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Interviews
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John Miles- From Pop to Music Theatre Peter Lathan talks to the seventies pop star, still working but now writing musicals as well. "It's the first time I've written a song for a box!" laughed John Miles as he ate a plate of pasta in Romano's Restaurant in South Shields' Customs House theatre. The box in question is the one in which the Jarrow marchers carried their petition to Parliament when they walked from Jarrow to London to beg for work for the dying town. We were talking about the new musical, Cuddy's Miles, for which he wrote the music, which opened on 7th October, 2004 - the day after the interview - at the Customs House. And yes, the box does sing, accompanied by six policemen! John Miles, of course, is probably best known for his seventies hit Music, which reached number three in the charts, but he has worked continually since that first hit, unlike many so-called stars of the pop world who had their moment of glory and then faded away. Numerous tours with Tina Turner, a number of Night of the Proms tours (in fact, he manages just to fit in the first night of Cuddy's Miles before setting off the following day to join James Brown, Joe Cocker and Cyndy Lauper for the latest tour) and, of course, recording his own music. In 1998 he made his first venture in music theatre. Playwright Tom Kelly (who, like Miles, was born in Jarrow) asked him if he would be interested in writing music for a stage adaptation of Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners which Kelly was doing for his students, among whom was Miles' daughter Tanya, on the BTEC Performing Arts course at South Tyneside College. He did so and the show proved to be such a success that the college was invited to perform it at the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Fringe. Since then he has co-operated twice with Kelly, on Tom and Catherine, the story of Catherine Cookson, and on Dan Dare the Musical. How, I wondered, does writing music theatre compare? "In some ways it's easier. You've got a starting pointing in the characters and the story. And music theatre is more expressive: you use more imagination because you've got to get the story across. On the other hand, in some ways it's harder as you've got to work in a more uniform style of writing." He enjoys the collaborative effort: "Arthur and Dave (Arthur McKenzie and David Whittaker) were great to work with and the amount of research and imagination which they've put into the writing is amazing." He has a strong personal interest in the piece because the Cuddy (the North East diminutive for Cuthbert) of the title was his grandfather, who was the cook on the March. "I was brought up with Cuddy's experiences through my father. I never knew my grandfather: he died before I was born, but my dad used to tell the stories. They were part of my childhood and I began really to take an interest when I was a teenager. "And I like the political edge to it. It's very relevant to the political situation today." I mentioned that someone had said to me, just the night before, "Oh no! Not the Jarrow March again!" "To put the Jarrow Crusade on-stage," he replied, using the proper title(!), "would be boring. This is off-the-wall. It's a very different approach." So it's not a documentary? "Definitely not!" What about the music for the show? What provided the inspiration for that? "Really it's half the music of the period and half jazz." It would have been impossible to talk to a pop musician of such long standing without touching on modern pop music, so I asked the obvious question: what does he think of modern pop? "Pittle!" (a good good North East word meaning urine!) was the immediate answer. "Raw talent has gone out of the window. You've got to look right. Your looks have got to fit, otherwise the music doesn't get a chance. Music is now just another form of celebrity and fashion. Everything today is disposable, even music. Modern songs are not written to be remembered. You've got to have your dancers, your choreographer, your stylist - ad the computer equipment that adjusts the sound so that they sing in tune!"
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