It’s 7pm, February 8.
Steve Harley, 1970s rock god, whose mullet was on the bedroom walls of millions of girls, whose Make Me Smile is one of the most played singles in history, having nested at No 1 in 1975, is visiting friends in Suffolk.
Steve enters the house. There’s a rug on a slippery surface. To someone felled by polio as a child, an unfettered rug is like Kryptonite. He steps. He falls.
‘The left heel slipped and I was on my arse. I heard a crack. As I went down I thought, “Oh, f***.” ’
Chart topper: Steve Harley at the height of his fame in 1976
Steve was prone. His friends propped him against a wall, dialled 999. It took three-and-a-half hours for an ambulance to arrive.
‘I knew, waiting while the ambulance kept getting diverted, I’ve got to deal with things. I was very calm.’
His main thoughts were that his career might be over.
Had he damaged his bad leg, the right one he has ‘been protecting for 63 years’, the one damaged by polio, caught when he was three?
Or his good leg, his ‘powerhouse, it takes me through life’? His wife, Dorothy, was summoned.
As Steve tells me when we meet before his next gig – he gallantly performs while seated on a stool, crutch at his side – in North Yorkshire: ‘I said, “Baby, I’ve broken my hip, my leg is flopping. My foot’s not connected.” She said, “It could have been worse.” ’
He must have been terrified. ‘There was no pain but, yeah, terror, I was horrified. Soon as it snows, all my life, there has been that fear.
Steve Harley playing guitar in Cockney Rebel in 1974
‘I had an aunt, and she’d phone as soon as she saw snowflakes and say, “Stephen, how will you manage?” ’
The paramedics were two ‘smashing young men’.
Steve was taken to West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, and was in surgery next day.
He was in for three nights; his wife, daughter Greta, son Kerr and two-year-old grandson Cameron visited.
‘Staff’d ask me, “How is the pain, on a scale of one to ten?” Well, I’ve been used to a lifetime of pain, so I said “It’s a one”, but still they gave me morphine.’
His scar is mending, the metal ‘stitches’ are out, and he has physio twice a week. And painkillers?
‘Threw them in the bin. I’ve been close to addicts. No, no, no. I’ve got children.’
He’s as handsome as ever.
He hugs me for a photo and I say I’m weak at the knees. ‘Arthritis? Too much horse riding?’ (Steve’s passion is racing; he’s a semi-professional gambler.)
‘No! Because of you!’ He blushes.
He bemoans he cannot, for now, wear the leather shoes he buys in Milan and has to settle for ‘awful rubber things’ until the injury heals. He dreads slipping while using a crutch.
Steve’s father, now in his 90s, was a semi-professional footballer in the 1940s and Steve, the second of five, was always kicking a ball. In 1954, when he was three, it was noticed he was clumsy.
‘I kept stumbling. I ached, I was lethargic.’ One night, as his dad went to check on him in bed, he noticed that Steve, who should have been asleep, was sweating profusely. Mum was called.
‘Come and see Stephen. There’s a problem.’
I never used an iron lung but they were all around me
The boy told them he could not feel his leg. It was numb. A GP was summoned. ‘She ran the points of scissors down my right leg and said, “Ambulance. Now.” ’
It arrived at the family’s flat in Deptford, South London, within 15 minutes.
Steve was rushed, with police outriders, to hospital. It was polio.
The virus, carried by droplets, attacks the central nervous system. It can lead to paralysis, even death.
I only know this as I’ve seen Breathe, starring Andrew Garfield as the real-life Robin Cavendish, paralysed aged 28, who invented a wheelchair with breathing apparatus that liberated patients from their beds.
Steve says: ‘I was never in an iron lung but they were all around me. It was worse when I went back at 12 to have surgery.’
Rocking on: Liz Jones with Steve last month
He should be 5ft 10in but is 5ft 8in. ‘The surgeon put pins in my good knee to stop that leg growing so I’d become more even.
‘This is not what you would wish on your worst enemy. I was 12, I was in hospital for a year, I wanted to end life. It was pain… even now I can’t describe it.’
He was in hospital, on and off, for four years. ‘I did school work quickly, it was all I could do with my life. I had an English teacher, God bless him, he’s still alive.
‘He started sending me D. H. Lawrence. I thought, “This is life-changing.” ’
He started listening to Dylan and The Beatles, but his ambition was to be a journalist.
Leaving school and hospital, he was indentured on a local newspaper, but his rebellious attitude meant he was sacked aged 20.
Drawing on his love of music – he learned violin from nine to 15 and got his first guitar aged 12 – he moved into a bedsit and began busking.
He wrote the first two Cockney Rebel albums before he even had a record deal.
Without polio, he wouldn’t have discovered a love of poetry. He’s also a keen art collector. ‘The vaccination was discovered a year after the epidemic of ’54.
‘I’m not bitter – it’s what makes us who we are. I just wish I could have ridden a horse at Cheltenham.’
He had nightmares as a child. ‘I have a phobia about hypodermic needles. They were THAT LONG in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s why I never became a junkie!’
How was he as a teenager, chatting up girls? ‘I had a real problem. Despite surgery, I wore a built-up shoe, which made me self-conscious.
‘I finally had to accept that people don’t give a s***, the guy limps. It doesn’t affect anything else at all.’ He has an extra twinkle.
Steve’s band was diverse, before anyone thought of the word. ‘I’ve spent every waking moment knowing I’ve had to be as good, as strong as the next man and the one place where I really am just like the next man is in that spotlight.
‘Only when that light hits me do I come alive.’
He says his wife, whom he met on a plane – she was the air hostess – and married in 1981, is ‘self-sufficient.
‘I’m quite solitary, I like to travel’. He wishes he could hike across the Peaks and Fells. ‘I watch Julia Bradbury and I could weep. I want to do that!’
Is the broken hip the start of the slippery slope towards old age? ‘I look at every floor surface at the moment, yeah.’
l Steve performs with orchestra and choir at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on May 19. Visit steveharley.com for details.