MOD ALMIGHTY

Steve Ellis began his career as a mod in flower-power clobber as frontman of chart-toppers Love Affair. Quitting in 1970, he worked with The Who's Roger Daltrey then gave up music to become a docker before a near-death experience. Interest in his work was rekindled after hooking up with long-time fan Paul Weller. Lois Wilson hears how his romance with music endures.

- Lois Wilson

I t’s late one afternoon in November 1967. Temperatures are near freezing and Steve Ellis, the 17-year-old lead singer of The Love Affair, is at the top of the Eros statue in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Two of his

bandmates are in the fountain beneath, shivering in the water they’ve just fallen into and now there’s a crowd of people gathering, big enough to cause a scene. Ellis is stuck and starting to panic. He’s hanging on to Eros’s arrow for dear life. Traffic is coming to a halt, drivers and passengers trying to get a glimpse of what is going on. Someone sensible calls the police and the fire brigade. Ellis is eventually escorted down.

“It was a PR stunt that went wrong,” he tells RC from his Brighton home. “Our managers made the tenuous connection between the name Love Affair and the Eros statue, one thing led to another, and we were front page news. We were nicked for breach of the peace and causing public disorder and each fined £12 at Bow Street Magistrates. Of course, we had to turn up to court in a hired white Rolls Royce.”

Three months later Everlasting Love, their grandiose cover of the Robert Knight song, hit No 1. In that sense their antics worked. But the song would most likely have hit the top spot anyway for Ellis had, and still does as his recent shows with The Signatures bear witness, a magnificent soul voice, that projected with an irresistible force rivalled only by his then contemporary Steve Marriott.

“Steve Marriott and the Small Faces were kindred spirits,” he admits. “Them and The Who and soul music and mods – that’s where it was at in the 60s.”

Stephen John Ellis was born on 7 April 1950 in Edgware, North London, and grew up in nearby Finchley with his mum, a housewife and part time secretary, his dad, a shipping clerk for Lloyds, his three siblings, and his grandma and granddad, the latter of whom “was on the Somme”, he says proudly.