Gig 052/053/054/055 John Otway, Motörhead / Radiators from Space, Eddie & the Hot Rods / Radio Stars / Squeeze, Tom Robinson Band

Gig 052
John Otway
Oxford Polytechnic
27 February 1978

Gig 053
Motörhead / Radiators from Space
Aylesbury Friars
11 March 1978

Gig 054
Eddie & the Hot Rods / Radio Stars / Squeeze
Oxford Polytechnic
13 March 1978

Gig 055
Tom Robinson Band
Swindon Brunel Rooms
17 March 1978

A series of gigs by acts I’d already seen at least once, in which the support acts sometimes turned out to be more interesting than the headliner. The lesson here is never ignore the support, regrettably it’s one which I’ve tended to ignore in more recent years.

Having scroted around the toilet venues for a few years, John Otway was now a real pop star. For his headline gig at the Poly he had a real group with a drummer and everything, and to be honest I’m not sure it added much to his schtick. Part of Otway’s appeal was his fairly loose relationship with the notion of regular tempo, which went out of the window once there was a real rhythm section in place. Thankfully he still played regular small gigs with Wild Willy at the likes of the Oranges & Lemons.

I’d seen Motörhead a few months previously; another gig at the same venue wasn’t likely to add much to my appreciation of their oeuvre, and indeed it didn’t though they were reliably entertaining, in the way that a boorish uncle with one good joke can be entertaining. Support act Radiators from Space were a bit more engaging, an Irish power-punk act who made an appealing melodic racket to general indifference. Main man Philip Chevron wasn’t really a rocker at heart, being more interested in artistes such as Brendan Behan and Berthold Brecht, and he went on to produce more interesting work with the Radiators – who moved on swiftly from the punk blueprint – as well as the likes of Agnes Bernelle and the Pogues. The Bernelle collection Father’s Lying Dead on the Ironing Board remains an extraordinary thing, hard to track down these days, worth looking out. To be fair Weimar cabaret probably wouldn’t have done much to enrapture a Motörhead audience.

A couple of nights later it was back to the Poly for my fourth Eddie & the Hot Rods experience. By now they were a polished chart act with a slick show and clangorous power-pop tunes, courtesy mainly of guitarist Graeme Douglas, nothing revolutionary, a good show if less exciting than their earlier stripped-down r’n’b incarnation. As it turned out they’d already peaked. First on were a group called Squeeze, whose first single Cat on a Wall I’d bought and liked a lot. Two vocalist/guitarists harmonised like a South London Lennon and McCartney across sometimes improbably sophisticated tunes which I wanted to hear again, while the seemingly mad-for-attention keyboard player kept trying to upstage them. Squeeze were followed by Radio Stars, who at that moment had a hit called Nervous Wreck. In various forms they’d been around forever and there was something rather desperate in their appropriation of new-wave moeurs. Their tunes were jaunty and frankly rather annoying. Singer Andy Ellison’s USP was to climb all over the PA stacks and lighting rigs, but he wore kneepads and the zaniness was all rather contrived, unlike Otway who would hurt himself and not even notice. Otway had better tunes too.

Then at the end of the week it was the TRB at Swindon. By now Tom Robinson was a chart act and spokesman for gay rights, anti-racism and lord knows how many other causes. As mentioned before, Tom was and is hugely admirable in so many ways, problem is that artistically this was becoming something of a trap. At this point the TRB were touring debut album Power in the Darkness, and we didn’t know it but like Eddie & the Hot Rods they’d already peaked. All the same it was great to see a whole venue singing along to Glad to be Gay, and my friend Richard even felt sufficiently emboldened to order a Dubonnet and Lemonade from the Brunel Rooms’ rotating bar.