He was a singer-songwriter, keyboard player and guitarist born John Errington in Jarrow, England.
He began his journey into music by learning the piano while still young and while in high school his father bought him an electric guitar after some persuasion. Taking further education at Art College he started performing there with the group, The Influence, with Paul Thompson who would end up in Roxy Music and Vic Malcolm who went to the band Geordie, before they all went their own separate ways and later left college as the group got more popular and gained his extra finance as working as an apprentice engraver.
Wanting to concentrate more on his song writing and performing his own material he formed The John Miles Set, which became popular in the local clubs but became frustrated when the audience often wanted to hear covers of hit records.
In 1971 he decided to pursue his career as a solo artist, signing up with Decca and writing songs often in collaboration with the bass player Bob Marshall, and in that decade alone he released four albums and eighteen singles such as the chart hits “High Fly” and “Remember Yesterday” with his most successful being “Slow Down” and “Music” which achieved the No. 10 and No. 3 spots respectively in the UK charts.
He didn’t have the usual image you would see from a rocker, but soon after Decca had convinced him to cut his long hair they took him on and projected a “James Dean image”, he was now in the limelight. His producers were Alan Parsons and then Rupert Holmes and he toured the UK with David Essex and Jethro Tull and the United States with Elton John.
Changing to the Arista record label he did not see the same success in the 1980s but went on tour with Tina Turner, often duetting with her on “It’s Only Love” in the absence of Bryan Adams, and became her music director for the latter half of that decade and early part of the ’90s.
1990 saw him performing the song “Where I Belong” which gained second place in the UK heats of A Song for Europe where the successful song would go on to become the British entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.
Later, in 1999, he wrote the music for the stage musical Tom and Catherine about the novelist Catherine Cookson and her husband Tom.
Often performing with other artists in all genres of music as well as following his own solo career, he appeared on albums such as his own Miles High, Play On, Rebel, Stranger in the City, Upfront and Zaragon as well as Romanza by Andrea Bocelli, Night Caller by Joe Cocker, Siempre by Il Divo, Outrider by Jimmy Page, Pyramid, Stereotomy, and Tales of Mystery & Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project, Tina Live in Europe by Tina Turner.
In the 2000s he continued to be active in music with his John Miles – Live In Concert DVD being released in 2002 and performing with the German group Pur.
He made appearances at the Night of the Proms nearly every year from 1985 and in 2017 was fiven an awrd for outstanding contribution at the Progressive Rock Awards.
He died in 2021 after a short illness when he was 72 years old.
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