John Otway...Awesome!

So last night was the second night of eccentric entertainment that I attended. Yes following form the success of Kinky Friedman I went to see Otway and Barrett. To those to in the know, that's John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett, together once again after, well only about a year, but I didn't have chance to catch their last tour. Before then though they haven't played together since the early eighties, as far as I know.

It was great to see what was, in essence, the original line up and to hear some Otway classics as they were originally performed back in the day before I even existed.




There was no real weirdness about this gig as I had company so nothing to report on that front. However, not wanting to let the night go by smoothly Brother Chris convinced me to go over and say hello. This was mainly due, for those who don't know or can't remember, to the fact that John Otway recorded the voice-over track to my graduate film Jonny The Pessimist. So an awkward conversation was had, made stranger by the fact that my PC blew up in the morning so I started moaning about that. At this point we wished him well and returned to our seats. Anyway, he did remember making the film and from what I could tell did seem to enjoy it which is nice. He mentioned how he'd been forwarding people to it via the John Otway forum and would link to it when his new site is up and running. Which is all great stuff.



So the gig continued, there were a few songs I'd never heard live before which was great. A highlight being The Highwayman, which was a definite influence on Jonny The Pessimist and if I remember correctly, the first Otway song I heard.



So once again another awesome night. Wild Willy Barret was excellent,a great straight man to Otway's eccentricities and a master musician. There were also some excellent and surprising destruction of guitars and a pair of Chekhov's bagpipes that it seemed would go unused until the finale.

So that's it for a few weeks, back to the day to day monotony of life, and the trials and tribulations a sucky, blowed up PC.