Song of the day

"Ritz", by Cockney Rebel. If you leave out the accepted wisdom of how Steve Harley had enormous tickets on himself and was all but impossible to work with, all of which may or may not be true, what you have left is the music. The dramatic reach and musical depth of this song, from 1974's second and final Cockney Rebel album (as such), "The Psychomodo", manages to out-Bowie what Bowie was doing at the same time. It also serves to highlight all that was lacking in Harley's soon-to-follow UK Number One single, "Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)", which to these antipodean ears has always sounded like a second-rate parody of what an actual Cockney rebel would sound like. (Which is not, really, to say that the latter is not perfectly enjoyable on its own terms (it is), just that those terms didn't contain much in the way of ambition.)