Steve Harley once named the greatest album ever written: “It mesmerises me”
Growing up, Steve Harley contracted a severe viral infection that meant he was in hospital for four years before the age of 16. Although his life was on the line, particularly when he was first diagnosed, Harley went down a rabbit hole of musical and poetic exploration, making these years the ones when he found his true calling: pursuing a music career.
They say that, during times of hardship, you often gravitate more towards the things that make you who you are. This is why, when people take some time to recuperate, they indulge in the things they find comfort in, whether that’s a book, a television show, a film, or a hobby. When Harley was hospitalised after contracting polio, things were laid out a little differently, as he took this time to discover the things that truly made his soul sing.
While recovering from his first operation at the age of 12, Harley was introduced to several works that would form the basis of his approach as an innovative and talented musician. Among these were trailblazers like T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, the music of Bob Dylan. Around this time, Dylan showed Harley what it meant to inject musicianship with mystery.
As a result, Harley became particularly intrigued by ‘Visions of Joanna’, forever drawn to a certain lyric that he would linger on, enjoying the fact that it felt impossible to pick it apart and reveal its true meaning. These lyrics were: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face / Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”
Perhaps this is why Blonde on Blonde became Harley’s favourite Dylan album, with its perfect amalgamation of poetry and cynicism. When it came to ultimate favourites, Harley once admitted to being “torn” between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde due to them both being “ridiculously brilliant pieces of work”. However, he found himself leaning towards the latter “because I could spend my life working out the meanings and the allegories inside ‘Visions Of Johanna’, which mesmerises me, frankly”.
In Harley’s eyes, no one could come close to the songwriting prowess of Dylan, whose ability to linger on certain ideas without really exposing or revealing his secrets inspired many folk musicians and singer-songwriters to explore more realism in their work. “I must put Bob at the top,” Harley said when asked about his favourite songwriter, “because he’s the one I keep fighting to interpret, to understand the mystery. The others are more straightforward.”
Despite recognising the power of others, like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens, he always found himself returning to Dylan, enjoying the endless amount of layers his music revealed with repeated listens. While some music becomes stale after too many visits, Dylan’s only served to entice Harley further, whose life-long pursuit of answers became an enduring adventure he longed to keep close to his chest.
