Celebrity deaths range from the ‘tragically young’ (Amy Winehouse) to the ‘I thought they’d gone years ago’ (Peregrine Worsthorne) and the monumental (Michael Jackson). But there’s another type: a more low-key one that knocks you a bit, as much as the death of a stranger can. Steve Harley, whose death was announced this weekend by his family, was one of those.

Everyone knows Harley and his Cockney Rebel band’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. But Harley was no one-hit wonder: dig a little deeper than that 1975 song and it’s clear to see what a brilliant and underappreciated musician he was.

Vanishingly few endure in the pop music sphere. Steve Harley blazed through the decades, with five remarkable albums. He had a strange vocal delivery that came from the meeting point of Bob Dylan and Foghorn Leghorn, with the addition of being unable to pronounce his r’s. The five Cockney Rebel albums, released from 1973 to 1976, contain tune after tune after tune – sometimes almost suffocatingly grandiose and over the top (‘Sebastian’, ‘Cavaliers’), sometimes comedic and deceptively trivial (‘Mr Soft’), but all of them transcendent. The lyrics are immaculate. Harley laboured over them, but they seem effortlessly elegant, with not a word wasted or out of place. Nothing, least of all popular music, exists in a vacuum, so there are obviously traces of the glam and sophisticated stylishness of contemporaries like Queen, Roxy Music and Sparks in there. But there’s a whole lot more that is entirely Harley’s own.

Harley never got the plaudits he deserved

Harley’s success was even more remarkable when you realise how he overcame the odds to succeed. He was a survivor of childhood polio and underwent an agonising operation to ‘even out’ his legs, which left him with a permanent limp.

Harley didn’t let adversity get in his way: when he fell out with the original Cockney Rebel, heturned the experience into his biggest hit: ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. A number one smash can be a monster and a millstone (I can’t imagine the Human League relish bursting into ‘Don’t You Want Me’ again, no matter how many electricity bills it pays) but Harley’s most-famous tune is truly sublime: it has hook after hook, a stop-start gimmick that was often copied but never bettered, and an acoustic guitar solo that seemingly descends from the heavens. It has an elegiac quality of the best mega hits. Even nearly half-a-century on, it stops you in your tracks.

The Cockney Rebel oeuvre, before and after this, is replete with such treats. But to suffer a big hit can knock talent off course. ‘Timeless Flight’ and ‘Love’s A Prima Donna’ (blessed by tacky sleeves) are even stranger, quirkier records that provided no hit singles. The former is full of epic but very weirdly structured songs, the latter flips between strange voices, courtesy of EMI’s newly-invented Vocoder, and extremely silly noises. It includes a seven-minute dirge about being smothered by a mother, sung-spoken by a wounded Cyberman over strangulated, detuned, quacking guitar and backwards percussion. It’s utterly mad – and utterly magnificent.

After folding Cockney Rebel, Harley barely released a note in the 1980s. When he did get back in the studio, he wisely went back to basics, eschewing the pomp for stripped back, straight-punching stuff. He was an engaging DJ on Radio 2’s ‘Sounds Of The Seventies’, in effect becoming his own archivist.

As Harley’s later years showed, we are often cruel and dismissive to pop stars who make the terrible, unforgivable mistake of getting old. As his music fell out of favour, Harley never got the plaudits he deserved during his lifetime. If anything good can come from his death at the age of 73, it’s that a new generation might discover his music – and an older one might find it again.