John Otway interview: "Rock'n Roll's Greatest Failure" on URGH!, Pete Townshend, "Cheryl's Going Home," his ambidextrous guitar, and his second full gig in Vancouver since 1979!

John Otway and a cute female fan at Toby's Open Mic

When UK cult musician John Otway performed last winter as part of brief shock-and-awe appearance at an open mic at Toby's Social Pub in North Vancouver, press materials that were circulating said that he had played over 5000 gigs. Before he took the stage, we were chatting, and I asked, "So will this count towards that list?" He grinned mischievously and said, "I'll tell you after."

Interviewing him earlier this month, I bring the question up again: had it counted? "I'll have to look on my spreadsheet to see if I've added it." How many shows are we up to now, anyhow? "Last year was my 5000th gig," Otway reports,  "and there's been about 120 since, so we're up to 5,120." (There have been more since).

So when did Otway actually start counting gigs? He used to entertain his school chums at a very young age, we gather, but Otway doesn't include on his official lists "the times when I did an odd song. But I had decided I would have a concert, a whole show of my own, in the drama room at my school. I've still got a recording of it. It's quite nice, because you can see just how much I haven't improved! I invited all these first-year girls that I sort of liked, that got to be Otway fans, to come to the show, and you can hear them screaming all the way through it..." 

That's where the spreadsheet starts. Otway was 18 for that show, so that was in 1970. 

That first official show consisted mostly of covers, but "there is one Otway song in there" ("Enjoy, It Just Won't Last," which -- again, if I understand correctly -- is the first song Otway ever wrote). "All the rest are covers, things like 'If I Were a Carpenter,' 'House of the Rising Sun,' a couple of Bob Dylan things."

Gig or not, some 5000+ shows later, the North Van four-song open mic appearance (viewable online here and here) was arranged by uber-fan Ian McClelland, who follows the exuberant first-gen punk online. (Actually, Otway's repertoire is a bit more complex than just punk, also including, with the occasional help of Wild Willy Barrett, earnest folkie ballads, disco spoofs, a BTO cover, and at least one very silly version of a Beatles song, but let's call him a first-gen punk for now, even though he predates punk rock by some margin, more on which below). McClelland learned Otway would be passing through Vancouver en route to a tour of New Zealand and Australia, and found a way to for him to make a brief public appearance. Otway told Toronto promoter Gary Topp, of long association with Otway, that it would be happening; Topp in turn informed Al Mader (a big fan of Otway's, and on the bill next Saturday). Al called me; I let other people know, and Otway ended up with a small but devoted cheering section, who no doubt confused the hell out of the Toby's regulars: "Who the hell is this guy? What's with the entourage?" 

One of the people in the audience that night was Zulu Records' Grant McDonagh, who had seen Otway perform in Vancouver on July 27th, 1979, opening for Pere Ubu at a venue in Robson Square on his first North American tour. I made a point to introduce McDonagh to Otway, which encounter both men remember: "It was great that people turned up that had seen me all those years ago. I've always had very fond memories of Vancouver, based on how well we were received the first time we played there."

That first Vancouver gig actually was a standout show from that 12-or-so date tour, backing Ubu. "That was with a guitarist called Ollie Halsall. It was one of those wonderful performances... I was walking onstage and tripped up and did a pratfall, basically, and got this huge applause from the audience." *(Otway's theatrics are usually deliberate but sometimes accidents work in his favour, too). "We actually stormed that gig, so I've got a really strong memory of it, and I thought, on the Pere Ubu tour, it was going to be brilliant, now; but the next gig was San Francisco, and we went on to do our first set, and as we started the show, there was this cry of, 'Get the phony English accents!' from the audience. They had tomato ketchup sachets, and they started throwing them onstage, so we walked offstage covered in what looked like a great deal of blood. It was quite funny, [to go from] the glory of Vancouver to the ignominy of San Francisco."

Otway also recalls the shooting of his live performance of "Cheryl's Going Home," which appeared in the concert anthology URGH!: A Music War, alongside footage of the Cramps, the Dead Kennedys, XTC, John Cooper Clarke, and many other artists active at that time. "I think we'd just come off an American and Canadian tour" (but not the same one as that first Vancouver show; this time, for his second venture onto the continent, Otway had brought a full band, which you see in the homecoming footage). "It's an interesting film, because the director just thought he'd pick a lot of acts that were current at the time and make a movie out of it." The Otway clip was shot at Portsmouth Polytechnic, in England. "They were choosing a song from each band, so we did a few numbers and that that's the one they chose." 

For a few of those who made it out to Toby's, URGH! had been their introduction to Otway's body of work, for some the sole representation of his oeuvre. I had picked up his two Canadian anthologies, Deep Thought and I Did It Otway (the cover of which shows him playing a vacuum cleaner, but note, this is no Eugene-Chadbourne-style homemade instrument, no electric rake; it's just a gag for the picture). So I knew there was more than that one song to his repertoire, as befits someone with a 50+ year career.  

But "Cheryl's Going Home" is, in fact, a cover. It was still appropriate, Otway says, for the filmmakers to pick it, because of an episode a few years before on the British music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, which helped make it a signature piece.  "It was the reason I became famous in the UK, because" -- running about the stage and leaping in the air, as Otway is prone to do -- "I landed astride an amplifier and landed on my testicles with an audience of five and a half million watching. And that shot me to stardom! So it's always been a favourite."

Actual image of Otway remembering landing on his testicles

"What's quite nice," Otway continues, "is that Bob Lind, the person that wrote it, wrote to me quite a few years ago and said, 'I understand you've done my song.'" Otway -- who really does have an English accent, which makes it occasionally challenging to decode what he's saying. so I miss a few words here -- then apparently replied to this letter, saying, "'Not only have I covered your song, I've played it at nearly every single gig of my career'... In an interview [Lind] did quite recently he said that my version of 'Cheryl's Going Home' is his favourite, which is quite nice." 

Another early cover, a version of "Where Do You Go to My Lovely," by Peter Sarstedt, gets significant mention in Otway's hilarious (first) memoir, Cor Baby, That's Really Me (which you can order from his website). Otway did it at that first gig, then performed as part of a bill with the Aylesbury Youth Orchestra (a version of the song seems to appear on some versions of the Aylesbury Goes Flaccid compilation but I don't think it's that one). Otway's memoir, somewhat eccentrically written in the third person, tells the story of the event, also from very early in his prehistory. Excerpting from pages 21-22:

After toying with various ideas, [Otway] decided to try and sing "Where Do You Go to My Lovely," add as much drama and emotion as he could, and use the 'Yelling Voice' he had tried at Queens Park playground. Basically, he thought, "I'll just get up there, sing this song and go completely over the top." 

John's performance that night followed some chamber music and an oboe solo. The audience was quiet and politely applauded our young star as he walked on the stage and hammered out the first few chords of the song. 

After the first line of singing, a couple of the younger members started giggling with embarrassment, to be joined very shortly by several more. As he hit the first chorus, and the first high note of the song, which meant screwing up his face into a contorted shape and forcing all the air in his lungs through his vocal chords as fast as possible, the whole audience erupted. Tears streamed down the faces of that orchestra and one woodwind player actually fell of his chair clutching his sides.

Otway got his first ever standing ovation that night. No one had ever seen anything quite so ridiculous and funny on one of these courses. 'I loved that silly singing you did," they said afterwards to a beaming Otway. Even Tony Freeth, who was organiser and conductor, thanked John for a very entertaining piece. 

So that was another important song in terms of Otway's history -- "the first time I ever cracked an audience," Otway puts it to me, "and the first time I'd realized that that sort of humour onstage could reap rewards." 

Otway does "tend to pick the covers for the humour element in them," but "Cheryl's Going Home" "wasn't ever done as a funny song," he explains. It entered his set during the time when Otway was performing regularly at Wild Willy Barrett's folk club in the early 1970s, where he'd been regularly doing "Where Do You Go to My Lovely." "It used to go down quite well, but Willy, after about the third week, said, 'If you want to play here again, you'll have to play a different song,' so I had to try to find a different song, and there was this song that was on the B-side of [Lind's] 'Elusive Butterfly,' and I'd always liked the track. I managed to discover that I could actually work out the chords to it. So I did the same thing I did with 'Where Do You Go to My Lovely,' and added this whole middle section which is full of drama."

The funnier, more outlandish material Otway does balances quite nicely with the sincere romanticism of some of his covers (including a version of "The Highwayman" that rivals Phil Ochs' for sheer drama) as well as some of the songs he's written (like "Geneve," his second single, which puzzled fans of "Really Free," his previous hit, to no end). "I've always tried to write well, and I've never found a difficulty going from something that's completely ridiculous to something that's really nicely written. I've never felt that you need to warn or tell people or do anything, you just play a nice song. Something that I think is nicely written is a song called 'Poetry and Jazz' on the Premature Adulation album, that I spent eighteen months writing. It's a lovely song. I try to write as well as I can. Even the amusing stuff, I try and do my best."

In terms of Otway's originals, I've grown particularly fond of "Louisa on a Horse," which was produced by Pete Townshend. The story of that encounter is entertainingly told in Otway's first memoir, including a studio encounter with an impressed Mick Jagger, whom Otway fails to recognize: "What did Mick Jagger say?" Otway's friends ask him. 

Otway is terrific at portraying himself as a bit clueless, even if you sense that he's actually a fairly savvy, clever character; it's quite a charming combination, actually. 

So does Otway still run into Townshend? "Our paths have crossed occasionally. When he played Toronto in the 1980s, I met up with him and we went to the Toronto show." Not long ago, as well, "we did a direct-to-disc version of the first album and Willy sent him a note and got a nice note back saying he couldn't help out but wished us the best with it and said to 'say hi to John for me.' He's obviously aware that I'm still around!"

I observe that it's curious that Townshend is not mentioned in the Otway movie. "What happened with the movie was that, I wanted to start it off with what will probably always be the best I gig I've ever done, which is the one in the Aylesbury Market Square after the first hit. And we had lovely footage that was shot for a television company on 16 mil film, and these days you can blow that up and do some work on it and it looks absolutely wonderful. And when we started making Otway: The Movie, I wanted to start off with the market square with 10,000 people in it, and me doing a song, because it makes such a strong statement; and then we basically told the story from there. And when I got up to writing the first book, I went right back to when I was born and did everything that led up to that concert, and carried on from there. But the film was long, and I noticed that it upset the narrative quite a bit. So everything leading up to that concert, including all the Pete Townshend stuff, got cut, to make the narrative tell one linear story. And Pete Townshend didn't want to be in the film, so we didn't have footage of him talking about me, which obviously would have made the film."

As for "Louisa on a Horse" -- rather hilariously represented live here, in footage from 2003 -- the song has some autobiographical significance for Otway: "White Leaf Cross is a beauty spot just outside of Aylesbury where I was born, and when my parents kicked me out of home, I lived on White Leaf Cross in a tent for a little while, and my first girlfriend [Sue Reese] lived near Princess Risborough. A lot of the references are all about that time. And when we recorded it, Pete Townshend said, 'I think I should put a bit of guitar on it,' and he was three feet away from me; there was a track playing, and Pete Townshend  played on my track literally three feet away from me, doing these wonderful Pete Townshend power chords. Funnily enough, I wasn't a huge Who fan at the time, but I remember watching him do that, thinking, 'Oh, he's quite good!'" 

I also asked about "Beware the Flowers ('Cause I'm Sure They're Going to Get You, Yeh)," the b-side of Otway's first and biggest hit. "Beware the Flowers" was voted England's 7th favourite song lyric in a BBC poll, as Otway explained with a very entertaining anecdote at the North Vancouver open mic (also reported in the Independent; it's a story that can be more fully researched by watching the movie about him, which itself was voted a favourite film in a Guardian poll, based on his fan's interventions). I have no shortage of theories as to where the central lyrical conceit might have come from, from the Star Trek episode, critiquing hippie passivity and drug use, showing the crew of the Enterprise stoned on the exhalations of dangerous alien plants, to Day of the Triffids, to a general mistrust of the cliched tokens of romantic love; but asked about the inspirations, Otway doesn't weigh in conclusively. "It's not one of those songs you can say, 'Oh, it's about this.' But amusingly, there's a list of songs that people can choose for their funerals, and it's on there, because people have chosen it. You can understand why!"  

As for "Bunsen Burner," his second hit -- "given" to him by his online fans as a 50th birthday present, which story there is also a great deal of entertaining background about in the movie -- the video features a very unique guitar, hinged in the middle, and designed so that you can trade off whether you are playing left- or right-handedly; two people can play it at once, as well. When I first saw it in the video, I thought it was a visual effect, a gag, some sort of mirror image stunt. It may be a gag of sorts, but it's also a physical object and a real, functioning guitar, which Otway will have with him, along with his Theremin, a vocal sampler, and a few other doodads to enhance his solo show. "Almost every song's got some sort of humorous attachment," he quips. 

This is not an optical illusion; that's a real guitar.

I ask Otway what that particular guitar is called, and he jokes, "It's a 12 string," pausing a beat to see if I get it; more usually, he refers to it as his "ambidextrous" guitar: "It folds up and it takes a lot of room, and you sometimes think, 'Is it worth carting something that big around the world for a three-minute gag; then you go, 'Yeah, yes it is.' Nobody else has got one!"

Otway explains to me how this unique instrument came to be: "Ollie Halsall, the person I played the Vancouver gig with, was a left-handed guitarist. And I'm left-handed. I mean, the first instrument I learned to play was the violin. I make a joke about it onstage, but you never get left-handed violin players, because when you're in the orchestra, the bow goes in the other person's eye. I'd love to see a symphony orchestra with one left-handed violin player, d'you know what I mean? All these people with OCD would go 'NO! Kick him out, he's driving me mad!' So anyway, because I did right-handed violin, I did right-handed guitar, but when I was working with Ollie, he would always ask me, 'Oh, could you tune up my guitar,' so I would tune up his guitar and found out that I might have been able to play the left handed guitar better. And it did make me realize I could play chords both ways round."

As Otway planned designs for the guitar, he realized that without a hinge, "the case would need to be this big":

"I thought, to make is smaller -- there's no strings going down the middle, so why not put it in two halves and hinge them together? And then I realized, 'hang on, you can make it flap!'" Otway moves his elbows back and forth to demonstrate. "It became a great source of humour." Otway had mocked up "a rough one," sawing up two Gibson guitars, whereupon he discovered that if you saw up two right-handed guitars, "they're not mirror images of each other," one of them clearly being upside-down. "I decided I wanted a proper one, which  meant getting a guitar maker that made both right- and left- handed guitars to make it. I told him about hinging them together and put a note to get a thick, rubber vacuum cleaner belt to go between them, so that it would flap. He went, 'I'm sure that we could do better than a vacuum cleaner belt.' And I went, 'As long as it flaps, that's fine.' And it arrived, and it had a vacuum cleaner belt! ...which makes it spring backwards and forwards."

It's delightful to watch, very funny, more than any mere optical effect could be. "I've always liked physical humour, and I've always been quite good at it, as people spotted my lack of coordination. People laugh at you if you're slightly un-coordinated. It's quite a handy attribute to have!"

Otway has a great sense of humility and humour about himself, as may be apparent, but he's actually a bit hard on himself in that book, no? 

"Ages ago, I had someone write a very disparaging short bio, and I just really liked the humour; I realized that banana skins are far more amusing than successes. My career, when I wrote that first book, was at a very low point, and I thought, 'Why not just write an amusing book where, instead of the artist being the good guy and the record companies being the bad ones, you have it the other way around, where the record companies are really doing their best, and the management is really doing their best, and this artist manages to screw everything up!' And unfortunately, when I looked back on all the decisions in my career, I could always find out where I'd gone wrong. I found it was an easy and amusing book to write, as long as I wrote it in the third person; if I'd written it in the first person, it wouldn't have been the same thing. And I could be a lot more cruel about myself than anybody else could possibly be!"

It's really all just a persona he's created. "It's an extension of me. The actual real Otway is basically boring. The Otway that I created is a lot more fun and exciting! And the other Otway fucks up a lot. I've always just imagined myself watching myself from the audience: 'Would I be entertained by this?' For me, the job of the entertainer isn't to travel the world persuading people you're a brilliant, wonderful person. It's to entertain them! It's character entertainment. So in the heckles for 'House of the Rising Sun,' the whole audience yells, 'Who's a prat?' and I go, 'I'm one!'" (Otway is not decisive as to whether a "heckle sheet" will be provided to mock him in the traditional manner for that song; a character named Deadly the Roadie may be on hand to help out on that front. But you can see some of the call-and-response at work in the Abbey Road sequences in the Otway film. Yes, Otway has recorded at Abbey Road!). 

Of course, back in February of this year, Otway's subsequent tour of New Zealand was impacted by a natural disaster, Cyclone Gabrielle, which ultimately meant that he had to cancel a couple of appearances, something he hates to do. That's why he decided to re-book a tour of the area, and why he's stopping over here again, with a bit of a better venue lined up (again with the aid of Gary Topp and a few of us who were at the Toby's show). The November 4th gig at LanaLou's has a cancellation of its own, in that Murray Acton of the Dayglo Abortions had originally been slated to round out the bill; he has to go back into hospital to deal with some of the leftovers of his recent cancer ordeal, so taking his place will be Stephen Hamm: Theremin Man. Which in a way is perfect, because Otway will also be packing his Theremin. There is discussion of a Theremin duet or duel or such (Otway has something in mind, he tells me; I can't wait to see what).  

Otway in North Vancouver

And if Otway isn't really a punk, he did (and does) have a trailblazing, punklike, DIY attitude: his first single, of "Misty Mountain" and "Gypsy," released in 1972, on CRS Records, was actually a self-release -- a very uncommon practice at the time; though they make it seem like a label, CRS is just the company -- County Recording Service -- where Otway (and Barrett, though he is not credited) got it pressed (a single copy is on sale on Discogs as I write this; with shipping, it would come to just over $108 Canadian dollars). The single came to the attention of famed DJ John Peel, giving Otway and Barrett "a bit of an early start. He was always looking out for new acts, and he picked up on the fact that there was this strange record that came out of Aylesbury that the artists had produced themselves, and it started playing on a major radio station, on the BBC. And then Pete Townshend got to hear of it, and that was a huge first step, to be a 20 year old, and Pete Townshend is producing some tracks for you... it's a great start!"

Was Otway punk rock before there was punk rock, then? "As I've said before, being shocking and playing badly suddenly became fashionable and caught up with us. But we'd been doing it for years! The problem is, a few years later, it became unfashionable, and we were still being shocking and playing badly."

John Otway plays LanaLou's on November 4th -- Facebook page here, Eventbrite here.  Contrary to previous reports, doors will be at 8 and the show will start closer to 9ish. Murray Acton will not be present; Stephen Hamm: Theremin Man (subject of a live review at LanaLou's on this very blog) will start the night, followed by a set from the Minimalist Jug Band, then a full! set! from Otway starting off sometime around 10:30. Not exactly sure what Hamm and Otway will have in mind, but you can likely expect some interaction -- both men are amenable!