JOHN HOWARD: Currently/I Am Not Gone
We listen to music differently these days, a subtle change in our appreciation having transpired via the largely invisible digital revolution. Once, and not so long upon the time ago, you'd catch a song on the radio, or hear a record at a friend's, and a quest would evolve. A visit to a record store, and then another, if the first hadn't the album or single that you sought. You might even order it and wait, returning to squire home your purchase to play it again, and again, and again.
I'm not saying that people don't still seek to find, but we have lost the thrill of the chase, the fine art of waiting having flown, we suffer the absence of anticipation. We now click and listen, a more disposable relationship is formed with a song on a screen, phone or tablet. The thrill of the chase, that need to find and own something that was always inherently ephemeral, has been diminished by everything being a mere search, swipe, or tap away.
Quintessentially English singer-songwriter John Howard's new single "Currently" c/w "I Am Not Gone" belongs to the days of record shops with listening booths, when shiny black plastic records were the format that reigned. In those days it would likely have been a Double A-Side, whence both songs were deemed equally relevant and fine, and such is the case with this fetching brace of offerings. They reveal a diligent artist at home with his gifts, possessing a deceptive effortlessness without ever seeming clever or contrived. Nifty and refined, they have a lingering catchiness, a thread of hooks that ensnare the mind.
"Currently" is as mini-baroque and chamber masterpiece laden with deceptive eloquence. Elements pervade of early Al Stewart or Cat Stevens and their bedsitter maladies, with melancholy shades of The Beatles and The Zombies, but with a dash of The Left Banke's classicism. "I Am Not Gone" has a flippant skip in it's step harking back to a Saturday afternoon on Carnaby Street. Laconic, with an effortless air that conceals the subtle songcraft within. At two minutes and fourteen seconds it delivers with the subtlety of a wistful kiss that immediately fades before you realise it has been delivered. The song could be a lost remnant from Keith Wast's successful but ill-fated "Except From A Teenage Opera."
John Howard has seen a remarkable renaissance in the past twenty years, after as many decades of stalled creativity. He belongs to a host of neglected once, but gradually respected piano men, Bill Fay and Jobriath spring to mind, who were ignored in the days that were supposed to belong to them, but who've a much greater relevance in the here that we call now.