The greatness of Steve Harley

You may have noticed by now that the airtime devoted to dead popstars bears scant relation to their actual importance in the genre, or indeed their popularity. So, for example, the death of the smackhead rapper Coolio was headline news on the BBC and the subject of a fawning feature on the PM programme, despite the fact that he had only one really big hit in the UK – ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ – the bones of which were written by Stevie Wonder.

Meanwhile, Rick Parfitt was the co-writer of a large proportion of Status Quo’s more than 60 top 30 hits – the greatest number of any band of any era – but his passing was scarcely mentioned. The reason, I think, is that the middle-class arts-grad crowd in our media are ashamed of Status Quo and would feel embarrassed eulogising him. Lou Reed – who was important, I would concede, but scarcely popular, given that he enjoyed only two UK top ten hits in his lifetime – was lauded for ever and a day, mainly because the BBC journos remember with awe and envy having met cool people at university who had a copy of Loaded.

And so it goes. It is sad that Bob Marley died in 1981 and at such a young age, but believe me, if he had died this week instead, his demise would require at least a month of retrospectives, the recall of parliament, his effigy installed on the spare plinth in Trafalgar Square and the immediate payment of reparations to Jamaica. I have no animus against Marley and have bought several of his albums, but politically motivated revisionism has made him perhaps the most overrated songwriter in history. I always preferred the slyly sinister Keith Hudson, not to mention Jimmy Cliff, if it is reggae we’re talking.

The sheer profusion of rock and roll deaths right now – the consequence of, uh, old age – also affects the airtime afforded the recently deceased, of course.