group\u2019s PR person<\/a> staged a stunt that involved the band climbing the statute of Eros in the middle of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in London\u2019s Piccadilly Circus. Ellis got stuck on top of the statue and had to be rescued by firemen. The band was arrested and fined, and by February 1968, \u201cEverlasting Love\u201d was Number One on the U.K. singles chart, bumping off the Beatles\u2019 \u201cHello, Goodbye.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n\tLike many artists, Ellis developed a complicated relationship with his most famous song. He declined to perform it live for a while, but ultimately came around to giving the fans what they wanted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cYou can\u2019t turn your back on your heritage; you cannot not do what people want,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s become one of those songs of its time, of its era. When we play it live, everybody goes mad. We usually finish up with it and maybe we go back on after. It used to be a bit of a curse and I thought, \u2018You know what. I\u2019m lucky, really.\u2019 To have a record of that magnitude at 17 years old. It\u2019s served me very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n
\n\tLove Affair released three more Top 10 singles in the U.K., \u201cRainbow Valley,\u201d \u201cA Day Without Love,\u201d and \u201cBringing on Back the Good Times.\u201d Ellis left the group in 1970, and formed his own band, Ellis, with keyboard player Zoot Money. His next group, Widowmaker, enjoyed some modest success with their two late Seventies albums, but by the early Eighties Ellis was done with music, living in the South of England, and happily working on the docks. But a freak accident with a forklift destroyed his feet, leading to nearly a decade of operations and physical therapy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tEventually, Ellis was strong enough and decided to return to music. He began playing live regularly and recorded several albums, including a 2015 record, The Best of Days, with Roger Daltrey and Paul Weller.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Ellis, the English singer whose group Love Affair knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":823231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,3878,2285,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-823230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-obit","tag-obituary","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}