Armed with only a modicum of musical ability, a self-deprecating sense of humour and no apparent fear of public humiliation, this Cockney bloke carved out a modest recording career. Anything to avoid returning to his former calling as a garbageman. He first attracted notice with his frenzied live shows, in which he showed no respect for his personal safety.
He parlayed the buzz generated by fans of his stage act into a single called "Cor Baby That's Really Free. His wilfully amateur approach was actually an asset with the ascendancy of punk.
He's caught the attention of some of Britain's biggest rock stars. Steeleye Span drummer Nigel Pegrum also played. Different for Girls Soundtrack. Whoops Apocalypse Soundtrack. Forever Green Martyn. Show all Hide all Show by Jump to: Actor Soundtrack Self Archive footage. Hide Show Actor 10 credits. Poet in cafe. Conrad uncredited. Show all 71 episodes. Show all 6 episodes. Plucker - Supergran and the Chronic Crooner Hank G.
Hide Show Soundtrack 5 credits. Hide Show Self 10 credits. I considered doing it acoustically - backpacking, with a ticket from Trailfinders.
Then it occurred to me that I could charter my own plane. Moments later I started to picture the place names on the T-shirts. Once ideas of this kind have entered your head, it's terrible. I was on Ask Jeeves the same afternoon, checking the price of a plane. Curiously for a man who has never concealed his lust for fame, Otway, off-stage, is diffident, considerate and unmistakably a decent person. An intense, highly intelligent man, he was an outstanding physics student who couldn't spell or add up.
At one point he launches into an aside about the possible impact of quantum theory on future definitions of human consciousness. There's still enough ungainliness in his physical movements to see how he acquired his reputation as an idiot savant and to explain how some of his teachers suggested he might prosper at a "special" school.
In a business where performers traditionally exaggerate their ability, Otway - a gifted songwriter who is capable of captivating and deranged live performance - has repeatedly disparaged his own work and hyped himself as "Rock'n'Roll's Greatest Failure". He had his second success, "Bunsen Burner", in , after he told his network of supporters that he would like another hit as his 50th birthday present. He or she would be sitting at home in, let's say, Worcester.
They'd see on the internet: stock in Nottingham. Then they'd drive north, buy the lot, and file the message: Nottingham cleared. They see some performers on stage, crowing about how rich they are, and understandably it fills them with feelings of inadequacy and rage. I make them feel good. But then the second hit went to the head. I started to think - right. I've cracked the UK.
But I have neglected significant areas of the rest of the overseas market. The designated film crew - who currently make Monkey Business, a reality show that charts the intimate lives of a community of chimpanzees in Dorset - are, Otway assures me, consummate professionals, eager to expand their portfolio by collaborating with the higher primates. This tour may be their boldest adventure to date, but the track record of Otway and his ingenious supporters is impeccable.
They hired, and sold out, the London Palladium, more than a year before "Bunsen Burner" was released and held a party there to celebrate its triumph. In October , Otway filled the Royal Albert Hall, having booked the 5,seat venue two years in advance. I have to declare an interest at this point. As a fan, I've watched Otway many times, right from the start of his career, when he played with his then collaborator Wild Willy Barrett at venues such as The Oranges and Lemons, a small pub in Oxford.
In those days, Otway approached the stage with the masochistic exhibitionism of the bullied schoolboy who'd drunk bottles of ink and hung off bridges by his ankles, while his tormentors laughed and girls screamed at him to stop. Otway could barely play, but with his white shirt torn open, scattering buttons into the crowd, he would run along a scaffolding pole 10 feet above the stage, singing lines such as: "Look out Princes Risborough - I'm back.
He still wears his trademark white shirt and black trousers when performing, though these days he looks less like a delinquent and more like a chemistry professor whose class have spiked his Earl Grey with Rohypnol. Because I could see the sharpened points of the cymbals below. He brought down the speaker stack but fractured no bones when he landed on the sharp corner of a bass cabinet, as the impact was cushioned by his testicles.
Because that was what I'd been doing for years. Suddenly I fitted in. The trouble was that eventually even the punks learnt how to play. John Otway's curious mixture of wit, poetry and acrobatics was never well-suited to the rigid categorisation that colours the thinking of major British labels. Had Otway been born in France, as Jonathan Rendall observed in this newspaper some years ago, he would never have had to work at being a legend.
It's patently absurd, I suggest to the singer, to judge his career by counting the hit singles he's had. By that criterion, Randy Newman and Little Richard are failures as well. But his fondness for playing the clown has obscured the quality of the songwriting on his best albums such as Premature Adulation, a wonderful CD released, largely unnoticed, in The more that you talk to Otway, the more you realise that the impetus behind his whole career has been a desire for revenge - on the boys who tormented him, and the girls who abandoned him.
After Paula Yates stood him up, following their one date in Oxford, he famously told the late broadcaster: "That's your last chance to go out with a rock star. When he got his huge advance from Polydor, Otway, who can't drive, bought a Bentley and hired a chauffeur. The Airbus, the movie, and the Sydney Opera House incident are just the latest instalments in a history of celebrity as a form of payback. His childhood humiliations in Aylesbury are never far from his mind.
One of his most recent recordings, "A Revisited", definitively repudiates the theory that Americans have a monopoly on great road songs, and that English place names such as Amersham, Missenden and Wendover will automatically sound ridiculous in pop lyrics. He says that the proudest moment of his life was the first "Otfest", a free concert in Aylesbury Market Square in , when 4, people came to watch him. The bullies and the ex-girlfriends were all there.
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