JOHN OTWAY AND THE BIG BAND - The Half Moon, Putney, London - December 4th, 2004 - by zetta-deluxe guest writer Nick Morgan

The church bells were ringing when I arrived in Putney – a Triple Bob Major I think – a charming, eccentric, and very British remnant of a bygone golden age. Appropriate then that I was heading – with my mate Bob – to see John Otway; charming, eccentric, British, remnant, bygone, golden and most definitely aged.

If the 51 year old Otway didn’t exist it would be hard to imagine him, let alone invent him. And certainly far beyond the powers of the witless corporate-faced marketing and A&R guys who dominate decision making in most record companies – even the so called independents. [Editor’s note – steady on Nick - just remember what pays your pension !] Otway is one of those very British gems who gently slid through the door that Punk had kicked in so violently in the mid-seventies – think Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Siouxsie Sioux, Elvis Costello – but whose musical directions and ambitions lay elsewhere. Otway’s songs (and there are some good ones – try ‘Josephine’ off the first album) are mostly rooted in the English folk-tradition, and his performance is pure Music Hall – somewhere between the insouciant naiveté and manic surrealism of comedians such as Charlie Drake, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe.
He starts the evening by somersaulting (literally) through what was – until a couple of year’s ago – his sole claim to fame – the 1977 top thirty (no. 27) hit ‘Really free’, followed by the B-side ‘Beware of the flowers’ – which for those of you who don’t know, was voted number seven in a BBC poll in 1999 for the Nations’ favourite song lyrics.