Showcasing a new full band sound, Case Hardin’s latest album Colours Simple is a collection of kicked around, country-rock songs populated by prostitutes, drinkers, lost souls and losers.
I invited the group’s singer-songwriter, Pete Gow, down the pub to tell me more…
Colours Simple – the superb new album from West London alt-country act Case Hardin – is a record that sounds like it’s been on a late night drinking session in the heart of the city, hung out in some casinos and massage parlours, talking to the lost and lonely, and then staggered off home in the wee small hours, as the sun rises over Acton.
To find out more about the record, I met up with the band’s singer-songwriter and frontman Pete Gow in a North London boozer…
I want to talk about the stunning, eight-minute album opener Poets Corner, which sounds like something Springsteen would’ve written if he’d lived in Acton, rather then New Jersey…
Like a lot of this album, it has a big, full band sound – there’s some serious rock guitar from Jim Maving in places…
Pete Gow: As it was coming together in my head, I couldn’t get away from that backstreets feel. I wanted to write something in a longer form and I’d decided it was going to be more of a guitar-based record…
Poets Corner is old school Springsteen and I knew I wanted that Phil Spector ‘bom-bom-bom’.
The title Poets Corner comes from the name of a place near where you live in Acton, West London. There’s an area called the Poets Corner Community Garden, where one freezing cold January afternoon you sat on a bench and turned some of your songs into this album… Can you elaborate on that?
Poets Corner is also mentioned on another track on the album – High Rollers. What’s so special about that place?
PG: I write for an album. If we’re going to do a new record, I will go off and write for three months. I’ve usually also got one or two songs hanging around… I don’t write all the time, or carry a notebook around.
But on this occasion [after making the last Case Hardin album PM ] I just carried on writing – I’d just moved to West London and I was writing without consequence. I didn’t think I was writing for another record, as we’d just recorded one, but the songs just kept on coming.
Poets Corner – the place – is nothing and it’s everything. It’s tiny – it’s where two houses intersect. It’s jam-packed full of plants and there’s a mural that the local school kids painted. It’s a piece of communal ground and there’s something quite quaint about it…
So, is this album your Acton baby?
PG: I guess it is [he laughs].
It sounds like a record that has been hanging out in bars, visited some gambling dens, stayed up all night talking to some lost and lonely characters and then walked home in the early hours of the morning…
PG: It feels like a city album, because I moved into one. I lived in Berkshire before. The writing of Colours Simple coincided with my move to London. I was absorbing stuff and hanging out in different places.
Before I moved to Acton, I lived in Brixton for six months. The song The Streets Are Where The Bars Are (The Bars Are Where The Girls Will Be) was written in Brixton, where I felt wide-eyed and touristy. It was a welcome to the jungle kind of thing.
That track is a good, old-fashioned rock and roll song, isn’t it?
PG: It’s just a good night out – I can’t remember how much of it is made up and how much of it actually happened.
Which is usually the sign of a good night out, to be fair…
There are lots of stories and characters in your lyrics. How many of them are based on real life and how many of them are fiction?
PG: Some of it is made up…. but for a song like Champeen [off the PM album] I had to take a journalistic approach and do some research, so there’s some kind of factual correctness.
High Rollers [on the new album] is an extension of the Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt story song, but with a Nick Cave twist to it – everything always goes wrong.
The album’s liner notes, which were written by journalist Mark Phillips (the senior foreign correspondent for CBS News), mention your day job as a TV news producer.
He writes that you keep your two lives separate, because you’re happier playing songs about imaginary bad women who’ve done your wrong, rather than bad people who caused actual death and destruction… But do any of the things that you see in your day job end up in your songs?
PG: I don’t travel as much as I used to, but some of the work I’ve done in the past would’ve been an easy route into political writing, but that’s not something that I’d ever wanted to do – I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in my own politics. I’ve used those experiences – it would’ve been negligent as a writer not to – but they come out in a more visual sense.
Cheap Streaks From A Bottle – the first single from the album – features The Reservoir Dogs brass section. It’s rollicking country-soul. What were you going for with that track?
PG: The record was recorded at [producer] Chris Clarke’s Reservoir Studios in North London. He’s the bass player in Danny & The Champions of the World and he’s been a record producer for many new years. He’s one of the cornerstones of the North London music circuit and he was in The Rockingbirds.
He came up with the idea of brass for that song. We knew there was something missing. If you like Case Hardin’s first three albums, then Cheap Streaks From A Bottle and Poets Corner are worth your ten pounds to see where we can take it… We try and branch out.
There are also some classic, ‘traditional’ stripped-down Case Hardin country songs on the new album – High Rollers, with Hana Piranha’s violin – and A Mention In Dispatches, which also features Hana…
PG: Both of those tracks could have sat on our PM record.
Fiction Writer is one of my favourite songs on the new album. It reminds me of some of those great early Ryan Adams tracks, circa Heartbreaker and Gold, when he was making his best solo stuff, rather than wasting his time doing soft rock or Taylor Swift covers…
PG: I’ll take that as a comparison – right up to – and including his album 29 – Ryan Adams was kind of the key figure that prompted me to go and write something, or, if I was in the process of writing, to try and write better.
Jesus Christ Tomorrow Morning has a real raw, ragged, country-rock sound. It sounds like a song that’s been lived-in and kicked around…
PG: It’s one of those songs that I’d had a hook for a long time ago, but I’d never liked the lyric. I found it in an old lyric book and I rewrote it. It comes in at just under two and a half minutes and if it didn’t have ‘Jesus Christ’ in it six times, it might even be a single…
There are some wonderful lines in Another Toytown Morning – the closing track on the album.
I particularly love the phrase, ‘open up these scars with pedal steel guitars – lost to the lonesome and high’.
It’s as if you’ve summed up country music in a nutshell.
There’s some great imagery: ‘an airless room and a bottle of wine, a turntable and some old Patsy Cline….’
Tennessee Williams’ ghost puts in an appearance, too…
PG: That’s why we all do this – because we can be driven to tears by sticking on an old Patsy Cline record. I’m sure I picked Patsy Cline becomes it rhymes with wine. You try and find a drink that rhymes with Kristofferson…
Colours Simple – the new album from Case Hardin – will be released on Clubhouse Records on September 18.
Left to right: John Howard; Robert Rotifer; Ian Button and Andy Lewis
In the second of a two-part interview, singer-songwriter John Howard – who releases his new album, John Howard & The Night Mail – later this month, tells me about being ‘rediscovered’, his childhood, how being openly-gay affected his pop career, and his plans for the rest of the year and beyond…
Your debut album, Kid In A Big World, was released in 1975. Looking back at those days now, how do you feel about them?
Do you regret that you didn’t become a big pop star? Did you want fame, fortune and success?
John Howard: The Kid… days feel like they were experienced by another person now… I look back and can’t actually remember too much about it. I always regret that I have very few recollections of recording the album at Abbey Road. That should have been a huge deal for me.
I’d spent all my latter-‘60s days staring at photos of The Beatles in Beatles Monthly recording at the studio, and here I was, there!
But I don’t remember feeling anything except, ‘OK, let’s make this album as good as we possibly can.’
It’s bizarre how little I remember. I think youth and its arrogance have a lot to do with that. I believed I had the talent to be signed to a big label like CBS and wasn’t surprised when we recorded at Abbey Road and then Apple in 1974.
I’d always thought I would be successful. I had built up a pretty good following of fans doing gigs in the Manchester area in the early ‘70s, and the move to London in ‘73 was specifically to find a manager, which I did within a few weeks of arriving, and to get a record deal, which I had by the end of ‘73.
I’d also been commissioned to write the theme song of the new Peter Fonda/William Holden movie, Open Season, recorded the song in Rome in January ‘74 to an arrangement written by the film’s orchestrator, and was told on a weekly basis by CBS staff that I was “gonna be huge!”. I was 21 and believed them, of course.
Since first hearing The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever I had decided that I not only wanted to be a singer-songwriter, I also wanted to be a recording artist.
I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than coming up with something as sensational as that record (dream on, darling!).
Regret, though, is the way to madness. I’m not actually a particularly nostalgic person, I don’t tend to dwell on the past, the good or the bad, and am only reminded of it occasionally when Neil [my husband] puts on one of my earlier albums. He often listens to my stuff, I rarely do…
How does it feel to have been rediscovered and reappraised for Kid In A Big World and to have been picked up on by musicians like Darren Hayman, Andy Lewis, Ian Button and Robert Rotifer?
JH: I went through almost the exact same rediscovery ten years ago, when Alexis Petridis in his 2005 Guardian review of The Dangerous Hours wrote, “So obscure was singer-songwriter John Howard that his recent re-emergence seemed less like a comeback than an archaeological find: you half-expected his return to live performance last year to be prefaced by the appearance of Tony Robinson, explaining that there had been a fascinating discovery in trench one.”
I’ve been rediscovered so many times now, the trench is looking a wee bit the worse for wear!
For me, The Night Mail album is part of a sequence of events helmed by Robert Rotifer since 2012. In fact, while I hope the album does well, and I’m knocked out by how well it’s being received, I want it to succeed mainly for Robert.
He has believed in my music for over three years now and has worked doggedly – and at times persuasively – to get me out of my ‘solo comfort zone’ into working with a band again with the support of a bona fide great record label.
He has done all that, even when I told him that although I loved what we’d recorded, I didn’t think he stood a cat in hell’s chance of finding a record deal for it, he proved me wrong.
In many ways Robert has become not only my friend and band colleague and writing compatriot, he is also my champion, my cajoler, my ego-support. He won’t take no lightly. Which for someone like me who is these days rather lazy when it comes to making too much effort unless pushed, is rather perfect.
Where did you grow up and what kind of childhood did you have?
JH: I was brought up in Lancashire. I was born in 1953 – the grandchild of millworkers and Potteries boys and girls, son of a middle-class draughtsman born into a pub business he rejected, and a working class secretary who always wanted better out of life, and got it.
I was surrounded by a lot of urban decay and greyness, but raised in a lovely little council house backing onto endless fields.
People say the world was in black and white until ‘65, but I don’t agree, my childhood is full of colours in my head. I was a very happy little kid, albeit with fears of my mother dying young – which she did – and always with a sense I was ‘different’ from the other lads at school, which I was.
There was always the conflict of Roman Catholics versus Church of England – my mum’s and dad’s families, respectively).
My dad’s early married life was made a misery by his mother-in-law who resented him not being a ‘good Catholic boy’, and my mum was always made to feel ‘not quite good enough’ by her mother-in-law who had raised herself to what she felt was a life one rung above the others.
It never really impacted on me, as I ran around the fields and played near the brooks, lost in my world of fantasy, where a visit to The Kardomah cafe in Manchester presented an exotic playground, with its large wooden elephants dotted round the huge dining room and the smell of freshly ground coffee always in the air.
I would spend my days at home listening to my parents’ album of My Fair Lady, falling in love with songs like On The Street Where You Live and its fabulous internal rhymes, and trying out my foxtrot to the 78s piled up inside the radiogram.
I loved listening to my dad playing the piano – he’s a great jazz pianist – and always wanted to learn. I wrote my first song at four to my budgerigar Joey and took classical piano lessons from the age of six.
It was only my burgeoning love of pop music in the ‘60s which prevented me following a career as a classical pianist, which my tutor had her eyes set on for me. I gave up at 16 and never read a piece of sheet music again.
The song Safety In Numbers, from your new album, tackles sexual prejudices.
What was it like being an openly gay man in the music scene in the ’70s? Did it hamper your career? Have things changed now, or do you still encounter prejudice?
JH: In 2007, I wrote a song called My Beautiful Days. It’s now one of my oft-requested live numbers. It covers the way things have changed between now and back in the ‘70s in terms of attitudes towards gay performers.
I was recently re-reading an interview David Bowie gave in 1971 following the release of Hunky Dory, where he said he was gay, but in reality, he meant he was bi-sexual – and even that is questionable.
I think his publicly stated sexuality then was more about appealing to as wide an audience as possible, being ‘gay’ was becoming more an accepted lifestyle choice around that time, and he probably felt it made him seem rebellious in the eyes of ‘the grown-ups’.
Bolan had that feyness some took as signs of his being gay. But both men were happily married chaps. Not gay at all, in fact. And ‘that was ok, then’, in the eyes of The Establishment (the BBC etc).
It was considered acceptable by them to allow a load of straight blokes wearing make-up and earrings to stomp and pout around Top Of The Pops playing at being camp, as long as it sort of sent it all up, a la Sweet.
Remember that we now view TV characters like John Inman’s Mr Humphries as out-and-out gay, but there were times in the Are You BeingServed? and its later follow-up Grace & Favour series when the scriptwriters created situations where one was made to wonder if he was just a straight ‘cissy’ mummy’s boy, rather than an out gay man.
Larry Grayson was camp as Christmas but he never once said he was gay. Just a little effeminate, darling. Or in Noel Coward’s time, ‘He’s rather theatrical, isn’t he?’
At that time it was considered career suicide to openly say you were a gay man. Bi-sexual was alright, as it didn’t mean you were completely turned off having sex with a woman. It had just enough frisson of naughtiness while not upsetting too many apples off the cart.
I realised how much things had changed in the late ‘90s, when George Michael was arrested for importuning in a Los Angeles loo. The scummy tabloids all rubbed their hands with glee thinking, “At last, we’ve brought the queen down! Let’s enjoy his destruction together, tabloid readers!” after years of trying to ‘out’ him.
Instead, George’s record sales tripled overnight, his latest Best Of became a huge seller, and when he appeared on the Parkinson chat show to talk about his arrest, he made a joke about it, which made us all laugh, and a nation fell in love with him all over again. Wonderful.
I never hid my sexuality, called everyone ‘darling’ and was just myself. A friend once told me I was ‘the most naturally gay man’ he had ever met.
I’ve always assumed that from the moment I walk into a room people will know I am gay. Not because I mince in, crack me wrists and start looking at men in a lascivious way, but just from how I am. I believe I give off a ‘gay vibe’. We gays called it ‘gaydar’.
Other gays sense it immediately, but in my case I think most straight people do too, especially women. They have an extra sense about such things. It’s probably because of the way we look – or don’t look – at them. Our eyes don’t immediately go to their boobs, and we’re more likely to compliment them on the dress they’re wearing or their shoes than stare at their breasts, and if we do do that it’s usually because we’re thinking aesthetically, ‘What a gorgeous-looking woman’ as we would if we’d met Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren in the ‘50s.
Well, this ‘vibe’ was obviously something which upset some people at organisations like the BBC. I was unaware of it at the time, thinking my lack of radio plays and therefore poor record sales was more to do with the fact my album [Kid In A Big World – 1975] wasn’t as good as I’d thought it was.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that CBS were disappointed with Kid… when we delivered it to them, so I thought they’d lost faith in it, which resulted in uninspiring sales.
It was only years later, during a visit to our home in Pembrokeshire in 2005 that my producer back in the ‘70s, Paul Phillips, told me he believed my failure to secure Radio 1 plays was due to my being gay. He told me that at the end of my performance at The Purcell Room in 1975, while the audience clapped and shouted for more – well, they did – he’d turned to his neighbour, a high-up producer at Radio 1 and raved about me to him, expecting a similar opinion back.
He was met with a very obvious case of homophobia, the guy’s reaction was very much “Him?? Played by the BBC??! I don’t think so!”.
When I told my 1970s manager’s widow about this a few weeks later, she reiterated something similar, which she had also kept to herself for 30 years for fear of upsetting me.
She told me that on talking to the same chap at that 1975 after-show ‘do’, he’d said to her, “Well, we won’t be playing HIM on Radio 1!”.
In those days, no Radio 1 plays meant very poor sales for a single, and singles sold albums for pop acts, so Kid… flopped, causing a sense of panic at my record label, CBS.
“What are we going to do with him?” set in around the corridors and offices of Soho Square and I, or my career, never recovered from that.
Instead of releasing my follow-up album Technicolour Biography, the label cancelled recording sessions, put me in the studio with disco producer Biddu and hoped that would put a stop to ‘all this gay stuff he’s writing about odd parties on the beach with bohemian types’ and push me into writing some good old hetero hits.
Instead I wrote about an affair I’d just had which had ended, leaving me rather devastated, all couched in ‘more commercial songs’ but still with an obvious sense of me singing to a bloke.
The only exception was a catchy little number, the ironically titled I Got My Lady, which was me having a bit of fun trying to write a hetero hit.
CBS released it with great relief as a single, but when that too was rejected by Radio 1 and bombed, the company decided enough was enough, pulled the Biddu-produced album from their schedules and said ‘bye, ‘bye.
I struggled to get any record deals after that, only recording the occasional single with people like Trevor Horn (pre-Frankie and Buggles) and Steve Levine (pre-Culture Club).
By the early ‘80s I’d had enough and took up an offer to work in the music industry itself, where my gayness was immediately accepted, indeed embraced by all my industry colleagues.
I would have gone through the rest of my life thinking the reason I’d failed as a pop singer in the ‘70s was because my recordings weren’t any good, should RPM/Cherry Red not have reissued Kid.., to such wide acclaim, and then followed that up with releases of Technicolour Biography and the Biddu-productions Can You Hear Me OK?, which also got amazing reviews, which led to me returning to performing and recording again and having that conversation with Paul Phillips in 2005.
That year I played a wonderfully camp gig in Highgate’s Glam-Ou-Rama Club, where the audience treated me like a returned hero from Planet Ziggy. I had finally succeeded! On my terms.
Are you looking forward to the new album launch in London [Sept 8 – The Phoenix Club] and taking the record out on the road?
JH: Yes, I always enjoy performing on stage. Especially when there are people there to hear me! The Phoenix Artist Club looks like a wonderfully bohemian venue and I’m very excited about performing there. It’s only a stone’s throw away from where my manager’s office was in Denmark Street in the ‘70s and CBS was situated across the road in Soho Square.
It was also in Denmark Street where I did the launch show for As I Was Saying, in 2006 at the 12 Bar Club, so it’s seems fitting the UK launch show for The Night Mail should be in that area.
Future gigs are still to be arranged and don’t look like they’ll happen ‘til the New Year now, but that’s fine, there’s no rush. I am the human proof of that!
How do you see the rest of the year shaping up?
JH: True to form, I don’t stop writing and recording, and already have another solo album completed and ready for release sometime next year.
I’m not sure through which label, or exactly when it will come out, but it will at some point next year.
I’m also recording a new EP of Randy Newman songs, which should come out early 2016. That’ll be an online-only release. All my EPs tend to be cover-jobs! I like occasionally recording songs I love by other writers, from Bowie to Button and back again, and five track EPs are a great vehicle for that.
What happens through the autumn will largely be determined in many ways by how well The Night Mail album does. Stay bright, pop pickers!
John Howard & The Night Mail is released on August 21 (Tapete).
Singer-songwriter and pianist John Howard’s latest project – John Howard & The Night Mail – could be the best pop album you’ll hear all year.
In the first of a two-part interview, I talk to him about writing and recording with his new band, ‘living in exile’ in Spain, his love of ‘60s pop culture, and why he’d rather listen to Revolver than Radio 1…
Ian Button, Robert Rotifer and Andy Lewis contemplate working with John Howard (photo credit: Pamela Berry)
John Howard released his piano-driven debut solo album, Kid In A Big World, 40 years ago – back in 1975.
Criminally overlooked at the time, it’s now considered a cult classic, but the mid-70s music industry wasn’t ready for an openly gay, flamboyant singer-songwriter…
Late last year, John, who’s now 62, teamed up with musicians and songwriters Robert Rotifer, Andy Lewis (Paul Weller’s bassist, DJ / Acid Jazz regular) and Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge, ex-Death In Vegas, ex-Thrashing Doves) to make a new album – his 15th.
Recorded over four days in November 2014, John Howard & The Night Mail will be released on the Tapete label on August 21.
It’s a wonderful collection of quirky, witty, intelligent, theatrical and nostalgic songs, from Zombies-like psych-pop (Before) to slinky retro mod-soul (Intact & Smiling), glam-rock (ControlFreak), observational Ray Davies-style tales of people’s everyday lives (London’s After-Work Drinking Culture & Deborah Fletcher) and the moving paean to ‘60s pop culture that is In The Light of Fires Burning, which name-checks Joe Meek, Neil Sedaka, The Beatles and Telstar, among others…
How does it feel to be back, with a new album and a new band, too?
John Howard: It’s always good to have a new album out. I don’t feel I’m ‘back’ particularly, because I’ve been writing, recording and releasing albums each year since my real ‘comeback’ album, The Dangerous Hours, which came out in 2005.
What is great is to be working with these amazingly talented guys, Robert Rotifer, Ian Button and Andy Lewis. They’re all fabulous musicians and songwriters, and great company, too.
I am really proud of The Night Mail album and knocked out it’s getting such a positive reaction.
It’s a great record…
JH: Thanks, Sean. I’m thrilled. It’s turned out sounding like we spent months recording it – it’s so polished and a really cohesive set of solid pop tracks, with some lovely songs.
This is an album I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – have made on my own. They are songs I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – have written on my own.
I love it. I listened to it again the other evening on our roof [in Spain] – the only cool place of an evening right now here – and was once again struck by how great it sounds.
That isn’t meant to be big-headed – it’s an acknowledgement of the terrific effort, time and talent that has gone into making the album by all four members of the band.
Several of the songs are observational – they’re populated with characters and their everyday lives. I’m thinking, in particular, of the tracks London’s After-Work Drinking Culture and Deborah Fletcher.
In my view, they’re up there with other great observational songs by Ray Davies, Blur, The Beatles, The Divine Comedy, and early Bowie… Do you write about real, or imaginary, characters?
JH: Well, those two songs you’ve mentioned have lyrics which were written by Robert and Ian, respectively, so that proves what great lyricists I’m working with!
London’s After-Work… particularly resonated with me, as the lyric described my own situation when I ‘worked for a living’ in the ‘80s and ‘90s at various music companies.
There was a definite belief system at work in all those companies that you had to be a member of The Team, and to prove your membership you were expected to go to the local wine bar after work and mix with your work buddies ‘til all hours.
I never went along with it, I used to purposely leave the office at six, making sure everyone saw me leave by waving and saying “‘bye!” loudly as I left.
I had a great guy waiting for me in our lovely home and there was simply no contest as to whom I wanted to spend my after-work time with.
I had some work colleagues who would get in at 7 a.m. and worked till 8 p.m. then went to the wine bar with other work colleagues and got home after midnight. They used to lecture me that I wasn’t doing my career prospects any favours by not doing the same.
My riposte was always the same, “when the company has done with you, they’ll get rid of you, no matter how late you stay or how many arses you lick while you’re here.”
And sure enough, they all became victims of the companies’ attitude to the ‘loyal’ office worker, the unspoken rulebook – ‘give everything, and get nothing but a salary for a while back.’
I remember one company I worked for arranged a ‘Team Building Awayday Event’ where we were all supposed to take part in sporting activities similar to those in the ‘70s TV programme It’s A Knockout. Each head of department was to ‘take a lead and build colleague brotherhood’.
The fact my department consisted of two girls and me went rather over their heads. I watched one of the first activities when we’d arrived at this damn thing, hurried back to my hotel room and stayed there reading for the rest of the day, claiming an asthma attack, when questioned about my absence that evening over dinner.
There was a definite sense that I’d let the side down – not from my two female departmental colleagues, who were actually just jealous that I’d managed to make such a crafty exit.
My own lyrics are usually about real people I’ve met, or around a story I’ve read or heard about, which then gets rather mangled into fiction as the song develops.
I don’t think Ian has ever actually met a sexual dominatrix like Debs Fletcher, but you’d have to ask him about that!
The opening song Before reminds of something from The Zombies album Odessey and Oracle…
JH: I love that album! Now you mention it, Before does have that Zombies feel about it. I hadn’t considered that until now. It’s my lyric which Robert set to music, so the beautiful structure of the song is all down to him.
I met Colin Blunstone [from The Zombies] when I was signed to CBS in ‘74/’75. He came to the launch concert I gave at London’s Purcell Room and sat next to me at the after-show lunch. I had to keep nipping myself that here was I, just down from sunny Ramsbottom, sitting next to one of the greatest pop vocalists ever whose recordings had filled my little transistor in my box room in Bury, listening to him telling me how much he loved my music!
Rod Argent from The Zombies played on your debut album, back in ’75, didn’t he?
JH: Yes, Rod played on Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner on Kid In A Big World and also on the first unreleased (until 2004) version of Family Man, which was re-recorded at Apple when CBS rejected Tony Meehan’s production. I have great memories of Rod making faces like a naughty child in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 as he came up with ever more outrageous sound effects on his Moog for Guess… while Tony Meehan was jumping up and down at the control room window shouting “Yes! Yes!”.
One of my favourite songs on the new album is In The Light of Fires Burning. It’s a very nostalgic lyric, with references to early/mid ‘60s pop culture – Joe Meek/ Telstar, Pink Floyd, Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, The Beatles…
I really like the imagery of the fairground – it’s very atmospheric. Can you tell me more about the inspiration behind that song?
Was it inspired by listening to ’60s pop music as you were growing up?
JH: Ah – that’s one of my personal favourites on the album too. I was brought up in the ‘50s and ‘60s – by the age of nine or ten, I was a huge pop fan and I was surrounded by it on radio, TV and in the music papers and culture, generally.
I always saw the fairground as a kind of example of pop music of the late ‘50s, early ‘60s – all fun and lights and laughter and everyone having a great time with friends while their favourite pop songs blasted out into the evening air. It’s what Sedaka himself has called The Tra-La-La Days, which was what pop music generally felt like then.
By the mid-‘60s, things got much more serious and thoughtful and thought-provoking. Pop stars were no longer pin-ups in Jackie, they were people ‘with something to say’, and their views were often taken as gospel.
It became a kind of new belief system for ‘the youth of today’, Dylan was ‘a generation’s spokesman’, and with that new attitude, the lyrics of pop songs became much more than simply sad or happy tales of love lost and found. They turned into an inward way of viewing an ever-disturbing world, Vietnam, The Cold War, assassinations…
Drugs like LSD were getting many of the talented people around at that time out of what they found too sickening to dwell on. It all felt so positive in ‘67, but by ’69, it all started to go wrong, of course. Utopia did not exist after all.
New realities were being created through the medium of pop – or rock as it became. And with that new awareness of something more than falling in love with your best friend’s girl, and a growing interest in what could be achieved in recording studios sonically, came great records like Tomorrow Never Knows, See Emily Play, Purple Haze, God Only Knows and A Day In The Life.
For me, aged around 14 or 15, it was a terrific time to be a young record buyer. There was so much fabulous and fascinating stuff around it was a case of ‘what can I afford to spend my pocket money on this week?’.
The last part of the lyric for In The Light… tells of how The Beatles changed pop music forever, from playing All My Loving on Ed Sullivan to creating Sgt Pepper in just three years. Astonishing.
When I sent Ian the lyric, I knew he’d get into it and come up with something wonderful for the tune. His band Papernut Cambridge, which is basically Ian under another name, has a gorgeous mid-to-late ‘60s vibe about it.
I always think of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd when I hear Papernut stuff – it resounds with all the stuff I heard on the radio in that glorious ‘66/’67 period in pop and popular culture.
I knew Ian would create a brilliant song from the lyric and when we recorded it and the guys came up with that stunning psychedelic ending in the studio, I was in seventh heaven! How perfect that was.
The first single from the new album is Intact and Smiling, which was written with Andy Lewis. It’s a great ’60s-style mod-soul-pop song. Are you a ’60s pop obsessive?
JH: Obsessive, no. Fan, yes. Because I grew up into my teens in that decade, then ‘60s pop music is part of my DNA.
But I was never a soul fan per se. I bought a lot of Tamla Motown records like Baby Love, Tracks of My Tears, I Was Made To Love Her, etc, and adore all of Marvin Gaye’s stuff, especially his ‘70s material like What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On.
I saw Marvin twice in concert in the ‘70s and he was truly sensational. The Mod movement never touched me – far too butch and confrontational for fey old me!
I was more of a studying hippie around the age of 15, and became a fully-fledged hairy by 1970. My pop heroes in the ‘60s were Dusty, P.J. Proby, Scott Walker, Gene Pitney, Roy Orbison, Cilla, all the drama-pop artists. By the late ‘60s, I’d become infatuated by The Beatles, buying everything they’d done to date – every single and album I’d missed while drooling over Dusty and Sonny & Cher.
Once at art college I started buying records by, and going to see in concert, The Incredible String Band, Frank Zappa and Roy Harper – whose Stormcock album is still one of the greatest LPs ever recorded.
And I became a very belated Dylan fan, buying again every album I’d missed in the ‘60s. I’d raved about and bought Like A Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street, but had never been fixated enough to buy his albums – until around late 1970).
The mod-soul influence on Intact & Smiling is all Andy’s, and I sent that lyric to him knowing he’d do something pop-soul with it, incorporating his own particular groove into the music. I loved singing it in the studio, it wasn’t a song I would ever have thought I’d sing, and I had a ball with such a fantastic backing track chugging along behind me. I didn’t however expect it to be the amazingly popular and catchy gem it has become!
The song Control Freak sounds like a nod to ‘70s glam-rock. Are you a control freak?
JH: Yes, more or less. I think that’s one of the reasons I began recording alone!
What has surprised me is how easy I’ve found it letting others take control of many of the aspects of this album. And because the recording sessions were so relaxed and also because I felt ‘in safe hands’ with the guys, I was happy to enjoy the team process when making the record.
The glam stomp thing of the track is down to Ian, who is quite the glam fan man. When Ian sent me his demo to my lyric, it reminded me of Bowie’s Jean Genie, so I decided to sing it with a faint circa ‘73 Aladdin Sane twang.
I actually wanted to re-do some of the vocals as I felt they were pretty rough in places, the double-tracking is very ‘out’ occasionally, but the boys all insisted it was ‘perfect’ and loved the out of phase double-tracking. ‘So authentically ‘70s.’
You can actually hear me right at the end of the track saying “Was that rough enough for you?”, directed at the control room. There was an unrecorded “Yes!” in reply.
Does it feel strange after having a period of keeping out of the limelight – when you were doing your own thing and releasing your own records – to be back working with a new band, co-writers and a new record label?
JH: I can’t say it feels ‘strange’ – I tend to respond to each situation as it comes. I’m quite adaptable as a person, and nothing ever truly surprises or shocks me.
I haven’t consciously kept out of the limelight – I think the limelight has had trouble finding me! Whoever’s operating that thing keeps missing me. ‘Hello! I’m over here!’ has been my mantra for quite some years.
Luckily for me, Robert and his Gare Du Nord compadre, Ralegh Long [English singer-songwriter] saw me waving in the distance and upped my profile considerably in 2013.
A musician friend of mine from way back, when I played him The Night Mail tracks, said “it isn’t better per se than what you’ve been doing by yourself in recent times, but this album will definitely take you to another level”, and that, certainly, the latter bit about ‘another level’, is true.
I can’t say what’s better or worse when it comes to my own recorded output. That’s up to whoever listens to my music to have an opinion.
Doing my own thing on my own label imprint (‘John Howard via AWAL/Kobalt’) for so long – since 2009 – meant I was in total control of what happened with it, who did the sleeve design, I handled all the arrangements and production, the title of each album, who mastered it, when it came out, what sort of promotion I’d do for it, etc. It was all down to me. So letting the reins slacken for this new album has been, well, actually rather relaxing. And I completely trust Tapete – they’re a great record label and they’re doing a wonderful job with the album. They have a fantastic roster of artists who we are now indirectly associated with as well.
It goes without saying, I wholly have faith in Robert, Andy and Ian who handled the production, mixing and mastering of The Night Mail album. My natural experience-created caution, when it comes to getting excited about anything I do, has meant I am weekly thrilled by what’s happening because of the album.
How easy was it to adjust to the process of writing, recording and playing with a new band?
JH: I’ve worked with musicians on and off over the years – obviously in the ‘70s I always worked with other musicians. In fact, when I recorded two singles with Trevor Horn in the late ‘70s, I didn’t play an instrument at all. I just wrote and sang the songs and then left them to Trevor and his fellows Geoff Downes, Anne Dudley and Bruce Woolley to do the rest. I recorded with what became Buggles and Art of Noise before they were Buggles and Art of Noise!
My 2005 Cherry Red release, As I Was Saying, was recorded with bassist Phil King (ex-Lush, now with The Jesus & Mary Chain) and guitarist Andre Barreau (Robbie Williams, The Bootleg Beatles), and we did a few gigs together to promote the album at the time.
Since then I’ve recorded entirely on my own. Circumstances dictated that really, and it was easier in terms of having as much time as I wanted to get something right. I could pop down to my studio at three in the morning and do a percussion overdub which had come into my head – having no neighbours helps – and take as long as I like to finish an album – usually about a year, playing everything myself.
What was it like making the new record?
JH: Writing the songs and making the Night Mail record was uncannily easy. I wrote lyrics with Robert, Ian or Andy in mind, in terms of how I imagined each one would write the melody and the style of song. The boys sent me their lyrics separately to put them to music.
It was always fascinating wondering what they’d do with my lyrics and, I guess, vice versa on their parts, too. Then, once the songs were written and we’d all sent our demos to each other and been very happy with the resultant ten songs, I then got to work demoing all of the songs on piano at home, with a few backing vocal and harmony ideas in there for future reference.
I initially had the idea that whoever wrote the lyric would sing the song, but Robert was very keen that I be the singer in the band.
I had originally imagined the project with just a band name, not with my name at the front. But again, Robert felt that the album should have my name on it. I think it was also Robert who came up with the Night Mail band name, and, of course, he did the front sleeve cover artwork too.
By the time we got to the studios in Ramsgate (Big Jelly) in November last year, I knew the songs like the back of my hand – I’ve always been a detail preparer by nature – and though the boys hadn’t routined the songs in the same obsessive way I had been doing for months beforehand – they are all rather busier than I am these days – as soon as recording began, they all fell into place beautifully. It was as though we’d been playing these songs together for years.
The sessions were so happy and convivial, like four guys having a great time, doing what they love doing. It was a lovely few days. The guys then got together a week or so later and mixed the tracks, then Andy did a final mix, and Ian mastered the album. It was a real team effort. None of it had been difficult. It had all been something of a breeze – much to my relief.
There are rumours that you’ve been ‘living in exile’ in Spain? Is this true?
JH: It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? ‘Living in exile’. But no, I wasn’t. My husband, Neil and I, decided to move to Spain in 2007, simply because we both felt that there was no professional reason to stay in the UK, much as we love the country and miss living in the UK every day.
It was mainly a financial decision to move here. Cost of living is much cheaper here – you get much more for your money with almost everything.
We’d had a large house in Pembrokeshire which we adored, bought for Neil’s parents to come and live with us in 2001, after I retired from working in the music business – which I’d done since the early ‘80s – and Neil had more or less retired from acting. Sadly Neil’s parents both died before they could move in, so we were rather rattling round in there.
Why were you lured out of Spain and tempted and intrigued by this latest project – The Night Mail?
JH: I’d come to a point in my career where the initial media excitement of the reissue of Kid In A Big World in 2003, and my ‘comeback’ to recording new material – which was greeted similarly to how The Night Mail album is being welcomed now – had died down.
I’d started off in 2004 playing some lovely gigs in great venues, like The Jermyn Street Theatre and Cecil Sharp House in London, but it had finally reached a point a couple of years later, where I was literally playing to eight people in clubs in Brighton and Chester.
I remember performing at The Tapestry open-air festival in 2006 and looking out at a field with about six people and a few bemused sheep looking back at me.
There was a sense that the 2004 rediscovery aura which had built up around me had evaporated to an “oh, he’s got yet another new album out now, has he?” attitude.
I’ve always been prolific when inspired, but it was actually beginning to work against me. One journalist was actually reported to me as saying, “the problem with John Howard is he brings out too much stuff, and the mystique simply disappears”.
My journalist and writer friend Rob Cochrane once told me, when I was musing over this apparent waning of interest in my music by 2006, “Your problem, John, is that you’re too happy, too sane and too un-fucked up to be of any interest to many music journalists. Get a drug habit which almost kills you and they’ll be all over you.”
It made me laugh anyway. I accepted it as a fact and decided to just carry on doing my own thing at my own pace, and basically thought ‘sod it if only a relatively few people want to hear it.’
I knew I had some really loyal fans who had stayed with me through thick and many thins and they are still there for me buying everything I bring out – God bless’ em.
But the media interest had completely disappeared by 2007, when my albums were getting no reviews at all.
The move to Spain also came at a fortuitous time, as in 2007 I coincidentally signed my Barefoot With Angels album to Spanish label Hanky Panky.
They organised two gigs for me in Bilbao and in Valencia but again, we had the same problem – getting enough people along to see me. Being a ‘legendary songwriter from the 1970s’ and ‘cult artist’, just two of the tags I’ve been labelled with over the last few years, didn’t, it seemed, mean many people wanted to pay good money to see me perform.
My fanbase, while extremely loyal, is spread thinly around the world, so expecting large turnouts at single venues with very little pre-promotion was frankly pie-in-the-sky by that time. And this was, of course, all before the joys of Twitter and Facebook, which has helped artists like me publicise our gigs much more widely enormously.
It was a chance reading in 2012 of an interview with songwriter Ralegh Long in the online magazine Neon Filler, where he mentioned me and Bill Fay as two of his greatest songwriting influences, which persuaded me to send the magazine a copy of my then new album, You Shall Go To The Ball – a studio re-approaching of some of my 1970s songs from Technicolour Biography, the unreleased (until 2004) follow-up to Kid In A Big World.
Joe Lepper, the editor, not only reviewed the album but also did a fabulous write-up of my music and career up to that point. It was the biggest write-up I’d had for years.
He also suggested I send a copy of You Shall Go To The Ball to Robert Rotifer, which I did.
Robert emailed back to say how much he loved the album and had actually been alerted to my music a couple of years earlier by [songwriter] Darren Hayman, who had attended my 2004 Jermyn Street Theatre show.
Robert interviewed me for his German radio programme on FM4 and during it he asked me if there was a possibility that I might go back to the UK to do some gigs.
I said if the venue was right and the gig was well-organised I would consider it. That was when the Rotifer Mission Machine really got into gear!
He and Ralegh asked me if I fancied playing a support slot at Ralegh’s Servant Jazz Quarters gig in 2013, which I did and it was a blast, so many people came along, the atmosphere was fantastic and it even spawned a live album in 2014, Live At The Servant Jazz Quarters. Robert had very cleverly manoeuvred the situation the previous few months into getting me a band for the gig – beginning by asking if I minded him accompanying me on a couple of numbers and then suggesting Ian as drummer and Andy as bassist for the evening. Unbeknownst to me, Andy had been a fan of Kid In A Big World for years, playing tracks like Spellbound on his DJ nights.
The publicity the gig received from various magazines like The Quietus, and a general buzz about it, generated by Robert, Ralegh and Ian’s label Gare Du Nord, resulted in my then current new studio album, Storeys becoming my most successful for years – even getting reviewed!
Robert’s plan B then sprang into action – he, along with Ian and Andy, wanted to record an album with me, but how to do it while I was living in Spain? There was the rub.
At first we mulled over maybe me recording piano and vocal tracks here in my home studio, then the guys overdubbing backings onto those in the UK. I wasn’t keen on that idea, there’s never a really cohesive sound to projects like that.
I eventually came up with the idea of the four of us writing songs together and really approaching a new album together as a band project. The guys loved that idea, and once we got into gear for that Robert came across Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, which he felt would be the perfect location to record the songs together.
He tied a UK visit by me for the recording sessions into another Servant Jazz Quarters gig, which meant it all made sense on many levels.
Who are your favourite songwriters and artists? What are you currently listening to – old and new artists?
JH: My ‘60s and early ‘70s musical heroes I’ve already covered earlier. Though in songwriting terms people like Randy Newman and Bacharach & David knock me out everytime I hear one of their songs.
Jimmy Webb is up there as a genius I wholly admire and adore and Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell are simply astonishing.
I loved early Gilbert O’Sullivan, Brian Wilson’s ‘60s creations take my breath away and Leonard Cohen and Bill Fay are brilliant to listen to still.
I was a big fan of Bolan in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, bought all his albums from My People Were Fair… to Slider. After that he got very samey and safe and just kept repeating the same ‘boogie riff’, which got very boring and creatively unchallenged.
I adored Bowie up to Low – that album was totally incredible, as was everything which went before. I still go back to Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, Young Americans and Low when I want my fix of D.B.
I covered his tour de force, The Bewlay Brothers, for my 2007 EP of the same name, and it’s now one of my most downloaded tracks to date.
In the ‘80s I got into Prince’s music in a big way – I still love his Purple Rain period and I still enjoy some Prefab Sprout stuff, though the ‘80s Prophet synths all over their tracks make it a little difficult to listen to for me now.
k.d. lang is a genius, I have all her albums. She sings like Karen Carpenter did, hits it right in the middle of the note every time. Stunning.
One of my pet hates in the ‘80s was the way many singers tended to sing ‘sharp’, above the note. Boy George did it often and Tony Hadley did it most of the time – it was a weird symptom of singing in that decidedly odd decade.
Lennon often sang under the note, just under it, which is a lovely thing to hear. Above the note, however little, hurts my ears.
I enjoyed Blur in the ‘90s and I think Damon Albarn is a huge talent. But I loathed Oasis, that “we’re as big as The Beatles” rubbish the Gallaghers spouted in interviews used to leave me shouting at my music mags!
My problem with nearly all pop music now is the way it’s recorded. I absolutely revile auto-tuning, it makes every singer sound like a computer. All their natural vocal sound is removed, replaced by an always in-tune digital horror.
I have friends who can’t hear it and think I’m going bonkers bringing it up everytime they play me a new record they’re in love with.
And the way now that everything is recorded at the same level, loudly, with no light and shade in the productions, even what begin as acoustic-sounding tracks turn into auto-tuned platters from hell. Every nuance is destroyed by this need to shout at us in perfect tune.
I had a go at listening to Radio 1 a few months ago, which I hadn’t done for years. I had to turn it off after three records and felt as if someone had punched me in the face. I had been sonically abused, dear!
I see young new artists performing at some live event on TV, think, ‘they’re good’, then listen to their stuff on iTunes to see if I want to buy it and am immediately hit with a pointlessly auto-tuned voice. Very sad. I run back to Revolver and bask in the light of real talent being recorded with sensitivity, musicality and balance. And human-ness. What’s wrong with occasional vocal flaws? They’re what make a great record stand out from the crowd. Why do record companies insist on getting their artists to shout so perfectly at us? It’s very unpleasant and should be banned, darling.
On the plus side of ‘new music’, it won’t surprise you to hear that I really love Robert Rotifer’s work – he writes great songs with such a tremendous punch about them.
Andy Lewis comes up with some wonderful ‘60s mod-soul ‘classics that should have been’ and Ian Button’s Papernut Cambridge records are regular spins here at home.
Ralegh Long has a big future ahead of him, his new album Hoverance is a tour de force in fragility set to gorgeous melodies, like curtains blowing in a cool breeze. I also think Alex Highton is an enormous talent. His first two albums are standouts for me.
It’s so difficult though now to get an album by a new artist away, without that big record company ‘branding’ thing that goes on. It’s all so corporate now. Everything has to have a ‘sound’ to succeed in the mainstream, everything is a soap powder which washes all the ‘dirt’ away. I love a bit of dirt. I am a perfectionist in the studio, but I always try to maintain a human quality to my recordings, which all have a kind of ‘60s vibe about them.
Most of what I play on my albums is acoustic and recorded in real time, layering as I go through the song each time, no spinning in. Done ‘the old way’. It means I retain a sense of naturalness, which if any big label or producer got their hands on it would be turned to auto-tuned digital mush in no time.
But there is no chance that any big label or producer would have the slightest interest in me, so I’m safe!
Do you have plans to make another record with your current collaborators?
JH: Oh, I hope so! I’d love to make another one with the boys. In fact, if this one does OK, we’re contracted to do three albums for Tapete.
So, Night Mail fans, buy this one and we’ll get to do another!
To read the second part of my interview with John Howard, in which he talks about about being ‘rediscovered’, his childhood, how being openly-gay affected his pop career, and his plans for the rest of the year and beyond, click here.
John Howard & The Night Mail is released on August 21 (Tapete).
Say It With Garage Flowers 