John Miles is dead, the man who wrote, sang and played (except for the rhythm and orchestra) such an oversized hit with “Music” that it overshadowed his entire life and work. Who doesn’t immediately hear the song: “Music was my first looove, and it will be my laaast”? The catchy tune of the first verse hide the fact that the song was a six-minute mini-opera with what felt like three dozen tempo and harmony changes. Rebellion was yesterday, back in 1976.
Rock music had set out to become a genre, especially in Miles’ homeland England, that could be taken seriously. It was called Progrock, “Progressive Rock”. To do this, the musicians had to master their instruments, be able to write scores and know what to do with an orchestra.
Miles also had the kind of rising hero tenor who was versatile enough to endure such a rollercoaster ride of emotions in such a short time. If he had to, he could immediately pull out the rasp in the vocal cords in the next piece and remind them that he could do hard rock too. The ingenious sound engineer from Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons, with the perfect ear for musical craft, became aware of him at that time. On five albums of his Alan Parsons Project Miles was a guest singer.
Miles grew up in Hebburn, a town with a now disused shipyard on the River Tyne in northeast England. Where Scotland is much closer than London. He already had a band at school. Paul Thompson played the drums there, and later on Roxy Music should co-invent glam rock. Miles also only became successful in London. There he was one of the permanent staff at Abbey Road Studios as a guitarist and keyboardist. As a craftsman, he was still in demand later, accompanying Tina Turner and Joe Cocker on tours again and again.
When you hear yourself through John Miles’ oeuvre now, on the occasion of his death, you quickly get the “Oh, that’s that too?” Effect. It was a bit unusual for the prog rock years of the seventies, but Miles celebrated his success less with albums and more with singles. “High Fly”, “Rebel” or “Remember Yesterday” usually sound like he wrote them for a James Bond film and are part of the standard repertoire of radio stations.
Also means: he was never cool. He probably didn’t care either. Since 1985 he has earned a lot of money by walking through the big halls in front of a large orchestra and with a bunch of changing stars in the revue show “Night of the Proms”. The list of names (Andrea Bocelli, Roger Hodgson, Debbie Harry) would fill an entire page of newspaper. Up there on the really big stage he could always show what he can do. And that was the art of packing the pathos and arc of an entire opera into the tiny frame of a rock song. A whole generation of fans who grew up with their music being scolded as the noise of semi-criminal street dogs thanked him. It was announced on Monday that he died after a brief, serious illness in Newcastle, just a few miles from the city of his childhood and youth. He was 72 years old.