John Howard & The Night Mail - Album Launch

Event information

In 1975 CBS released “Kid in a Big World”, the debut LP by a golden-voiced young piano man called John Howard. But somehow, between glam and pub rock, this early masterpiece fell through the gaps. The world may have been ready for Bowie flirting with androgyny, but not quite ready yet for an out gay pop star.

Over the intervening decades, John Howard has seen more masterpieces shelved and eventually some of them rediscovered, kicking off a string of solo albums recorded in his Spanish exile over last few years.

Forty years after his debut, Canterbury-based/Vienna-born pop writer and musician Robert Rotifer has enticed this living singer-songwriter legend back to England to work on the collaborative project John Howard & The Night Mail. Apart from Howard himself on vocals and piano and Rotifer on guitar the Night Mail features Andy Lewis (Paul Weller's bassist, DJ and Acid Jazz regular) on bass and mellotron and Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge, ex-Death in Vegas, ex-Thrashing Doves) on drums, all of them contributing to an album of co-writes that due out August 21 on Tapete Records (Robert Forster, The Lilac Time, Lloyd Cole…).

It's nothing less than the joyful rebirth of an almost forgotten hero of British pop history.