Love Affair frontman Steve Ellis – famed for his hit Everlasting Love – died at the age of 76 surrounded by his family following ‘complications from a chronic illness’
Love Affair frontman Steve Ellis – famed for his hit Everlasting Love – has died at the age of 76.
Steve died peacefully on Friday surrounded by his loved ones “following complications from a chronic illness”, an announcement made on his official social media confirmed over the weekend.
Born in Edgware, northwest London in 1950, Steve had his first taste of fame when he set up the Soul Survivors at just 15-years-old. He grew up around music, with his mum buying him Ray Charles records. Inspired by Ray and James Brown, Steve credited James for informing his own approach to his career. “It blew our socks off, he was phenomenal. I thought, that’s how a singer has to be, so I started doing gymnastics,” he said in 2021 of seeing the I Got You (I Feel Good) singer live.
Soul Survivors would perform at weddings, youth clubs and bar mitzvahs, pretending they had been booked to play. As their fame grew, they performed in bigger venues across the UK, including soul clubs in Manchester and Stoke.
The band later morphed into Love Affair in the mid-60s with members Rex Brayley, Mick Jackson, Lynton Guest and Maurice Bacon and it was then they signed to record label Decca and released their debut single She Smiled Sweetly. Released just a few weeks after the original version by the Rolling Stones, the single flopped in the charts.
Despite their tough foray into the industry, Love Affair and Steve tried once more with a cover of Everlasting Love now under record label CBS. At just 17, Steve was recording the vocals for the song in between doing shifts on a building site. Their cover of the song – originally recorded by US singer Robert Knight – saw the band catapult to fame.
Immediately, it skyrocketed to number one in the UK charts and spent two weeks there. Despite subsequent popular US versions, it is Love Affair’s version that plays at weddings up and down the country and on the radio even now. “To have a record of that magnitude at 17 years old. It’s served me very well,” Steve said of the song’s incredible success.
Following the fame that came with Everlasting Love, Love Affair released several more songs, including another cover – this time of Rainbow Valley, which managed an impressive 11 weeks in the top 40. The band also had success with A Day Without Love and Bringing on Back The Good Times.
In the late 1960s, Steve left the group following a disappointing release of Baby I Know and disillusionment with fame. “The band wanted to go progressive rock and that wasn’t for me. I’d always been a soul-boy,” he said of his decision to leave, “The main reason we broke up though was the screaming fans. We couldn’t hear what we were playing.”
Steve was the frontman of a number of other bands – including Ellis and Widowmaker – but he never quite tasted the success that Love Affair gave him. He performed at universities but all anyone wanted to hear was Everlasting Love, with Steve describing the song as both a “blessing and a curse”. He eventually retired from the music industry to work as a docker.
“I had a bad accident. I had both my feet broken so it took me out of the game for quite a while. Later a pal of mine called up and said ‘Why don’t you get back gigging again?’ So I thought ‘Yeah, that’s what I’ve got to do,'” he said.
A brave return to music after working on his mobility saw Steve return to the music industry in the 1990s, touring across the UK for the following decade. He later teamed up with Paul Weller for a charity single in aid of the NSPCC, titled Step Inside My Love.
He released his solo album The Last Angry Man in 1977 and Basement Days six years later in 1983. He released new music again in 2008, an album called Best Of Days which featured two tracks with Roger Daltrey. Roger had been the one who produced Ellis’ debut album.
Steve worked again with Paul on the 2018 album Boom! Bang! Twang!, with Paul co-writing two tracks and also co-producing the album. The pair came together again for a one-off song in 2022, Just To Simplify.
He released music as recently as last September, an album of 11 tracks titled Baby Faced Assassin on which he worked with Paul once again on three tracks. In a tribute to Steve following his death, Paul wrote: “Our dear mate Stevie Ellis passed on last week. God bless ya Stevie safe travels everlasting love for sure.”
Steve is survived by his wife Val and their three grown-up children.
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