Rebel S01e04

The first volume of Tempesta di Mare's series on Chandos, Comédie et Tragédie, offers period-style performances of orchestral music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Féry Rebel, and Marin Marais. The orchestral suites drawn from Lully's music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Rebel's symphonie nouvelle Les élémens, and Marais' suite from the tragédie en musique Alcyone give a taste of theater music in the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and these pieces show how inventive composers were with instrumentation and their combinations of dances with dramatic scene painting. Tempesta di Mare, which is also known as the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, gives bright and energetic performances, and the musicians have a fine sense of the swung rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lively ornamentation in French Baroque music. The recording is clear and well-balanced, though the percussion in Lully's March for the Turkish Ceremony (track 4) is a bit startling, and the dissonant opening of Rebel's Le Chaos (track 13) has its own shock value. Highly recommended.

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.

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".

Baroque instrumental music often took the form of dance suites, which allowed considerable flexibility in the arrangement of minuets, sarabandes, gavottes, bourrées, chaconnes, allemandes, and courantes, mixed with character pieces and even scenic tableaux in the much larger presentations of court ballets. In Terpsichore: Apothéose de la Danse baroque, a splendid 2018 AliaVox release by Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations, works by Jean-Féry Rebel and Georg Philipp Telemann are compared side-by-side to indicate the commonality of practices at the time, as well as the variety of dance music in the hands of two different masters.

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.

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.