Since stepping onto the comeback trail around a decade ago singer songwriter John Howard has proved himself to be a prolific recording artist. From his home studio in Spain he is regularly producing at least a release a year. It’s a far cry from his desperate attempts to release albums in the 1970s as his label CBS gradually lost interest in him.
This year has been particularly busy, with this latest full album following on from one of his regular cover EPs and a live album recorded from his 2013 gig at the Servant Jazz Quarters, a venue he is returning to in November this year.
There’s more to come as well. He is teaming up later this year with Gare Du Nord Records artists Robert Rotifer (Rotifer) and Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge) as well as Paul Weller’s bassist Andy Lewis to form a band, the name of which is currently under wraps. In his interview with us earlier this month Howard also revealed plans for a further covers EP.
But back to this current release and here we find Howard in reflective mood again, looking back on his 70s career and London’s gay culture, his 1990s career as a record company executive and current feelings of identity.
There is also story telling as well, a format he excelled in during 2013’s album Storeys about characters in an imagined apartment block. It is his story telling ability that creates the best track on Hello My Name Is, Bob/Bobbi, which focuses on the double life of a drag queen who sadly says goodbye to his glamorous female alter ego. Howard discusses the real life Bob that the song is based on further in our interview with him earlier this month.
Bloomsbury Chapter is another standout, inspired by an email exchange with Rotifer and taking the listener back to Howard’s time in London in the 1970s and “the memories of various romantic break-ups at that time.”
Another reflective track is Same Mistakes, a song about the passing of heroes and loved ones. Howard explains that part of the song is about the detached yet personal loss of heroes like John Lennon and Janis Joplin he and his friends felt when they died. He adds that the middle eight section is recounting more personal loss. This “is really to do with how I wish I’d said so much more to my mum who died forty years ago at the age of just 50,” says Howard. “I wish I’d told her how much she meant to me, I don’t think I ever did, but I guess she knew anyway,” he adds.
The album comes to a close with Secrets, inspired by his time in the 1990s as a record executive, a role that never really sat well with a man who two decades before was hoping to embark on a successful career as a recording artist. Howard explains: “They were great days in many ways, for the first time in my life earning a fabulous salary and travelling First Class round the world for conferences and meetings, but I was constantly waiting for someone to ‘suss me’, to discover I hadn’t a clue what the marketing guys were rabbiting on about in their bizarre company jargon.”
This crisis of identity is a fitting end to an album that offers a fascinating insight into how we perceive ourselves. The album also provides another interesting chapter in the Howard narrative, of an artist reawakened from the past to become a fiercely independent artist of the present.
8/10
by Joe Lepper
For more information about John Howard and details of how to order Hello My Name Is visit here.
Related Posts
