John Howard Interview by Dave Hammond.

John Howard

‘Look - The Unknown Story of Danielle Du Bois’: A Modern Day Concept Album Inspired by a Real Life Story

Interview by Dave Hammond Photography by Neil France (except where stated).

“I’ve always wanted to do a concept album, because I come from that period of concept albums ...”

John Howard has been writing, performing and producing music since the early 1970s and has been enjoying something of a creative renaissance over the past twenty years, following the re-issue of his 1975 debut album, ‘Kid in a Big World’ in 2001. Since then, he has been prolific in releasing solo albums, piano instrumental albums and collaborated with The Night Mail as well as penning three volumes of his autobiography. I enjoyed a wonderful chat with John, who is now based in Spain with his partner Neil, covering the recent career spanning retrospective and his new release.

Before we talk about your new album, which is called ‘Look - The Unknown Story of Danielle Du Bois’, I’d like to have a brief chat about the album you released last year, ‘Collected - the best of John Howard’ featuring 38 tracks covering pretty much the whole of your career from the early 1970s right through to when that disc was released?

Yeah, absolutely, including the 1971 demo. And yeah, that was an amazing project. It was Edward Rogers, you know, the guy from Rogers and Butler, who I connected with at the Lexington in 2019. And we got on like a house on fire. And he reminded me he came to see me in 2004 when I played at Camden Underworld. He’s from Birmingham, originally, but lives in New York now. So when we finally got to meet in 2019, he said, ‘You know, you should release a best of, a proper best of covering everything’. And I said, ‘Well, that would be great’. In the meantime, he put me in touch with Kool Kat music for ‘To the Left of the Moon’s Reflection’ [2020], which was around the last time you and I talked, right? And Ed kept saying, ‘We really

should do this’. So, I mentioned it to Ray Gianchetti, who runs Kool Kat he said, ‘Yeah, why not, I’ll release it’. So, Ed sent me a list of tracks that he particularly wanted on there. And we talked about what else we’d like on there - I’d like this, yeah, I’d like that on there and so on. Gradually, we sort of whittled it down and came to what was a lot, you know, 38 tracks. And he really surprised me because I thought he was just gonna go for ‘Goodbye Susie’, ‘Family Man’ [both from ‘Kid in a Big World’] and all that sort of stuff, but he was the one who suggested the demo, which I recorded in my parents’ house in Ramsbottom in 1971 on a guitar. He said, ‘I really want ‘I Feel What I Feel’ on there because it sounds like John Lennon circa 1970, it’s got that vibe’. He kept coming up with these leftfield suggestions. I mean, he picked ‘Snow’ [‘Songs for Randall EP, 2016], the Randy Newman song [first recorded by The Johnny Mann Singers for the album ‘Sixties Mann’ in 1966], which Harry Nilsson had recorded [during the sessions for 1970’s ‘Nilsson Sings Newman’, although not included on the album], and I love that song and I recorded it in 2015, I think. And he picked that out and they kept coming up with all these quite surprising things that I wouldn’t have expected, so I think it made it very eclectic and interesting. I mean, it’s done very well and had good reviews.

Yeah. Is it fair to say then that if you’d selected all the tracks yourself, it would have been a different track list altogether?

I’m sure it would. I think I’d probably pick what I thought people would like. And probably some of my own favourites, which doesn’t always mean this other people’s favourites, you know? So yeah, I think having somebody else’s view, and, and because he was quite definite on how he saw this collection, he had this real vision. So, I just went along with it. And it was, I found, really good to have somebody else’s point of view, almost like almost like having a producer, rather than, you know, doing everything

yourself. So yeah, I think it’s made it a better collection than basically me putting it all together.

Well, to be honest, John, there’s so much of your music that he could have picked from. You could have probably chosen ten different people to pick 38 tracks and they’d have each come up with a different selection. And each one of them would have been a valid ‘best of’.

Did you see the picture up on Facebook recently with all my albums on the shelves? I didn’t put the EPs or the singles on, but I put the all the studio albums up on a shelf where I keep all my CDs, and I put them all up and it just happened to fit everything from ‘Kid in a Big World’ [1975] right the way through to ‘Look …’ [2022]. And I thought ‘too much, do you think?’ But the response was the opposite. It just drove it home to me how much I’ve done, you know, because sometimes I do forget what I’ve done. Neil constantly plays albums of mine here and says ‘Listen to this’, which I might not have listened to for ten years. When those sorts of things are brought back to you, you remember where you were and when you wrote them, and when you recorded them and what inspired them, you suddenly realise my God, there’s an awful lot of stuff.

Just moving on from that to the album that you’ve just released and indeed, in the last ten years or so, you have been really quite prolific. Apart from your solo stuff, there is the music that you’ve done with Ian Button and The Night Mail and then the piano instrumentals album that you did last year, ‘Dreaming I Am Waking: Piano Music for My Father’. It is like you’re very restless and continuing looking at doing things differently. This leads us on to the current album, which again, is a little bit of a departure in that it’s a concept album, one with the arc of a story running through it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it is a concept album. And yeah, I’ve always wanted to do a concept album, because I come

April Ashley, 1970

from that period of concept albums, that late-’60s, early-’70s period, when they were the rage, and then they became a bit sort of … I think people probably started to think they’re a little self-indulgent, perhaps. And, you know, you had four LP sets by Yes, like ‘Tales of Topographic Oceans’ [1973], and it all got a bit much. I thought, well, I really fancy doing a concept of some sort. And I’d always written, right back to ‘Goodbye Suzie’, stories, songs about the way you’re viewing somebody else’s life or little mini movies of your own life. There was a friend of mine called April Ashley. I used to play in her restaurant in the mid-’70s in Knightsbridge, a little basement restaurant behind Harrods where I played piano and sang. She was she was just this amazing person to talk to, like a wise matron, and she had the great Diana Dors and Danny La Rue and loads of people who were great showbiz friends come to the restaurant. This lady, who gender transitioned without telling anyone in 1960, in Britain, when it wasn’t accepted or understood at the time, went on to be a famous model and actress. I think she was a Smirnoff model as well at one point in the early-’60s. Utterly beautiful. And then she was outed in 1961 [by The Sunday People newspaper], which ruined her career, just finished her. You know, her modelling career ended, her acting career ended, everything ended. And basically, she kept on going, really, by the fact that she was a lovely person, and a lot of people loved her. She was such a great personality. They came up with this idea of getting a restaurant, and she would front it, and she would run it and she would always be there and be talking to the customers and be the face on the restaurant. And it did really well. I think she got married to a Baron in Scotland [Arthur Corbett, 3rd Baron Rowalian], lived in his castle for three years before the marriage ended. Over the years, we didn’t see each other much, and then, about twenty years ago, we got back in touch and by then, she had a holiday home in Marbella. So, we started ringing each other and she always said ‘You must come down and bring Neil and we’ll

and we’ll have a lovely week’, but we never did it, which I regret because she died in December [2021]. I just finished the album a couple of months previously and I was planning, when it came out, to send her a copy. So, she never heard this album, even though it was completely inspired by her. It’s not actually about her, the story’s different. But there are elements of her in there, so you could say it’s inspired by her and I dedicated it to her as well. But also, I knew quite a few other people through the years who went through a similar transitioning thing and so it’s all their experiences and their stories, and the way they felt which inspired this and the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, that this is the perfect concept album if you like, because it lends itself to music and to lyrics and then to a story. So, I just started thinking up this story. And I think the first the first song I wrote for it was ‘Goodbye Daniel’, which begins with Daniel, who is a Pop star and all the rest of it and then disappears off to Hollywood, they think to make a film about his life, and doesn’t turn up as he detours in his private plane, and goes to Paris to an exclusive clinic where, over many, many months he transitions into Danielle Du Bois and begins a new life in Paris. I’m jumping ahead here talking about tracks, but at the end of that track, now there’s a bit where the voice of the surgeon says ‘Bonjour Mademoiselle’ as she comes out of surgery, having previously said ‘Au revoir monsieur’ as she went into surgery. That was something I always remembered April telling me.

That’s quite touching. Was April aware that you were writing the music and words for this story and she was the inspiration behind it?

I never mentioned it to her because I wanted it to be a lovely surprise. I wrote a song called ‘Magdalena Merrywidow’, for my album ‘Barefoot with Angels’ [2007] and that was inspired by her, though it’s an eight or nine-minute song. And that was that was the beginning of this, this process of thinking of her story, being inspired to write a song and then moved into

John in 1974

writing the album. But no, she was never aware of it. I think she would have liked it. I hope she would have liked it.

One of the things I was going to do was ask you to just briefly run through each of the songs to give us the story of Danielle Du Bois. Let’s go back to the beginning of the album and the first track, ‘Last Night He Woke Up Screaming’, which starts off with a child singing to himself. What’s the background to that track?

Well, this child is me at the age of five! My parents had got a Philips tape recorder that Christmas, 1958, and that was like Dad testing it out, you know, I sing a song and he’ll put the tape on and play the piano, because my dad was a fantastic pianist. So that basically, opens the story where Daniel is singing this song, this nursery rhyme, with his mother playing the piano. And it’s a nice little dream that becomes a recurring dream, which then morphs, as dreams can you know, into sort of a nightmare, a disparate, disturbing situation where white dresses start appearing and start floating past and going towards this altar. There’s a bride standing there, you see the back of the bride and then as the camera comes around, the bride lifts the veil. And it’s the teenage Daniel. His mother hears him screaming as he wakes up from these nightmares night after night. He was brought up in a very strict home, his father was a major in the army, a Second World War hero. He doesn’t abuse him or knock him about it, but he’s very strict with him. He senses, you know, that he’s different and he’s never going to be a soldier fighting in any war. Anyway, he gave him a gun and took him and taught him how to kill and hunt, which Daniel hated. His mother loves her husband and but also loves her son and knows her son’s in trouble, but can’t do anything about it. Because of the time, the world was a different place, nobody understood any of these things really, so at the end of the song he ends up leaving home to live in London. The lyric where the bride lifts the veil is actually a dream I

used to have when I was about eight or nine … there was a wedding and I used to be both bride and groom. It was very strange for an eight or nine year old, quite disturbing. So, it’s a bit of personal experience in there and by the end of the song, he’s left home. Onto his new life.

Which leads us into the second song, which is ‘Every Day A New Adventure’, where he’s gone to London and is in awe of the place and excited about his new adventure. One of the things I like about the album is that it’s not just the words to the songs which tell the story, but also the music as well - it matches the mood and sentiment of the lyric.

Yeah, and I purposely gave it that light, fairground sort of rhythm, slightly Beatles-esque. It was Ed Rogers who said it was like something that could have been on ‘Sgt. Pepper’ [1967], ‘Benefit of Mr Kite’ sort of thing. It took forever to record because I was doing everything live; as you know, I use hardly any samples at all. I just have to come up with various ways of getting a programmed effect, or I used different keyboards and used very odd notations so that they sounded strange, went up and down in different keys. It took forever for me to do, but I got very excited about it. And I remember, as I was recording, I thought, ‘well, this sounds like it could have been a Pop single’, you know. So, that’s how that story develops when Daniel gets to London. He’s a very entrepreneurial chap and he sets up his own record label and publishing company, and has a recording studio and records this song himself, which again is a bit of me, you know, because I like to do everything myself in the studio. And it becomes this massive hit, which leads to a film company ... a little bit of Anthony Newley comes in, having that thing of being a pop star, but also a film star ... making a film, all of which goes on in the song and all of which turns him into this huge star.

We’ve already talked about track three, ‘Good Day Daniel’. It’s at this point where he decides that this is

not the life that he wants. He wants a different life because he’s got this calling to become Danielle rather than Daniel.

Yes, absolutely. Because he already came from a quite wealthy family and he’s now a self-made millionaire. He has the dream, he has the finances, he can do it. The ultimate dream is to become the person he always thought lived within, but couldn’t get out, you know, because he was trapped. And I set it in Paris, because I just thought, well, although London was swinging, Paris was very glamorous. I think that was the slight difference in my head. I mean, I was only a kid in the ‘60s, but Paris always had Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Cardin, the fashions and all that sort of scene. I just thought that it would be a much more glamorous setting for when Daniel transitions into Danielle.

That song finishes, as you said earlier, with the line “Bonjour Mademoiselle”, the transition complete, and we move on to the next song, the beautiful ‘The Mirror (Look!)’ with Danielle taking in what she’d finally become.

Okay. So, I’m very, very proud of that song. I wanted that to be almost heavenly, in a way, I wanted it to be this incredible sort of awestruck moment where, you know, she looks in the mirror, and my God, you know, I am not immutable, but I’m everything that I dreamed I could be. It’s happened. And, you know, the voices around, I call them guardian angels. But, you know, whether they’re real or imagined I think it’s up to the listener to decide, but they’re all with her and saying, ‘Yes, you’re absolutely gorgeous’. And that has become, I think, one of them the most popular tracks of the album, because it’s, it’s almost like, it’s almost like the crux of the whole thing.

You mentioned the guardian angels, and they make numerous appearances in songs later on as well early. But we’ll come to that a little bit later. But then, once that transition is complete, there’s still a

little bit of reminiscence of the time when Danielle was Daniel, in the next track, ‘Where Did the Boy Go?’. And then moving on to when Danielle moves to Paris with ‘Here I Am in Paris’. Just tell us a little bit about those two songs.

Okay, well, ‘Where Did the Boy Go’ is basically about when the fans, the friends, the Hollywood moguls are all waiting for the moment when Daniel arrives in Hollywood, and you know, the film is discussed, and there’s going to be this amazing film of his life story. The fans had all waved him off at the airport, very Beatlemania, like, you know, screaming at the airport and saying goodbye to him. And everyone is saying, ‘Where is he, where has he gone?’ It’s quite a simple song and it’s very Poppy. That’s got quite a lot of radio plays, maybe because it’s got that ‘Hunky Dory’ [David Bowie, 1971], ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ vibe about it, which I really tried to capture. And obviously, there’s no answer apart from what we know as the listener. In the next song, she is introduced to Parisian society. And I think, although it’s not in the album story, I’ve since thought it would be quite nice if it was her surgeon who knew all these incredible people in Paris and introduced her to, to this, you know, the highest society in Paris, film stars, models, directors, writers, fashion designers. So that basically is her celebrating the fact that, you know, she’s just having this incredible life, mixing with, with all these glamorous people. film directors and everything. I think it’s quite a triumphant song. It’s quite redemptive because it’s at the point at which she’s truly arrived, you know?

Absolutely. The next track introduces another character into the story, Monsieur Boudoir. Is he based on someone real?

Probably quite a few of the queens I used to know in the restaurants I played back in the ‘70s! In some of the gay restaurants, I would often meet quite a few Monsieur Boudoir types, you know, promising you the earth and taking you to dinner and all the rest of

it. But he’s more than that really, I mean, it basically translates as ‘Mr. Bedroom’ and he’s this incredibly glamorous character who loves people being in relationships and loves people getting together and likes acting like Cupid almost, you know, sort of bringing people together. So, he has these incredible parties, and literally cherry-picks all the people that he wants for each party. It’s like Danielle is a witness to all this going on over quite a few years. And then, when he dies, he has this incredible funeral where all his followers and fans, and people who he brought together who adore him attend this lavish funeral and he ends up in a mausoleum made of pink marble. The lovely thing about writing a concept album, which I’ve discovered, is that it lets your mind completely go free. You’re not talking about yourself. A little bit perhaps, but generally you’re not talking about yourself or your own situation, which a lot of my songs are as you know, they’re very personal, that come out of personal experience, writing other characters, which I did an awful lot more in the early-’70s. To have this concept that I can I can work with, it frees your mind up so, you know, he’s buried in a mausoleum of made a pink marble might not have made it in a song if it wasn’t written as part of the concept. Like being a script writer or a screenplay writer, you can visualise these things happening and they just all pour into my head and I just write them all down here. That’s connection. And I sit at the piano and the songs arrive.

That’s interesting. You mentioned about scriptwriters and directors and things like that. I’m listening to the album and I thought, there’s a bit of a gap in time between the next two tracks where we fast forward a couple of decades. I was thinking, well, that will be the perfect time for an intermission for a musical or a stage play! Is that something that’s been thought about or talked about?

It has. My old producer from the ‘70s, Paul Phillips, is someone I’ve kept in touch with ever since. Whenever I’m working on an album or finish a track, I

always send it to him every time and he comes back to me and makes suggestions here and there, which I usually ignore! But he’s a great guy. He’s very talented and he’s always known exactly how I work. After about the fourth or fifth track I sent him from this album, he said, ‘You know, John, this, this could be a film or musical as it has so much potential for being something other than an album’. I said, ‘Yeah, lovely idea, but I don’t know anybody’. Anyway, he’s already talking to friends of his who he’s known over the years, producers and people involved in musicals, so he’s actually getting the ball rolling. He’s going to Monaco soon, apparently to talk to somebody about the idea. Whether it happens, Dave, I don’t know, as stage musicals have a reputation of folding before they even get on stage, quite often, as there’s a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of people, millions have to be spent to give what people expect from musicals. If it ever happens, I think it’s going to take quite some time. But it’s lovely that he’s got this idea. And he’s already interested another chap in the idea. I think also, it would make a good animation project, you know, I think you could actually make a really nice animated movie of it. That way, you could actually get more fantasy elements to it, you know, we don’t have to have live actions. Other people are coming up with these ideas and it seems people who’ve heard it are quite inspired by it, and that’s really fantastic to know.

It’s such a good story and it probably resonates today because it’s such an open subject compared with fifty years ago. It’s probably something could be made now as opposed to fifty years ago. Just moving on to the next track on the album, ‘Still Gorgeous’ takes place several decades later and finds Danielle taking stock of her life and where she is at that point. It also introduces a reporter who finds out this story of Daniel transitioning to Danielle. Then there’s the next track, ‘Sticks and Stones’.

‘Still Gorgeous’ just wrote itself. I

knew I wanted this show number in there. When I was performing in Restaurants, there used to be a drag group called the Disappointed Sisters who would come on stage while I was playing, dancing around and making funny faces. I’d also do a duet with the lead singer. I had this idea I could add this in to the show in some way. I thought, how can I get Daniel onstage after all these years? Why would she perform? So, the idea I got was this whole thing about the reporter, hearing somebody else telling the story about this Pop star who then disappeared, which intrigued the reporter enough to investigate. The reporter then gets a phone call saying there were rumours that Daniel was now living in Paris as Danielle. So eventually, she tracks Daniel down and offers to interview her, but Danielle says no, because she’s done with being Daniel and doesn’t want it all bringing back. She’s very happy with who she is now. But she does say, I am actually thinking about performing again. And I’ve been offered to do this gig at this club that I go to. The reporter bites and sees the show, where Danielle performs ‘Still Gorgeous’ with all her friends on stage. And it’s a big lavish, camp, show number. The reporter writes a review of the show, which turns Danielle into this sensation and everybody wants to know all about Danielle. So, fame comes knocking at the door again. She’s not sure she wants it anymore, but she accepts it and becomes an icon in the gay and transgender communities. Like April, that’s exactly what I’m tapping into. In real life, April became this iconic figure. She was given the keys to Liverpool, where she came from. She was made an OBE for championing transgender rights. They even had exhibitions of April’s paintings in galleries all over the UK. Recording that track was interesting because again, I don’t have anybody to record with, so I had to do all the voices myself and make myself sound like a like a lot of people on stage. I recorded it in different parts of the studio but kept them as it was, so you got this room ambience of different people singing on different parts of the stage. I sent it to Ian Button because he was

going to master the album. He said, ‘Why don’t you come up with some sound effects, like a club audience?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know where to get those’. He found all these samples from, I think, the BBC archives of different clubs, audiences. Cheers, laughter, claps applause. And fascinatingly, the one he chose was a recording from the ‘60s of a club in Paris, which also had British people in the audience as well as French people. It was just so perfect. For me, when he did that, it just lifted the track from being a studio recording into a proper live performance. And then we move into ‘Sticks and Stones’. You know, she’s now on the cover of Vogue and everybody wants to talk about Danielle. But, she’s on her own in this apartment and leafing through the magazines and there she is, another article, there she is again, and then starts thinking back to when she was the young Daniel being bullied, which I was too, and being called names in the street, which I was. That was quite a personal song to me in a lot of ways. And that’s how it works, she actually thinks back to what life was before she became Danielle, living this fantastic life in Paris. I thought it was important to actually pull the story back a little bit to her former life rather than just continuing this line of glamour and fabulousness and all the rest of it, which is great.

Yes, right at the end of the song, the angels reappear and everybody’s singing about love. I think the angels are in the next song as well, ‘The Mirror (Look!) Reprise’, which takes in the final days of Danielle?

That’s right. Well, it’s basically the death scene and they’re all helping us through the journey, which we’d all like to have wouldn’t we, somebody helping you pass on? Anyway, the angels basically lift her up and carry her off as the song finishes and the next song ’16 (Woo! Woo!)’ starts, where you find the angels are carrying her into her old school classroom, full of her old classmates, having the life that she never had. It’s a joyous occasion, almost like one of those songs from ‘Grease’ [1978], you know, with

everyone singing and dancing and being happy. Very vampy, that sort of vibe and if you notice, there’s that Buddy Holly kind of feel to the song. Then, right at the end of the number, the action freezes and all the stories from her life and snippets of songs come together in one song called ‘A Place in Time’, each version of Daniel / Danielle making an appearance. It’s what I call ‘an afterture’ rather than an overture.

It all sounds wonderful; I can only imagine how spectacular it would look if it were to become a musical on stage. It’s very ambitious, but what are your plans now and how do you follow this?

Well, I have the third book in the series of my life story, called ‘In the Eyeline of Furtherance’ and covering the time period 1986 to 2001 [this follows ‘Incidents Crowded with Life’, 2018 and ‘Illusions of Happiness, 2020]. That’s the time I was working within the music industry, before ‘Kid in A Big World’ was re-released [in 2001] and during the time I met Neil. I’m also working on another project. I always like to set myself a challenge, so I’m working on a forty minute track …

A 40 minute track?

Yes, 40 minutes. I don’t think it will get any radio airplay!

Well, there’s a challenge! If I ever resurrect the Smelly Flowerpot radio show, guess what I’ll be playing first!

I hope so! I’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s an exhausting process. It’s all about friendship … the friends you’ve known, the ones you’ve imagined as well as the ones you’ve loved and lost. It deals with how these friendships change over the years, how you change and how your friends change.

That sounds intriguing, we look forward to hearing it! Best of luck with the new release and further adventures, and thanks for taking the time to talk about your various projects.

‘Look - The Unknown Story of Danielle Du Bois’ is out now on Kool Kat Musik whilst the third instalment of Howard’s autobiography, ‘In the Eyeline of Furtherance’ is available via Fisher King Publishing.

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