Gig 047 John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett
1 December 1977
During the autumn of 1977 I’d made a few friends in Oxford, some of whom frequented the Oranges & Lemons in St Clements. So it was that on a drizzly Thursday night I wandered over Magdalen bridge to the part of town which Inspector Morse never visited, to see almost-local semi-legends John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett play one of their regular nights in said boozer. At this time I was a bit nervous about entering an unfamiliar pub, not because I was underage – in those days no one worried about that so long as you behaved yourself – but because it seemed to take very little to provoke hostility, particularly if you looked vaguely punk-ish. Sleepy Abingdon was frequently like the Wild West at chucking out time, and I was well used to getting, and avoiding, the hairy eyeball in Oxford city centre. With the O&L however I needn’t have worried, despite its reputation for being ‘a bit rough’. It was certainly a little shabby – wooden tables and stools here and there, a low stage in the in front of the big window to the left of the entrance, the bar along one side of the main room, a small back room with a ratty sofa, a jukebox, walls covered in snapshots and hand-made posters – but overwhelmingly it was friendly in a rather deadbeat way, rheumy-eyed stoners either side of the bar just happy to be in this benign space. There were also a few punks, and what seemed to be one or two nutters who were essentially harmless, or so it appeared at the time.
Otway & Barrett had been playing the O&L for a year or two and seemed to know everyone there, their growing fame or rather notoriety being a source of mild amusement to all. I didn’t sense any sort of contrivance about their shambling approach, they just did what they did, and certainly in Otway’s case it’s not like there was any other option. As mentioned before, his untutored approach to songwriting comprised a mixture of the daft and just occasionally the heartfelt. In such a setting the daft songs tended to be the most popular, particularly Beware of the Flowers (Coz I’m Sure They’re Gonna Get You Yeah), and Cor Baby That’s Really Free, which at that moment was a real hit single and saw the duo cavorting on Top of the Pops and playing real theatres and the like. Fame had changed nothing, Barrett still wearing a vaguely grumpy exasperated look as his held things together musically, Otway a village-idiot Jagger, scuttling across the stage, climbing on the amps, falling over and hurting himself, which was always a crowd-pleaser. Despite the clowning he was a good-looking, charismatic guy who knew how to strike an attitude in theatrical style, even if it was more panto than Shakespeare. The climax of the set was Cheryl’s Going Home, which involved Otway pretending to be a train, doing a mid-air somersault while playing guitar, and again hurting himself. I suspected that their chart success meant Otway & Barrett wouldn’t play such a venue for much longer – in the event they never stopped playing the O&L, I saw them perform there on numerous subsequent occasions, and if the pub hadn’t closed Otway would no doubt still be getting into scrapes on that too-small stage.
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