hypersongs

Catherine Howe

A singer-songwriter from Halifax, Yorkshire, whose 1971 debut What a Beautiful Place sold for about a month before her label closed and returned to print in 2007, and who won an Ivor Novello Award for "Harry".

Halifax, television and a lost debut

Catherine Howe was born in Halifax on May 17, 1950, and trained as an actress at the Corona Drama School in London. In the late 1960s she acted on television, in Dixon of Dock Green (1966), as Ara in the Doctor Who story The Underwater Menace (1967) and in The Wednesday Play (1967), and later in Z-Cars (1971) and the film Private Road (1971). In 1970 she met Andrew Cameron Miller, an executive at Reflection, a subsidiary of CBS Records.

She recorded her debut, What a Beautiful Place, at Trident Studios in London in February 1971, produced by Bobby Scott, the American jazz pianist who co-wrote "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother". The LP was on sale for about a month in the summer of 1971 before Reflection closed, and the master tapes were lost. Numero Group reissued it on CD on January 30, 2007, from an original source copy with an unreleased outtake, "In the Hot Summer", and on vinyl in 2010.

Harry, Italy and a long absence

Howe sang two songs for Piero Piccioni's film God Under the Skin in 1972, and did Italian television work with him in 1974. Harry (RCA, 1974 or 1975) had a title track that won an Ivor Novello Award, which the article says made her only the second female recording artist to win it, and which was popular on BBC Radio 2. She then made Silent Mother Nature (RCA, 1976) and Dragonfly Days (Ariola, 1978 or 1979), her only record not reissued on CD, and sang the lead on an Ennio Morricone theme in 1976. After Dragonfly Days she retired from the music industry, citing poor sales and promotion, and later took an Open University first-class degree in history and religion.

She returned with Princelet Street (2005), English Tale with Vo Fletcher (2010) and Because It Would Be Beautiful (2015). The Observer gave the reissue five stars in 2007 and called her a Kate Bush before her time, and Record Collector named her one of the great unrecognised voices. BGO reissued Harry and Silent Mother Nature in 2006. She has also written history books: George Jacob Holyoake's Journey of 1842 (2012), Halifax 1842: A Year of Crisis (2014) and London Story 1848 (2020).

Albums

  • What a Beautiful Place 1971 · Reflection

    Her 1971 debut: jazzy, orchestral ballads produced by Bobby Scott, rediscovered in 2007.

Songs

  • Up North What a Beautiful Place · 1971

    A song from What a Beautiful Place that Noah Berlatsky called gorgeous, quietly epic nostalgia with a high, almost yodelled hook.

Sources

  1. Catherine Howe, Wikipedia
  2. Catherine Howe, MusicBrainz
  3. What a Beautiful Place, Secretly Store
  4. Catherine Howe, What a Beautiful Place, Indie-eye