Steve Ellis, the voice of Everlasting Love, dies aged 76 after a career that began at 15

Steve Ellis, the singer whose voice carried Love Affair’s Everlasting Love to the top of the UK charts, has died at the age of 76. An announcement on his official social media accounts said he “peacefully left the world” on the evening of Friday 30 October, surrounded by loved ones, following complications from a chronic illness.

A teenage singer with a hit for the ages

Born in Edgware, north-west London, in 1950, Ellis was a teenager when he started his first group, the Soul Survivors, at 15. His musical education came partly from home, where his mother bought him Ray Charles records, and partly from the stage. Seeing James Brown perform live was a turning point. “He blew our socks off, he was phenomenal. I thought, that’s how a singer has to be, so I started doing gymnastics,” Ellis told the Express in 2021.

The group reportedly cut its teeth at weddings, youth clubs and bar mitzvahs, sometimes pretending to have been booked. As it grew it graduated to soul clubs in cities such as Manchester and Stoke. By the mid-1960s it had become Love Affair, with Rex Brayley, Mick Jackson, Lynton Guest and Maurice Bacon alongside Ellis, and had signed to Decca.

The start was rocky. Debut single She Smiled Sweetly, a cover released within weeks of the Rolling Stones’ own version, flopped. The follow-up, another cover, changed everything. Everlasting Love had been recorded earlier by the American singer Robert Knight, but Ellis’s version, reportedly sung when he was 17 and squeezed in between shifts on a building site, spent two weeks at number one in the UK.

The sources differ on exactly when the song hit the top. The Guardian places its chart-topping run in 1968, while the Independent and the Standard point to 1967. All agree on the outcome: a record that has outlasted nearly every rival version. Carl Carlton’s take reached the US top ten in 1974, yet the Love Affair recording remains the most streamed and a fixture at weddings. It has also turned up on screen, including in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast.

Beyond the hits, a long second act

Love Affair followed up with Rainbow Valley, which spent 11 weeks in the Top 40, then A Day Without Love and Bringing On Back the Good Times, giving them four Top 10 hits in total. But the fame came with friction. Ellis said the band wanted to move towards progressive rock, while he had “always been a soul-boy”, and that the noise of screaming fans meant the group could barely hear themselves play. He left at the end of the 1960s, according to the Independent.

He fronted other projects, including the band Ellis, whose debut album was produced by Roger Daltrey, and Widowmaker, and released solo albums such as The Last Angry Man in 1977 and Basement Days in 1983. Commercial success on the scale of Love Affair’s never returned. The Mirror reports that audiences at his university shows wanted little beyond Everlasting Love, a song he described as both a “blessing and a curse”. It also reports that he stepped away from music for a time and worked as a docker after an accident in which he broke both feet, before a friend persuaded him to start gigging again.

The final chapter was a productive one. His 2008 album Best of Days reunited him with Daltrey and began a lasting partnership with Paul Weller, who featured on two tracks, including a live acoustic Everlasting Love. Weller co-wrote and co-produced 2018’s Boom! Bang! Twang!, and the two shared a song in 2022, Just to Simplify. Ellis’s latest record, Baby Faced Assassin, came out in September and includes three more songs created with Weller.

Tributes from friends and fellow musicians

Weller wrote in a social media post: “God bless ya Stevie safe travels everlasting love for sure.” Blues musician Norman Beaker, who played on a track of the new album, called Ellis “a good friend and a great voice” and “a legend with the mod movement”. Kent festival company BCM Entertainments said he “always brought something special to our events”.

The Independent reports that songwriter David Courtney first announced the death before it was confirmed on Ellis’s Facebook page. The family’s message invited fans to leave memories and condolences in the comments, and signed off with the title of the song that defined him: “Everlasting Love.”

For a singer who said that having such a record at 17 had “served me very well”, it is a fitting epitaph. Steve Ellis recorded a teenage vocal that is still sung at weddings nearly six decades later, and he was making new music with one of Britain’s most respected songwriters only weeks before he died.

File photo: Steve Ellis performing in 2022.jpg by Spartacus103uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.