Oh no it wasn’t. My vote for it was based on long and careful consideration and entirely independent of Otway’s influence.

And let’s not forget the double A side of The Inbetweenies/Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me. I can’t imagine the latter song being played on the radio today.

I saw him in Dick Whittington at Oxford Apollo in 1984 with Cilla Black and Billy Dainty. It was absolutely brilliant and Jimmy Cricket was very funny indeed.

I’m late to this thread and quite a few of my re-reads have already been mentioned – how surprising! P G Wodehouse, lots of them, especially the Jeeves and Wooster books but others too, especially Leave It To […]

Peter Gabriel had definitely read Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Fountain of Salmacis is, in parts, lifted pretty closely from it if I remember rightly

Everyone should read more Wodehouse. I have more than 90 of his books and have recently started re-reading them in roughly chronological order. PGW never fails to make me smile

Keats wrote a poem called On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer. The last few lines go: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle […]

I always used to enjoy the efforts to crowbar Genesis into Top Gear

Back in 1987, Andy Partridge of XTC teamed up with John Otway, the (Cor Baby That’s) Really Free Hitmaker, under the name Johnny Japes And His Jesticles to make a promotional single for Viz comic called Bags of […]

He might also be viewed as a tiresome whinger who was given far more chances in the Test side than he deserved.

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve ordered my copy.

This is brilliant stuff, Colin. I really hope it succeeds.

That’s class. As you’d expect from The Muppet Show

The Beatles Bob Genesis (though some of the later albums are going straight into the sea)

Wouldn’t we all. I’m enthusiastic enough to have bought the CD box with all the surviving recordings from it and they’re joyful to hear. What a band! What performances!

There are so many lesser known songs it’s hard to know which one to pick. But I love this one so here it is.

What about Oh Mercy? That was only 11 years later. I love that album. And the show he played at Hammersmith Apollo that year (one of a run of at least 5 that Q raved about – was that written by Mark Ellen or […]

This is classic live Bob. Shame on the audience members for having “no idea” what it is. We’d all have recognised it.

I had originally only planned to buy new speakers. I thought that my Musical Fidelity X-Ray CD player (which had been expensively uprated by Musical Fidelity in 1999) was fine but I was shocked to hear how much […]