WOMAD

John Otway

From United Kingdom

One of the defining, and least attractive, characteristics of Britain in the Eighties was an obsession with success at all costs; John Otway stands as a glorious corrective to that trait, a Great British failure (miles better than Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, who underachieved with far less style). Otway had a faint brush with fame in the late Seventies when, with Wild Willy Barrett, he injured himself spectacularly on the Old Grey Whistle Test and made the charts with “Cor Baby, That’s Really Free.” Since then (like Eddie the Eagle) it’s been all downhill!That, of course, is the Otway legend. The reality is that there are two Otways: the one who delights in publicity stunts that fail to get his records in the charts and another whose live shows are a consistent pleasure, who has turned to the stage, TV and building society ads with success, and who has an utterly devoted following who clearly spend too much of their lives on-line discussing his exploits. It was the first Otway who left the vocals off three copies of one of his singles: the buyers of those three were treated to Otway doing karaoke in their front room. And it was the first Otway who, on hearing that Warners like his version of Jerusalem, pressed the single with a Warners label, thus signing the label to the artist. (Neither of these scams resulted in a chart hit.)Otway Mark II wrote the acclaimed biography “Cor baby, That’s Really Me (Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure),” which is a hugely entertaining read, if somewhat disingenuous. Few definitions of failure encompass selling out the Albert Hall, playing to packed crowds in New York and delighting audiences the length of the land. Such was his live success in the Nineties that Otway returned to the studio for the first time in 12 years to produce the album Premature Adulation. It didn’t chart, of course, but for the man with one of the world’s more interesting guitars, that’s all grist to the mill.