- His favorite songs are "Honky Tonk Women" by The Rolling Stones, "Every Time We Say Goodbye" by Ella Fitzgerald, "Paperback Writer" by The Beatles, "How Can I Tell You" by Cat Stevens, "No Regrets" by Tom Rush, "Just One Look" by The Hollies, "Sail On Sailor" by The Beach Boys, "A Case Of You" by Joni Mitchell, "Tom Traubert's Blues" by Tom Waits, "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks. (Source: BBC Radio 2 "Tracks of My Years").
- He was offered the role of the Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage production of "The Phantom of the Opera", and recorded a version of the title song with Sarah Brightman, but Lloyd Webber eventually chose Michael Crawford for the role instead.
- Presented the Best Original Song award, for Never Any Good, to Martin Simpson at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. (4th February 2008).
- Plays piano and guitar.
- From the age of nine, Harley took classical violin lessons and he played in his grammar school orchestra.
- His father Ronnie was a milkman and semi-professional footballer; his mother Joyce was a semi-professional jazz singer.
- Harley was involved in racehorse ownership from 1984, and racing became his main pastime until his death in 2024.
- Harley started his musical career in 1971 playing in bars and clubs, mainly at folk venues on open-mike nights. He sang at Les Cousins, Bunjies and The Troubadour in London on nights featuring John Martyn, Ralph McTell, Martin Carthy and Julie Felix, who were popular musicians in the London folk scene.
- Aged 15, he took his O-level exams in his hospital bed. He left school without completing his A-level exams.
- During the summer of 1953, aged two, Harley contracted a severe case of polio and the doctors told his father he was going to die. He survived, but spent four years in hospital between the ages of three and 16.
- Aged 10, he began learning the guitar after his parents had given him a nylon-string Spanish guitar for Christmas, and he started to write his own songs.
- While in hospital he wrote poetry, finding inspiration in Dylan's ballads.
- He had six UK hit singles with the band in the mid-1970s, including "Judy Teen", "Mr. Soft", and the number one "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)".
- He was an English singer-songwriter and frontman of the rock group Cockney Rebel.
- He attended Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School until the age of 17.
- Harley was a pupil at Edmund Waller Primary School in New Cross, London.
- In 1971, he joined the folk band Odin as rhythm guitarist and co-singer and there met Jean-Paul Crocker, who became the first Cockney Rebel violinist.
- In 1968, at the age of 17, Harley began his first full-time job, working as a trainee accountant with the Daily Express, despite having gained only 24% in his mock O-level maths exam. From there he progressed to become a reporter, having wanted to be a journalist since the age of 12.
- Over three years, Harley worked at the Essex County Standard, the Braintree and Witham Times, the Maldon and Burnham Standard and the Colchester Evening Gazette. He returned to London to work for the East London Advertiser (ELA), where he covered the story of the Kray murder at The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel.
- He underwent major surgery in 1963 and 1966. After recovering from the first operation, aged 12, Harley was introduced to the poetry of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, the prose of John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, and the music of Bob Dylan, which pointed him to future careers involving words and music.
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