smile.