With his February 1975 debut album Kid in a Big World (CBS Records), Howard emerged as a late voice of the glam-pop wave of the early 1970s.
Shortly after moving to London in August 1973, Howard was playing at the Troubadour folk club, when he was spotted by "Hurricane" Smith's manager Stuart Reid, who was the head of pop at Chappell Music.
His second album – Technicolour Biography (recorded 1974 and 1975), produced by Paul Phillips – was a collection of songs in a vein similar to those on Kid in a Big World.
But after BBC Radio 1's rejection of the two singles from the debut album, CBS balked at this new set and shelved the project, with the songs never being developed beyond the initial "vocals and piano" demonstrations.
In his first autobiography, "Incidents Crowded With Life", he writes about this appearance Howard recalls that he was greeted by a beaming Lynsey De Paul "Brilliant", she said, "I watched you on my monitor!
Stephen Thomas Erlewine called this sequence of events one of the most extreme of examples of Murphy's Law in record company history.
"[11] After leaving CBS, Howard spent a brief time playing London's fashionable restaurants and piano bars – including a regular stint, for several months in 1976, at April Ashley's AD8 club.
But by the mid-1980s, Howard had stopped recording and moved to the business side of music, where he forged a successful career in A&R for fifteen years, before "retiring" to Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 2000.
Among the artists Howard worked with during this period were: Elkie Brooks, Maria Friedman, Connie Francis, Hazell Dean, Sonia, Gary Glitter, The Crickets, Lonnie Donegan, Madness, Barry Manilow and Sir Tim Rice.
lang, Stephen Sondheim, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Janet Hood/Bill Russell – was slated for 1996 release on the Carlton label.
"[17] Writing in The Guardian, in 2005, Alex Petridis mused that, when Kid was "[r]eissued to critical raves, its florid, glam piano balladry seemed more contemporary in the age of Rufus Wainwright than it must have done at the height of pub rock.
Musically "spare and simple, just Howard and his piano, occasionally embellished with a synthesizer and overdubbed vocals," the album is "a perfect soundtrack for either late-night introspection or a contemplative Sunday morning.
"The voice," wrote Helen Wright, "is in peak condition – richer than in his youth but retaining all the character, and sounding more and more like a slightly posher John Lennon."
[22] The momentum of new songwriting and recording continued with Howard's next album Same Bed, Different Dreams (2006), released on the small French label Disques Eurovisions.
Although the release of Same Bed was delayed until the summer of 2006 – the year after 2005's Dangerous Hours and As I Was Saying – Howard had laid down and sent to Eurovisions demos of all 14 of the album's songs in January 2004.
Reviewing Same Bed for the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Celine Remy called it "an authentic hidden treasure of eccentric pop: the kind of disc that one could imagine had been reissued as a vestige of a time when Bowie still haunted the cabarets and Elton John preferred writing to shopping," with Matthieu Grunfeld in another French magazine, Magic RPM, suggesting that the album "should find a strong echo among...the fans of Ben Folds.
Released on the small Spanish label, Hanky Panky Records, the album includes the song, "The Exquisites,"[27] that Howard wrote for his 2005 London show[28] at the Glam-ou-rama[29] community's Night of a Thousand Ziggys.
T. Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music and their gorgeous chart-colleagues brought fun, great singles and beauty back to a pop scene badly in need of a polish.
Waiting to emigrate to Spain, he realized a series of songs sublimely inhabited by English ghosts, a haunting and restful work, completed and refined in his new country, but without even a hint of sunshine or sangria, only suggestions of clouds and summer showers.
Tranquil in tone, but pulled by the magnets of retrospection and anticipation, these songs have a striving but restful nature, a certain sadness, but balanced by a spirit of joyful projection.
The result, writes Joe Lepper for the digital magazine Neon Filler, "gives the album a dreamlike, almost Brian Wilson produced feel, with his forgotten songs shining brightly throughout.
Piano and keyboards are the main instruments, but underneath there are lush orchestral strings, multi-layered backing vocals and carefully placed percussion.
The upshot was a November 2013 triple bill with Ralegh Long and Darren Hayman at the North London venue The Servant Jazz Quarters.
For this show, Howard performed with his first live band for many years: Rotifer, Andy Lewis (Paul Weller's bassist) and drummer Ian Button (Papernut Cambridge).
Once touted as the next big thing, his is a story of the almost made it, a tale of the machinations of the music industry, dropped in the 1970s, only to experience a resurrection since the early 2000s, that has included influencing emerging artists like Long.
It was received with rapturous reviews in Mojo, Record Collector and Q magazine, as well as German Rolling Stone and several online music sites like Drowned in Sound (10 out of 10), musicOMH and Neon Filler.
Issued with the same artwork as the original 1975 album, it promises to be a series of releases by Howard on the label, which is run by Pedro Vizcaino in Zaragoza.
In March 2022, Howard released his album LOOK - The Unknown Story of Danielle Du Bois, dedicated to and inspired by John's friend April Ashley.
The album's fictitious narrative told how early 1960s pop star Daniel Wood moved to Paris and transitioned into Danielle Du Bois, who became one of society's glitterati, befriending the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Cardin and Josephine Baker.
Then in April that year, Kool Kat Musik issued a double CD set of John's 1975 debut album, Kid In A Big World.