Rebel Bakes

Although he created a decadent glam rocker image through early albums like The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo, Steve Harley soon revealed a romantic heart beating beneath all the artsy sleaze on singles like "Judy Teen" and "Make Me Smile (Come up and See Me)." This 1976 album, the last studio outing Harley would record under the Cockney Rebel banner, allowed him to give full vent to his romantic thoughts via lushly crafted songs about the travails of love. Love Is a Prima Donna features two of Harley's finest songs in the title track, a bracing song that features the writer waxing comical about the pitfalls of love over a briskly paced pop tune that fleshes out its pub-piano melody with flamenco guitar and a choir, and "(Love) Compared With You," a delicately orchestrated love ballad that manages to be touching and heartfelt without lapsing into sappy sentimentality. This album also produced one of Harley's biggest hits with an arty, synthesizer-laced cover of the Beatles' classic "Here Comes the Sun".

Indulging for the first time in Cockney Rebel's debut album – and one uses the word "indulging" deliberately, for like so much else that's this delicious, you cannot help but feel faintly sinful when it's over – is like waking up from a really weird dream, and discovering that reality is weirder still. A handful of Human Menagerie's songs are slight, even forced, and certainly indicative of the group's inexperience. But others – the labyrinthine "Sebastian," the loquacious "Death Trip" in particular – possess confidence, arrogance, and a doomed, decadent madness which astounds. Subject to ruthless dissection, Steve Harley's lyrics were essentially nonsense, a stream of disconnected images whose most gallant achievement is that they usually rhyme. But what could have been perceived as a weakness – or, more generously, an emotionally overwrought attempt to blend Byron with Burroughs – is actually their strength.

If The Human Menagerie, Cockney Rebel's debut album, was a journey into the bowels of decadent cabaret, The Psychomodo, their second, is like a trip to the circus. Except the clowns were more sickly perverted than clowns normally are, and the fun house was filled with rattlesnakes and spiders. Such twists on innocent childhood imagery have transfixed authors from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, but Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were the first band to set that same dread to music, and the only ones to make it work. The Psychomodo was also the band's breakthrough album. The Human Menagerie drew wild reviews and curious sales, but it existed as a cult album even after "Judy Teen" swung out of nowhere to give the band a hit single in spring 1974. Then "Mr Soft" rode his bloodied big top themes into town and Rebelmania erupted. The Psychomodo, still possessing one of the most elegantly threatening jackets of any album ever, had no alternative but to clean up. Harley's themes remained essentially the same as last time out – fey, fractured alienation; studied, splintered melancholia, and shattered shards of imagery which mean more in the mind than they ever could on paper.

Harmonia Mundi's Rebel: Elements – Vivaldi: Four Seasons combines two of the Baroque's biggest instrumental barnburners as performed by one of the top period instrument groups in Europe, Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, under the leadership of concertmasters Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer and Georg Kallweit and featuring their star attraction, violinist Midori Seiler. Like Vivaldi's often derided as over-familiar Four Seasons, Jean-Féry Rebel's 1737 ballet Les Éléments does not want for good recordings, but it is nowhere near as famous as the Vivaldi; this is the first time the two have been combined on a recording, and these pieces are quite compatible given their shared, programmatic purposes.

Cockney Rebel was an English band that ran for a few years in the early 1970s. Despite the odd hit single, it disbanded (seemingly for good) in 1974. Despite this, frontman Steve Harley reformed the band with drummer Stuart Elliot and a few new musicians.
Recorded in just two months at the end of 1974, The Best Years of Our Lives marked the band’s first album under its new name Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel. It was another co-production between Harley and Alan Parsons (Abbey Road, The Dark Side of the Moon).
It was this album and its two singles that catapulted Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel to mainstream success. They epitomised that era: glamorous, sordid yet highly interesting as some amazing music came out.

The 18th century was a time when deportment and noble behavior were essential for people of quality. Dance formed a major part of all social ceremonies and theatrical presentations. Nowhere was dancing more highly regarded than in France, where ballets de cour assumed great importance, and the Lullian tragedie en musique had its counterpart in the ballet en action of the opera-ballet. The Fantaisie (1729) and Plaisirs champetres (1734) of Jean-Fiery Rebel, reflecting the differing personalities of their prima ballerinas Camargo and Salle, have been called choreographic symphonies.

In their fifth release with Dorian Sono Luminus, REBEL explodes through the speakers with this exciting collection of Quartets and Quintets by prolific composer Georg Philip Telemann. Telemann was probably the most famous and commercially successful composer working in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century. The consummate stylist, Telemann was always striving to write music that was up to the minute. This helped make him one of the most popular composers of his day and of ours.

Indulging for the first time in Cockney Rebel's debut album – and one uses the word "indulging" deliberately, for like so much else that's this delicious, you cannot help but feel faintly sinful when it's over – is like waking up from a really weird dream, and discovering that reality is weirder still. A handful of Human Menagerie's songs are slight, even forced, and certainly indicative of the group's inexperience…

'Ulysse' by Jean-Fery Rebel (1666-1747), with its prologue and five acts, was given at the Paris Opera on January 23 1703. The libretto by Henry Guichard, after Homer, recounts the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, where Circe, still in love with him, attempts to regain him by magic. The opera ends in the triumph of love over evil. Rebel followed the formal framework of the lyric tragedies of his master Lully, including some scenes to marvel at. But his orchestral writing also announces Rameau, especially in the depiction of battles, earthquakes or storms.