It’s Sunday evening at the All’s Well bar in Gibraltar and the jukebox is playing non-stop John Otway songs. The great rock eccentric is leading fans in the call-and-response parts of his 2002 heavy-rock version of House of the Rising Sun, originally recorded at Abbey Road with 1,000 fans on guest vocals. The bar staff look on in amusement. “It was so special,” says Sarah Hatton, a 61-year-old lorry driver from Cornwall, afterwards. “John looked so happy.”
This is John Otway’s Wee Rock weekend – named after one of his songs and held on the wee rock of Gibraltar. Equal parts DIY punk and comedic entertainer, Otway is a veteran of more than 5,000 gigs across five decades of attention-grabbing stunts. Now 70, he still plays dozens of dates a year. To celebrate 30 years of his four-piece Otway Big Band, he has brought 100 fans to Gibraltar for one of his regular international excursions.
When I first started seeing him in the 1980s, I thought – from my perspective as an Italian – there was something quintessentially English and end-of-the-pier about Otway: flailing away in his trademark black trousers and white shirt, cartwheeling across the stage, jumping off ladders and deliberately head-butting the microphone – almost like a rock’n’roll Tommy Cooper. This is my first time on one of his oversees jaunts, surrounded by Otway lifers. “We’re like the Otway family,” says Debs Smith, 61, from Nottingham, who sang at the Abbey Road sessions. “We don’t see each other for a couple of years, then meet up at these events and pick up like we never left off.”
Otway’s career has been a seat-of-the-pants journey that started with a nine-year-old Aylesbury boy’s obsession with becoming a pop star. “He was a weird and interesting character with enormous self-belief and absolutely no ability,” laughs Chris France, a friend since Otway’s teenage years and a music industry veteran. He’s visiting from Portugal with wife, Issy. “Otway had a blind faith and determination and I got caught up in his crusade,” he says.
That crusade started in the early 1970s, at local fixture Wild Willy Barrett’s weekly folk club, the Bog Hog, above the Derby Arms in Aylesbury. For four weeks, Otway played Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? When Barrett insisted he learn another song, he started writing his own. In 1972, with £100 borrowed from Chris France, Otway and Barrett recorded the double A-side single Gypsy/Misty Mountain. He borrowed another £100 to produce 500 copies. One found its way to John Peel, and then to Pete Townshend, who produced four more songs for them.
In 1977, Polydor bought the rights to their first album, titled John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett, and the duo appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Otway’s maniacal performance ended with him misjudging a leap on to Barrett’s guitar amp and landing on his groin on the amp. He finished the song on his knees in agony, a furious Barrett grabbing his throat. The result was a sales surge, a Top of the Pops appearance and a three-year contract with Polydor.
Otway burned through the money, buying a Bentley he couldn’t drive and flying to LA to rerecord the song Geneve with a 100-piece orchestra to impress the old flame the song was written for. Popular musical tastes changed and Polydor dropped him. Undeterred, Otway started calling himself Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure. But as his audience shrank, they became more fervent, captivated by his famously rambunctious shows.
Dave and Sue James, both in their 60s, have come to Gibraltar from Shoreham. “The first time I saw him in Brighton in 1976 he did a somersault and took out the first two rows,” says Dave. “There were pints flying everywhere!”
Otway is a famously un-coordinated performer. “I once broke my nose,” he recalls over a beer in the island’s main square on Saturday afternoon. “During Body Talk, where I put drum pads in my pockets and play my body like an electronic drum kit, I thought it would be funny to pull my knee towards my face to set off the tom-tom in my back pocket.”
“We’ve seen him hundreds of times,” admits Cliff Norris, who has travelled from Orkney. “One night in Aylesbury he did a pub ‘tour’ where he played a couple of songs in one pub, then ran across the street and played a couple more, then ran down the street and played a couple more. He did that most of the night. I drove his gear around in my red MG Midget.”
Tonight’s main event is a barnstorming two-set celebration of Otway’s catalogue, but before that, the bass player for local support band Thrifty Malone calls Otway onstage to surprise him with a framed copy of the OGTW episode running order – Otway billed between Dr Hook and XTC – signed by presenter Bob Harris and accompanied by a handwritten note: “A carefully created document to mark a very special moment and sent with huge affection.” Otway looks genuinely thrilled.
The genesis of the annual overseas trips started after Otway booked his 2,000th gig at the 2,000-capacity London Astoria in 1993 and wanted his 2,001st to be just as special. He considered Australia and the US for what he called 2001 – A Space Otway, but “in the end all we could afford was to go to Dunkerque,” he says.
There have since been 15 Dunkerque trips – “I would always go for a dip in the English Channel. There would be 400 Otway fans watching me walk into the sea in the end of November!” – plus international one-offs such as this weekend. “We’ve been to most of the weekends,” says James Knowles, a retired bakery manager from Barnsley. “The camaraderie is fantastic.”
Over the years, Otway’s fans have evolved to become his key collaborators. The 2002 House of the Rising Sun recording was a mutually hatched scheme to get Otway into the charts: if all 1,000 singers bought copies for their friends, maybe the A-side, Bunsen Burner, would crack the Top 40. Not only did Otway reach No 9, it also got him on Top of the Pops for the first time in 25 years.
It’s one of many stunts that Otway has (mostly) managed to pull off. “Usually when you’re down the pub having a few drinks coming up with crazy ideas, everyone has a laugh and forgets about it the next morning,” says Richard Cotton, who has been Otway’s planner for more than 30 years. “With Otway, he’ll call a day or two later and say: ‘I booked it!’”
This includes cashing in his pension fund to rent the Odeon in Leicester Square and sell tickets for the premiere of an as-yet-unmade film with a 10-month deadline. After fan Steve Barker, a technical production supervisor, agreed to direct it, Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie met the deadline. Attendees and donors were credited as producers; Barker filmed them walking in and edited them into the end of the film as it was screening.
Armed with their own IMDb credits, more than 100 fans followed Otway to the Cannes film festival, where they charged the promenade dressed in his trademark attire and wearing Otway masks. (They even got Miss France to wear one). “It’s been suggested that I was crowdfunding before crowdfunding was even invented,” says Otway, reflecting on his fan loyalty. But the truth might be more organic than that.
“He has this brilliant ability to inspire,” says France. “He inspired me to go into music and be successful at it. He’s an enigma, an English treasure and still a work in progress. He can communicate with people in a way I’ve never seen before. He’s a warm person, he’ll help when he can and be happy to be helped. We’ve all stuck our necks out over the years. He inspires support and loyalty.”
Otway’s philosophy is simple: “When you do a great gig, you want to have a beer with the audience afterwards. I would feel really disappointed if I was kept away from the party.”
In 2017, Otway wanted to be the first person to record on the Caribbean island of Montserrat since the Rolling Stones made Steel Wheels in George Martin’s Air studios, which was destroyed by a hurricane and a volcano in 1989. “The studio was in such bad shape that while we were scouting for a space to build a temporary studio, the guy showing us around fell through the floor,” says Steve Barker. “On the last day, we discovered that George Martin had a soundproofed cinema in his basement.” Favours were called, sleeves were tugged and Martin, a month before his death, gave his blessing. Otway crowdfunded to build a temporary studio, and 50 fans flew out for the recording, singing backing vocals with local school kids. “We ended up at the governor’s mansion dressed up and having wine and canapés,” marvels Sarah Hatton.
On finishing the album – which he titled Montserrat – Otway donated the recording equipment to the children, to be overseen by Peter Filleul, a local music teacher and member of the Climax Blues Band. His kindness is typical, says John Skews, a fan from Sheffield who has been running Otway’s merch for eight years. “Before we went to Montserrat, I had a personalised notebook made with a gold disc on the cover and the joke: ‘John Otway: 50,000 record sales’. I said: ‘Go on, write me a hit.’ He used it to write the lyrics for Montserrat. The trip coincided with my 50th: on my birthday he returned the notebook with all his handwritten lyrics.”
On Saturday night in Gibraltar, Otway’s well-versed fans shower him with flowers as he starts the first of two sets with his song Beware of the Flowers. He sports a plastic seagull mask for a soaring Seagulls on Speed, and ends with 1978’s Geneve, a tender love song about his first heartbreak. Then it’s time for drinks with the fans until closing time.
“I always used to fret that I would never achieve the sort of mega-stardom I thought I was destined for,” Otway had said earlier. “But I’ve made enough money to bring my family up on. You can talk to all your fans and it’s a micro-audience for a micro-star, but that micro-audience is very loyal, and I do really enjoy them as much as I hope they enjoy me.
“It is a lovely level of stardom. The fans are probably more avid than anybody else’s fans. If any big person’s fans are that avid, they’re probably stalkers!”
• John Otway is touring the UK now. Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s 50th anniversary tour commences in April. See johnotway.com
