Meet rock’n’roll’s ‘greatest failure’: John Otway

John Otway peaked seven minutes into his career. Go ahead and check the YouTube metrics. A violent upsurge in the squiggly line shows the most replayed bit of his UK TV debut: the moment he takes a chaotic tumble astride Wild Willy Barrett’s guitar amplifier and lands smack on his testicles.

It happened in front of 5.5 million viewers of The Old Grey Whistle Test in October 1977. If it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been invited to play his hit (Cor Baby That’s) Really Free on Top of the Pops. Nor would he be here today, probably, preparing his first ever world tour as “rock’n’roll’s greatest failure”.

“I remember once hearing Boris Becker say there was life before he won Wimbledon and life afterwards. For me, there was life before I landed on my testicles and life afterwards,” he recalls fondly from his home in Nottingham, bed-hair akimbo from rising 10 minutes ago.

At the time, it felt like fate. “From the age of nine, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a rock star.” That night on Top of the Pops, “I was thinking, ‘Yep, this is it. We’re on our way’. I didn’t realise that was it.”

After the Top 30 success of Really Free, Otway flew to Los Angeles to record a daringly different song named for a girl he fancied: Geneve. With trademark financial foresight, he booked a massive orchestra. “So that was the end of my career and my love life in one foul song.”

It was and it wasn’t. Absurd overreaching and comical self-deprecation have been Otway’s weapons since his teenaged days clearing rooms in his hometown of Aylesbury. Today his fans buy T-shirts with slogans like “I can’t believe it’s not better” and “It’s nearly rock’n’roll but I like it”. At shows they chant, “Can’t sing, can’t play, what’s his name? Otway!”

The fact that he played his five thousandth show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2022 proves he’s struck at least one chord with precision. It’s a slippery one to put your finger on, but it has more to do with sincerity, vulnerability and sheer perseverance than talent as defined by music industry professionals.

“If it’s about talent then I certainly shouldn’t have made it,” he says cheerfully. His main strengths boil down to “sort of trickery and invention – although I do think I’ve written some quite nice lyrics”.

Back in ’72, no less a rock god than Pete Townshend agreed. Listening one night to John Peel’s iconoclastic BBC radio show, The Who guitarist was smitten by an independently pressed single called Misty Mountain by Otway and Barrett – the latter a wild-haired Aylesbury local who could actually play the guitar quite well.

“Pete was amazing,” Otway says. “He produced four tracks on the first Otway-Barrett album. One of my favourite moments was Louisa On a Horse. He said, ‘I think it needs a bit of guitar’. So he picked up a guitar, and he was jumping up and down doing all these big Pete Townshend power chords about five feet away from me! I remember thinking, ‘Oh, he is good, isn’t he?’”

Ironically, being good was on the way out. When Otway finally managed to release the album in 1976, UK music tastemakers had turned their backs on stadium monsters like The Who in favour of inept outsiders. Punks. Hence, after years of near empty rooms, the short-lived and fully televised victory of Really Free.

Otway’s brief window of fame is vividly date-stamped. On September 7, 1978, he found himself riding home from a party thrown by Paul McCartney in Keith Moon’s limousine. Sadly, that night was the great drummer’s last. Which puts the lesser rock star’s survival in some perspective.

“I’ve always been a bit of a strategist,” Otway says. “I mean, after that first hit it took 25 years to get another one, but I managed to claw up there.” Bunsen Burner landed him on Top of the Pops for the second time in 2003. Again, the talent involved was not necessarily musical.

“I worked out what the problems were with getting a hit, and the main one was just getting the records into the record shops. So you basically press up a lot of records and persuade the shops to take them on sale or return.”

For 18 months prior, Otway’s long-term co-strategist Richard Cotton had been asking to hear the song he was intending to release. “I said, ‘Look, the song doesn’t matter. We need a campaign’.” It involved producing a 12-track CD and asking fans to vote for the hit, “which meant that they sort of took responsibility to make it a hit”.

It’s all about the fans. Every rock star will tell you that, but few mean it like John Otway. His years in the wilderness taught him about the very real power of a small, passionate and carefully maintained following long before “crowdfunding” was a thing.

His many fan-centric stunts over the years have included selling producer credits to fund a documentary, Otway: the Movie, and then filming punters as they arrived at the ticketed premiere to quickly splice them into the final reel. In 2017, he fulfilled a grand goal of making an album at Sir George Martin’s abandoned Caribbean studio, Air. The trip was funded by the 50 fans invited to fly over and sing on it.

“To win an audience over, you’ve got to genuinely like them,” says the master of the pint-spilling somersault. “I noticed from very early on that people would laugh at me when I walked on stage. I think there was something to do with a lack of co-ordination that I’ve got, and I realised that that was a wonderful weapon.

“I always wanted to be a huge megastar and I managed what I call micro-stardom. You go to a gig, the crowds aren’t that big, but you can talk to anybody that wants to talk to you, you can let them buy you drinks. It’s pleasant. And it’s a privilege to have actually made a living out of it.”

Otway’s early career mantra that “No problem is too big if you can borrow enough money to solve it” brought him unstuck when the responsibility of parenthood hit 35 years ago. “My father-in-law cleared my debt,” he says gratefully. Since then, breaking even has been his bottom line. “My mum always thought I’d end up having to get a proper job. My siblings have long since retired and here I am at the age of 73, still working! It’s brilliant.”

Australia joined Otway’s relentless schedule – still several hundred gigs a year – in 2023. His March return is part of a debut “world tour” stopping in Canada, Japan and the antipodes. As described in his second memoir, I Did It Otway, a similar jaunt in an Otway-branded jet was scuppered due to insufficient passenger subscriptions in 2006.

This one, “to celebrate the 33 and a third anniversary of the band”, will be documented in his third book, a road diary destined to become a micro-classic of the genre.

“We’ve got studios booked in Vancouver, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and we’re recording a long-playing record,” he adds. “It’s a picture disc with the northern hemisphere on one side and the southern hemisphere on the other. So not only have I got to organise all that … I’ve also got to write the songs.”

John Otway and his band play Memo Music Hall St Kilda on March 31, and the Vanguard, Newtown, on April 2.

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