Music is, maybe, seventy per cent of my life but I have other things to do as well. Music is my life – but it’s not all of my life, I have other interests apart from music, a lot of different things which take up my life. But if it doesn’t give you any pleasure, if you wake up in the morning and it’s, like, “Ooh, I’ve got to go and play a concert tonight,” then don’t do it, because if you feel like that when get on-stage, people in the audience are about to see that. No matter what you do in life – whether it’s playing music or writing for the newspaper – whatever you do, as long as you have fun doing it, as long as you have pleasure then you should do it. – But if you stop playing, what it would be like for you? If you earn money by doing it – that’s fine! If sometimes you do a concert because the people have come to see you, you say, “OK, tonight we’ll play for nothing – just to make sure that you, guys, are happy.” That what we do. You should play to entertain people, to make them happy. And a lot of bands do play because they want to earn just the money, they don’t care about the people they play to, and I think that is wrong. I think that to, say, with Mick Box and other guys from HEEP, they play not only for the money but because it gives them pleasure to play. You play music because you have your pleasure, because it’s good to go on playing to an audience of twenty people, fifty people, five hundred people, five thousand – if you don’t enjoy doing it, then you should stop. Once it becomes that, then – and I’ll be the first to do so – you should stop playing. You get to the point where you play because you have to play – to earn money. You don’t have a business machine behind you – unlike, say, Ozzy Osbourne…
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– John, looking at musicians like you, like HEEP, who earn no penny from your past glories, I’ve always been wondering that it must be difficult playing just to make your living. Having found that John resides ten minutes away from where DME was staying at, while in London, we arranged a meeting at the old pub called “Queen’s Head”, and there, over a beer, we had a long talk – mainly about musician’s life and all sorts of things rather than just music. On the personal level, Lawton is one of the most nice people you could come across. With the HEEP, LUCIFER’S FRIEND and LES HUMPHRIES SINGERS experiences under his belt, now John is an artist in his own right, and his artistry is no less magical.
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Many know him as a singer whose voice delivered URIAH HEEP’s greatest commercial hit, “Free Me”, but there’s more to the singer’s talent than that.