John Miles

John Miles was not a one-hit wonder, contrary to popular belief. It's true that "Music" is the only track of his that survives in the collective memory, as confirmed by streaming figures: on December 5, 2021, it stood at 17 million plays on Spotify and 15 million views on YouTube (spread across various videos). Every other song of his is still far from reaching the one-million mark.

Indeed, well before streaming took over, "Music" already seemed to be the only song he'd ever made: on radio stations with an eye on the past, in TV appearances, in countless articles on the history of rock.

There's certainly no doubt about the impact the song had in Europe in 1976: number 3 in the UK, number 1 in the Netherlands (where it remains one of the best-loved songs of all time), number 2 in Italy (failing to reach the top only because of Riccardo Cocciante's "Margherita"), and number 10 in Germany.

Yet these weren't the only successes John Miles achieved. Besides the decent sales of the album "Rebel", which included the aforementioned single and itself reached number 9 in the UK and number 7 in Italy, he released several other singles with notable results: "Highfly" was a UK top 20 hit in 1975, "Remember Yesterday" reached the UK top 40 and the Italian top 20 in 1976, and "Slow Down" hit number 10 in the UK and the US top 40 in 1977.

There are songs with lesser chart results than these that are still well above a million plays on both Spotify and YouTube: the way time has swallowed up everything John Miles ever released, aside from "Music", is simply cruel. The songs mentioned above are all examples of sophisticated pop music, consistently poised at the meeting point between a catchy refrain and layered arrangement.

"Highfly", released in autumn 1975 and later included on "Rebel" in March of the following year, is an excellent piece of glam rock with a saturated guitar sound, likely influenced by the late Move (the one led by Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne; "California Man" being the reference track) or by the early period of Manfred Mann's Earth Band (think in particular of the hit single "Joybringer"). Despite those clear touchstones, it manages to shine thanks to the dynamism of the composition and the skill of Alan Parsons behind the mixing desk.

The producer, for that matter, was firmly convinced of Miles's potential, to the point of bringing him in to sing on his own "Tales Of Mystery And Imagination", recorded at the same time as "Rebel" in the latter half of 1975. It wasn't a one-off collaboration: Parsons would go on to produce another Miles album ("More Miles Per Hour", 1979), and Miles would sing on three more Alan Parsons Project records between 1978 and 1987 ("Pyramid", "Stereotomy" and "Gaudi").

Also worth noting is "Slow Down", released in February 1977 as part of Miles's second album, "Stranger In The City", and then as a single in the summer of that same year, even managing to make inroads into the North American market.

It's a disco track with a funk-rock rhythm section that's rather tougher than the genre's average, particularly because of the distorted, jagged tone chosen by bassist Bob Marshall (co-writer of this song and of many others by Miles). There's a synth solo with a progressive flavor and a guitar solo run through a talk box, elements likewise foreign to the standard disco playbook, yet they sit well within a particularly aggressive track, sung by Miles in a sharp, scratchy high register.

So why is this article named after "Music"? Because even though the passage of time has unfairly buried material that was worthy and well known in its day, that doesn't change one fact: popular music in general, and rock music in particular, whether we like it or not, is steeped in mythology. A postmodern mythology, often bloated with rhetoric and hypocrisy (consider how much weight is given to something like authenticity, as if it weren't almost always carefully engineered by managers and producers), but there's no way to ignore it, and it ends up shaping how a work survives, especially as the distance of time grows greater.

Mythology is what allows the Beatles, Queen or Michael Jackson to remain among the most listened-to artists decades after breaking up, dying, or otherwise ceasing activity. These same mechanics play out at every scale: Miles operates on a level that's an infinitesimal fraction of the names above, so much so that his name is now unknown to most people. But if one song has survived, it's precisely the one that had the right qualities to carve out a niche in rock mythology - perhaps also because it was built on the same coordinates as other songs from the era that became classics, like Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", Styx's "Come Sail Away", Wings's "Live And Let Die", or the theme from "Jesus Christ Superstar".

A piano ballad, a rococo triumph (this may well be the track where arranger Andrew Powell codifies the signature orchestral sound that would later appear on every Alan Parsons Project record), a surprise harpsichord riff, hard-rock guitar solos over odd-time-signature interludes, shifts between major and minor keys (a device that's especially noticeable toward the end, as the vocal returns), and lyrics that, in contrast to such an elaborate structure, are almost self-evidently simple: music is one of the most important things in many people's lives.

The reason the statistics on streaming figures as of December 5, 2021 were given at the start of this article is that it was on that day that John Miles passed away. This article is written in memory of his talent.

Music was my first love

And it will be my last

Music of the future

And music of the past

To live without my music

Would be impossible to do

In this world of troubles

My music pulls me through

Ride the wave of great music

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13/04/2026