The John Howard Interview
Tell me about growing up in Bury? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music and what was it that initially fascinated you about it? Was music relevant around your household growing up?
I was born in 1953 in a small market town called Heywood in Lancashire and spent the first seven years of my life there. It was an old cotton mill town where my grandmother and great aunts had worked, and I have good memories of growing up there. My father was a jazz pianist and he was always playing songs at home in our sitting-room on the old upright piano, routining them for a gig he had coming up that weekend. It was listening to him playing that made me want to become a pianist. My family moved to Bury when I was seven and I found it more difficult there. My accent, which from even just a few miles away was considered ‘posh’ and snobbish, made me an outsider, so I was consequently bullied a lot at school. Bury was a rougher, poorer town than Heywood, and there seemed to be a lot of poverty which I hadn’t been aware of in Heywood. I actually recall seeing boys in my school walking around with ‘pink shaven heads’, caused by the stuff kids with lice and nits were treated with. This wasn’t the 1930s, remember, this was the mid-‘60s. I’d been trained as a classical pianist from the age of seven, and, as I reached my teens, I discovered I was a natural performer too.
It more or less saved me, in that the bullying stopped when I began to perform at Christmas school parties, playing Beatles songs and the like. It made me realise that being different could also be a good thing. I’d already fallen in love with pop music in the early ‘60s, especially when Merseybeat happened in ’63. I began buying records by many of the British pop stars of the day like The Beatles and Cilla Black, and then discovered the joys of Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw, as well as American artists like Roy Orbison, Sonny & Cher, The Beach Boys and Gene Pitney. That was how I discovered songwriters like Randy Newman, Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson and producers like Phil Spector, George Martin and Mort Shuman. These were magical times for me, every week, there were such great, inventive records coming out. The ‘60s never stopped developing both musically and in terms of production. Artists, songwriters and producers were learning their craft as studio technology developed and everyone was coming up with often mind-blowing records. I recall the first time I heard The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, I was fourteen and it felt like my world had shifted up a gear, and then just a year or so later Richard Harris’s ‘MacArthur Park’ came on the radio, it blew me away. That was when I knew what I wanted to do, not just perform but also write songs and make records.
Do you have any siblings? What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? When and where did you see your first concert and what kind of impact did that leave on you? Who were some of your earliest influences?
I had one older sister, Sue, who died a couple of years ago. Our lives turned out quite differently, in that she married and had a family in her teens while I went on to perform in folk clubs and dreamt of success as a recording artist. Being gay, and knowing that from quite a young age, having a family was not in my game plan. I knew that I would leave home at some point in search of realising my ambition. As a kid, of course, I’d do the usual ‘playing out’ with friends, but by the age of around twelve, I was more interested in trying my hand at writing songs and listening to the transistor radio in the garden or my bedroom to hear the latest 45s. All my close friends were pop fanatics like me and we’d visit the local record shop to listen to the new one by Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd, bringing our latest purchases to each other’s houses and sharing what we loved that week. That was our kind of fun. The first concert I saw was in early 1970, I was sixteen, and had heard a track by Roy Harper on one of the CBS Sampler LPs at college, loved it and went to see him at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. He was astonishing. For two hours, he sat on stage with just his guitar and entranced everyone in the theatre. A few months later, I saw The Incredible String Band there, and they too were amazing. A truly joyous concert. So Harper and The ISB were certainly my influences at the age of sixteen, and I soon heard and bought LPs by Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Simon & Garfunkel and The Mothers of Invention. I was a late-comer to the Bob Dylan party but once hooked via a friend of mine in 1970, I bought loads of his albums. Blonde On Blonde was never off my record player. They, along with my ‘60s heroes, all inspired me to try different ways of songwriting, slowly honing my own style with their help and the invaluable assistance of a multi-tracking tape recorder my parents bought for me.
Did you participate in any groups prior to venturing into your career as a solo artist? When and where did you make your live performance debut and what was that experience like for you? Tell me about writing and recording your debut LP “Kid In A Big World” in ‘75.
I was always a solo artist, always wanted to be (I first worked with a group on an album in 2005 when I recorded As I Was Saying with bassist Phil King and guitarist and percussionist Andre Barreau). My first live performance in front of a paying audience was at Accrington College, where I was studying art and design. I was accompanied on the drums that night by Tim Whittaker, who went on to join the band Deaf School. I was astonished at the audience’s reaction to my songs, they cheered and whistled and it was a beautiful noise. It convinced me that this was my future. A few months later I performed solo at The Octagon Theatre in Bolton. That was where I began to build up a small following. The same people would come to see me whenever I performed there, which was about half a dozen times between 1970 and 1973. I loved it. I loved hearing that silence when I was playing one of my songs and then the applause at the end. Every time, it felt like I’d come home. From then on I played loads of folk clubs, Universities and theatres. When I moved to London in 1973, I played a few clubs, such as The Troubadour, but once I was spotted and signed to a management and publisher, I began to concentrate on writing and demo’ing my songs, preparing for a record company to hopefully sign me up. In January 1974, CBS did and in April I began recording the Kid In A Big World album at Abbey Road Studios. I look back at those sessions and wonder why I wasn’t more overawed by recording at The Beatles’ recording ‘home’. But I think I just went in each day – I literally lived just round the corner from Abbey Road - and concentrated on making the best album, with my producer Tony Meehan, that I could. There wasn’t really time for dreaming. I was confident we were making an excellent album which would begin my future, so nostalgia never entered my mind. I do recall one moment, however, when I was about to overdub harpsichord and strings on the mellotron onto the track ‘Gone Away’, and Tony said into my cans, “That’s the same mellotron The Beatles used on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever, John.” It made me pause for a moment, that’s for sure!
When and where did recording begin and how did the deal with CBS come about? What was the overall vision for the album? Would you mind walking me through some of the tracks such as the title track, “Goodbye Suzie” and “Gone Away” that are featured on the album?
As I say, recording Kid In A Big World began at Abbey Road in April ’74 and then I moved onto Apple Studios in September when CBS decided they wanted me to re-record ‘Family Man’ and ‘Kid In A Big World’. They felt Tony’s productions took the songs too far from my original demos. Paul Phillips arranged and produced those remakes. The CBS deal was quite long and drawn out, to be honest. They kept blowing hot and cold from when they’d shown an interest in me in around October ’73, along the way suggesting a name change (to Christopher Howard – which I and my manager rejected) and dithering as to whether they were going to sign me up. Then in December ’73, I got a commission to write the opening song for a new movie, Open Season, starring Peter Fonda and William Holden. The director of the movie, Peter Collinson, had directed Up The Junction and The Italian Job, so the fact he had personally asked me to write the song for his new film after hearing my demos, was pretty prestigious and became the spur CBS needed to get off their bums and actually sign me up. Tony Meehan’s vision for the album was to try and create a varied set of tracks, showing different styles and approaches, rather than simply a pianist/singer-songwriter LP, of which there were lots around at that time. He wanted to make me stand out in a rather crowded forum. So he got in a Palm Court-type orchestra for two of the tracks, brought in Rod Argent to play Moog on a couple of songs, and a trio of saxophonists on one or two others to give those songs a jazz feel. The band he formed for the album were also more of a rock combo than providing gentle wistful folk-pop.
Drummer Bob Henrit and bassist Dave Wintour gave the songs a much more punchy sound than I’d envisaged. But it worked, and everyone was confident we had a winner. The Apple Studios re-makes went well too, ‘Family Man’ and ‘Kid In A Big World’ having a more piano-based sound with a strings backing, again giving even more variation to the sound of the whole LP. ‘Goodbye Suzie’ was the first song Tony and I recorded, but oddly he never saw it as a single, and his vision was to begin the LP with ‘Spellbound’ – its jazzy uptempo arrangement again confounding expectations. It was only when CBS’s Managing Director, Dick Asher, heard ‘Suzie’ that the decision to make it my debut 45 was made. Dick loved the song. While ‘Goodbye Suzie’ stuck pretty closely to the demo in terms of musical approach, ‘Gone Away’ was completely changed by Tony. I’d written it as a kind of Bacharach-esque ‘Walk On By’ thing, with a touch of Carole King’s ‘It’s Too Late’ in there as well. But Tony slowed it down to half the speed and turned it into a really dramatic ballad. The song was pitched very high, which wasn’t a problem when it was a mid-tempo pop song, but I found it difficult to sing it the way Tony had arranged it. So we split the verses and choruses into different sections, where I got the verses right first and then moved onto the middle-eights and choruses. Even at the age of 21 they were challenging vocally! But, as a recording, it worked. Engineer Peter Bown was a marvel at the recording desk, and he created a lovely sound. It still sounds huge. And, yes, everytime I hear the mellotron strings and harpsichord on ‘Gone Away’ I can hear Tony’s voice in my cans almost freaking me out!
What eventually happened after that album that led you to the decision to work on the more business side of music? Did you continue to play throughout those years, or was this a time strictly dedicated to business?
After Kid In A Big World came out in February 1975, CBS seemed to get rather muddled about what they wanted me to be. When they signed me, they saw me as a longterm albums artist who they were going to gradually build, in fact that’s what Dick Asher told the invited audience at my concert at the Purcell Room to launch the LP. But when ‘Kid’ failed to set the world alight, which the company had expected it to, their ‘vision’ changed entirely. I was in the midst of sessions with Paul Phillips recording the follow-up album, Technicolour Biography, in March 1975, just a month after ‘Kid’ was released, when Dick Asher informed me and my manager the label wanted me to write hit songs. They cancelled the Technicolour Biography album as “it has no hits on it”, and put me in the studio with disco producer Biddu (Tina Charles, Carl Douglas). I’d known Biddu for a couple of years as he was a friend of my manager’s, but it seemed an odd decision to have him produce me. Happily, Biddu hired Pip Williams to do all the new songs’ arrangements and he was a joy to work with. We recorded ten songs, and I looked forward to the album, Can You Hear Me OK?, being released later that year. The label were very excited about one of the tracks, ‘I Got My Lady’ and scheduled it for a Summer ’75 release.
But, Summer came and went and the single didn’t come out. In September, they also rejected the album, complaining, ironically, it was too unlike Kid In A Big World. The situation had become quite surreal by then and as a creative artist I felt completely at sea and rather lost. The label did release ‘I Got My Lady’ as a single – in January 1976 after I’d been on a Christmas music show performing the song – but it flopped. The label dropped me soon after. I began performing in various London restaurants and clubs, including April Ashley’s AD8 eaterie in Knightsbridge, which paid the rent, and then at the end of 1976 I broke my back in an accident at home. I was out of action for several months until in the Summer of 1977 I was introduced to Trevor Horn with whom I recorded my next single, ‘I Can Breathe Again’. Ariola signed me and for a while it looked like things might be turning for the better. The single got lots of Radio 1 play (the first time they’d played any of my singles) but in the end it failed to chart. I did another single with Trevor which came out in 1979 and then was re-signed by CBS to work with Nicky Graham on a new project I’d created, The Strange Case of Cal Mylar. It was an electronic, synth-driven album, which the label got very excited about. They released two singles from the sessions, ‘I Tune Into You’ and ‘Lonely-I’, in 1980, but as they failed to chart as well, the part-recorded album was shelved.
I then recorded two singles with Steve Levine, about a year before he began to work with Culture Club, but again, released in 1981 under the moniker Quiz, the singles stiffed. In 1984, I released my prophetically-titled final 45, ‘Nothing More To Say (But Goodbye)’. I didn’t release anything else for almost 20 years. I occasionally did vocal sessions with Steve Levine for various projects he was working on, and I even recorded a complete album in 1996, The Pros & Cons of Passion, but the company I recorded it for went bust and closed down the week the album was due out. Between 1984 and 2000, I enjoyed a successful new career, working in the music business in Licensing, A & R, and Special Projects, for companies like EMI, Carlton, MCA/Universal and finally Reader’s Digest Music, where I was Director of International Music. I was lucky enough to A & R some fabulous albums by hugely talented artists like Elkie Brooks, Maria Friedman, The Crickets, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and even the legendary Lonnie Donegan, who recorded a wonderful album for me called Muleskinner Blues featuring Van Morrison. They were fun days, and apart from the doomed 1996 project, I stayed away from recording my own material for almost twenty years. I retired in 2000 and moved to West Wales with my husband, actor Neil France, and then in 2003, RPM Records reissued Kid In A Big World on CD. It got rave reviews and unexpectedly relaunched my recording and performing career.
You’ve made up for those times when you weren’t writing and recording in the last 20 years or so with various releases such as last year’s “LOOK” and “From The Far Side Of A Near Miss”. What are you most proud of when it comes to a career as both an artist and as an industry man?
I like to challenge myself with every album I release, and so I guess I’m proud of the fact I’ve done that and, hopefully, produced some albums which will stand the test of time. Regarding my career in the music business in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I suppose I’m proud of the fact that I made a difference with the albums and artists I worked with and that I discovered a talent I didn’t know I had when I was recording in the ‘70s: being able to focus on someone else’s talent rather than holding personal ambitions for my own. I’m also very proud of now being a published author. Fisher King Publishing have brought out three volumes of my memoirs, Incidents Crowded With Life in 2018, Illusions of Happiness in 2020 and In The Eyeline of Furtherance in 2022.
Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Just to say a big thanks for everyone’s support over these years. I’ve been lucky in that many people have stayed the course with me, and the fact I’m still working with great record companies like Think Like A Key Music and Kool Kat Musik on various projects is extremely heartwarming. Their faith in what I do means a lot.
John’s album Cut The Wire was released on vinyl for the first time by Think Like A Key Music in January this year. For more info go to: https://www.thinklikeakey.com/release/344398-john-howard-cut-the-wire
