Interview: John Otway Debut New Zealand Tour

UK cult rock 'n' roller and two-hit wonder John Otway is bringing his famously chaotic live act to New Zealand for the first time this month, adding five more shows to his tally of more than 5000 in his 50 years of gigging with his band. Covering everything from his televised straddle injury in 1977, to 2013 feature film Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie, UTR intrepid interviewer Kit Walker caught up with John on the eve of his first NZ tour. Find out where you can catch Otway live below, and scroll down for a wild ride...

UPDATE: "Due to the extraordinary weather Auckland is facing at the moment, tonite’s John Otway show at the Wine Cellar is postponed until Sunday 19th February 2023 at the same venue with the slightly earlier time of 7pm. The opening act will be The Tegal Chicken. All tickets purchased for tonite’s show are valid for the re scheduled show. Should ticket holders require a refund, please contact Undertheradar asap."

UnderTheRadar proudly presents...

John Otway

Tuesday 14th February - Valhalla, Wellington [cancelled]
Wednesday 15th February - Space Academy, Christchurch [cancelled]
Friday 17th February - Daddy Long Legs store, Titirangi, Auckland
Saturday 18th February - 605 Morningside, Auckland w/ Ratso
Sunday 19th February - The Wine Cellar, Auckland w/ The Tegal Chicken

Tickets available HERE via UTR

Before reading, Kit Walker suggests hearing what Dawn French said about John in this fascinating interview.  

Kit Walker: Where are you now John?

John Otway: I’m in London packing, I’m about to go round the world. Before New Zealand I’m doing a show in Gibraltar to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my band. Then to Vancouver, Tokyo and New Caledonia. And after NZ it’s Australia Thailand and back home mid-March. I’m really looking forward to it all.

What do you like to eat on the road?

I tend to have one meal a day and don’t like eating before a gig so try and get something like pub food at lunchtime.

Why NZ now??

Been trying to get there for the last 40 years it’s the first time everything fallen in to place - and I’m delighted.

5000 + shows???? Can you remember them all?

A surprising number of them - as I mentioned below I’d kept a record so I was able to list them all in the Gig 5000 newspaper.

When you hit big the first time you bought a new house and a new car, how far to the other end of the ladder have you been?

A ladder implies climbing, I managed to dig myself a pretty big hole to climb out of. It made for an amusing book though.

Tell us about a John Otway show now??

I once produced an album called The Set Remains The Same. That was years ago and nothing much has changed

Is the touring life of John Otway sustainable? Is it harder now?

Most definitely yes - the hardest thing for me was lockdown when the gigs stopped. Since 1976 I had become used to going out several times a week when people would buy me drinks and tell me how wonderful I was. I hated it when that stopped and I don’t want it to stop again.

Are you still doing somersaults?

I always thought that if I stopped doing the somersaults for a long period then I probably would not be able to start doing them again. So Covid put an end to them. I did do a somersaults at sixty tour and was still doing them for my Cor Baby I’m an OAP show when I was 65.

Tell us about these moments in your life...

1977 The Old Grey Whistle Test - what's it like having 5 million people watch you crush the family jewels?

The Whistle test was my first time on UK national television. The show with my guitarist Wild Willy Barrett had a mad physical element to it, it chimed with that punk era. I would somersault whilst playing guitar, hang upside down from lighting rigs etc. With this show pumped full of adrenaline I thought it would be possible to leap on top of Wild Willy’s amplifier to sing a few lines before diving off. It would have worked had not one foot slipped, resulting in me painfully landing astride the amplifier. Even though it was excruciatingly painful I instinctively knew straight away that this sort of behaviour makes exceptionally good television - And I was right. It was real overnight success. Really Free, the single we had out at the time, entered the charts the following week and that wonderful error of judgement is what made me a pop star.

Polydor gave you a phenomenal advance back then equivalent to $2 million NZ now.

When we did the Whistle test performance and had the hit record my deal with Polydor was coming to an end and Polydor were very keen to hang on to one of their few hit acts. I however felt that we would be better off with the more trendy label Stiff Records. So Polydor kept putting up the offer to keep us on the label in the end the offer was impossible to turn down 125,000 UK pounds worth about 2 million NZ dollars now. Amusingly Polydor had just signed The Jam for 7,000 UK Pounds - this turned out to be a much much wiser investment for the company.

Selling out The Astoria (In London).

To my surprise and my record company’s disappointment my career did not take the trajectory we had hoped and eventually reached a nadir when I felt, quite correctly, that things couldn’t get any worse - So I penned an amusing self-effacing autobiography about how all my carefully thought out decisions had guaranteed my downfall. I managed to get a major publishing deal “We’re going to market you as Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure” they said - Identifying exactly where my talent lay. Audiences started returning to watch the new branded Otway and in 1993 I was heading for my 2,000th gig (yes I had kept a record of them all). Seven years before the millennium the number 2,000 had a relevance and a six month promo tour for my gig 2,000 paid off and I headlined the biggest gig I’d played since the 1970s. It was the turning point.

Selling out The Royal Albert Hall.

It didn’t take me long to work out that if I could get over 2,000 to a show at the Astoria in London that The Royal Albert Hall was just over twice the size and with a mega amount of effort should be possible. The idea of Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure headlining the Royal Albert Hall caught the imagination and after a year long campaign and a 40 date Albert Hall tour pulled it off and packed the place. When I in my teens I remember being impressed with Deep Purple’s Concerto for Rock Band and Orchestra that they had recorded at the Albert Hall and had thought that if I ever played the venue I’d like to do something like that too. Symphony Orchestras tend to be a little expensive and out of the price range for a one-hit micro-star however, I had been in the Aylesbury Youth Orchestra in my childhood, and they were still going, so I managed to do some of the show with my first band who, as I explained, had gone.

Getting that second hit twenty five years later.

My fans had started clubbing together each year to get me a birthday present. I got a theremin and a pair of Bagpipes among other things, After over twenty Hitless years I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I would always be a one-hit wonder until it was suggested that for my big 50th birthday my fans could get me back in the charts. Back in 2002 in the UK only physical sales counted towards the chart at that point downloads and streaming didn’t count and record sales were so low that 30,000 copies could get you into the Top Ten. Our campaign had 1,000 backing vocalists recorded at Abbey Road, the fans voted for which track should be the hit and despite the fact that the largest retailer in the land would not stock a track called Bunsen Burner from a balding fifty year old - by the time I’d hit that milestone we’d done it, and got to number nine! And I was back on the UKs premier music TV programme Top Of The Pops twenty five years after I first appeared on it

Making your own movie.

After the hit for my 50th a lot of people wondered what I was going to do for my 60th - To me it was obvious …. Otway The Movie. I had always religiously looked after any footage of me. Luckily there was a documentary from 1978 that had been shot on film and after writing my autobiography I had a pretty good idea of how to pace the narrative. We funded the film by selling 1,500 premier tickets to the fans and credited them all as producers. The director of the movie worked with TV news and so was used to editing very quickly, so for the climax of the movie the fans could see themselves actually arriving at the premier before their names appeared in the credits.

The 5000th gig...

Since Gig 2,000 I had kept a record of all my gigs and coming up to 2020 realised I would soon hit the 5,000 mark, and so booked the Shepherds Bush Empire in London for the big night. Then… Covid happened and there was hardly a gig ’til 2022, the year of my 70th birthday - I realised that many people celebrated becoming a septuagenarian but very few acts could claim to have done 5,000 shows. So that was the big celebration for last year, and just in case no one believed that I’d done that many I produced a 36 page newspaper and listed every single one.

Phew! Tell me is there a question John Otway should have been asked by the media that has yet to be asked?

“You are one of the most brilliant singers and genius songwriters the UK has ever produced, on a par with The Beatles, The Stones and Oasis, your records are just as good why have you not had quite as many hits?” - No journalist has ever asked me that.