Steve Harley: Rock star? I looked like a teacher

Arranging to meet Steve Harley at a little French café in Soho, central London, called Maison Bertaux brings the memories flooding back. His, not mine. “I used to drink next door at the Coach & Horses,” Harley says of the period in the mid-1970s when he brought a new kind of florid theatricality to rock with his band Cockney Rebel. “Lucian Freud would be in there all day, drinking until he fell off his stool, and at the time I was hanging out with Marc Bolan, who was always ‘on’. In 1974, by which point I was quite famous, I went for lunch with Marc and David Bowie on the Kings Road. A coachload of teenage girls pulled up, banging on the windows and screaming.