John Howard's "The Dangerous Hours" (Bad Pressings, August 2005)

After tracking it down in Spin record-shop, Newcastle, I've been utterly astonished by how great this record is; Howard is in as resonant, delicate voice as ever he was, and his settings of Robert Cochrane's poems are glorious: the melodies sound as if they should have been around forever. Set alongside "Kid in a Big World", "Technicolour Biography" and "Can You Hear Me OK", this may well be his finest work to date – and will hopefully form the beginning of a sustained comeback. Out of nowhere – well, significant critical admiration for his re-issued 1970s work, certainly – he is back, and on staggering form, the songs tumbling out majestically, one after the other.

At the centre: the majestic piano playing, interposed with eerily warm-chilling synth-keyboard and subtle effects; multi-tracked vocals and devastatingly punctuating echoing harmonies by Howard. If there's nostalgia in this record, it is far from comforting, and all is related to the present, felt tense: "Such a Drag" is vintage, avuncular-melancholy glam-pop, "Dear Glitterheart" one of the most celestial, sublime endings to a record I have ever heard – "...*Oh*... *Yes*..." – complete with a beyond-moving falsetto at the finish, and swooning, Wilsonian harmonies. And such words of Cochrane’s as these:

‘Space waltz for dreamers
A red shoe on your head
As the man sells the world
From the back of his mind
Arching a brow
An eye pencil smile
Dangerously eyeing disaster sublime’

Amongst so many songs which reveal themselves as masterly upon much listening is “Expect the Unexpected”, in which the twinkling, twilit verse, reminiscent of the Style Council’s “Piano Paintings” suite, descends into grave, deep minor-key piano chords:

‘Tattered, mournful and so
Woefully arrayed…
Scattered yearnings
Picture cards unplayed
Intentions left unlived […]’

And ’tis all so very English; Howard's wise, tender delivery of Cochrane's compact, anguished stanzas: momentary tragedy and epiphany found in the Carry On tradition (the harpsichord-led "What a Carry On"), an emphasis on the ‘lives of quiet desperation’: ‘*So soon the laughter goes from life*’. There are emotionally grandiose choruses, and the social portraiture is concernedly bleak; and what sequencing? Fissures, contrasts, epiphanies: the ascending chorale adjoining the title-track’s chorus: what he would have sounded like if produced by Trevor Horn in 1982, rather than 1978. “The Dangerous Hours” has such a consistent unity of mood and sound that you’ll feel like playing it straight away after it concludes – as I have done several times.

Above all, this is the album of an artist communicating within the – hopefully not bygone – tradition of sensitive *and* flamboyant Englishness; and no album of this year comes close for me (aside from the Shortwave Set's "The Debt Collection"). That final gasp of A.R. Kane's "i" comes to mind, after "Catch My Drift": ‘I just challenge anyone to listen to [this] and not cry…’

One can only hope that the undervaluation of John Howard’s work during the 1970s is not mirrored today.