Can You Hear Me OK?

After RPM issued Technicolour Biography, a collection of incomplete demos intended for John Howard's follow-up to his 1975 debut, Kid in a Big World, it seemed like the John Howard vaults were emptied out. As it turned out, that's not quite the case. After CBS rejected the Technicolour Biography material for not being commercial enough, Howard wrote a brand-new set of songs in a little over a month, and then headed into the studio with a commercially savvy producer endorsed by CBS: Biddu, the man who helmed Carl Douglas' camp disco classic, "Kung Fu Fighting." On paper this didn't seem like an ideal match, but the label wanted Howard to have a disco hit, and Biddu seemed to be the producer to deliver on this promise. Such careful plans have a way of unraveling, and CBS' scheming backfired. Howard and Biddu had known each other for a few years prior to recording the album that wound up as Can You Hear Me OK?, and Biddu had wanted to record the singer/songwriter for years. When they teamed for this particular project, they had commercial success on their mind, but it didn't take the shape of what the label had been thinking. Howard wrote a set of a bright, cheerful pop tunes and love songs, sanding down many of the eccentricities that marked Kid in a Big World and Technicolour Biography, yet retaining his exceptional sense of songcraft and very British sense of theatricality. It was a deliberately mass-market spin on his style, and Biddu followed Howard's lead, giving it a lush, sleek sound that falls halfway between mid-period Wings and Al Stewart's Time Passages. It's a smoother album than Kid in a Big World, traveling a little bit closer to the middle of the road and lacking the left turns and detours that make that record such a rich experience, but that doesn't mean Can You Hear Me OK? isn't a rewarding listen; Howard is still an immensely gifted pop craftsman, and the fact that he could streamline his work so successfully on this album is just further testament to that. Can You Hear Me OK? does seem like it could have been a soft rock hit in 1975/1976, but after its excellent first single, "I Got My Lady," failed to make an impression, CBS pulled the album from release, and it sat on the shelves until RPM released it in 2005, in the wake of the success of their previous Howard reissues. It was a long wait, but anybody who found Kid in a Big World an enchanting listen will likely love this as well.