Favourite Waste of Time: Chatting with Owen Paul Ahead a Devizes 80s Gig

July 1986, Madonna was asking her papa not to preach, Chris De Burgh was fantasising about a lady in red, and they were the only two things preventing a feelgood summer cover called My Favourite Waste of Time reaching the top of the charts. It was recorded by Owen Paul, who arrives in Devizes for a “tribute to the eighties” gig at the Corn Exchange on Friday 21^st March. I caught up with him ahead of this, and we chatted merrily about the hit, his origins and influences, mullets and all things eighties, oh and what to expect from the show….

After clearing up uncertainty over his two forenames, Owen is his, Paul derived from a younger brother’s name, we moved onto the way I envisioned this meeting. I imagined we’d be dancing on some tropical beach in white sleeveless t-shirts and sporting mullets, as was the video to his pop smash.

“Yeah,” he laughed, explaining about a gig last Saturday in Exeter with Radio 1 DJ Pat Sharp, “it was the battle of the guy that used to be the world champion of the mullet people!”

A tropical theme was so eighties too, I said, from Wham to Blacklace, we all wanted to go on holiday, we all wanted to be on that beach in the My Favourite Waste of Time video. “You’re absolutely right,” Owen responded, pointing out the gig last weekend was in a theatre called Tropicana. “It was one of the strangest shows I’ve ever done. Club Tropicana, just for the event, right?  The show started at 2pm and run ‘till 8pm. I said to my manager, ‘we’re gonna play in the afternoon?’ She was like, ‘yeah. You do the thing in the afternoon, people come dressed in eighties clothes and they forget their lives for five minutes.’ Apparently, it’s a thing; adults like to go to a show between 2 and 6pm, so they can get back to watch Casualty!”

I assured Owen I must be the exception to that rule, but Owen was still giggling, “or Strictly!”

But were the contents of the show like what we can expect to see in Devizes on the 21^st, I had to ask. For the record, while tagged with the idiom “one-hit-wonder,” Owen is a prolific recording artist who is still releasing new original material; will he be playing these? “Even though I still do songs, when it’s an eighties show like in Devizes, it’ll be full on eighties-tastic, girl singers, dancers, and we’ll sing Bowie, U2, Deacon Blue, Crowded House and more.”

Time to drop my million-dollar question which had been floating around my excuse for a brain since knowing I was to chat with Owen. That the term one-hit-wonder, which Owen was bequeathed at the time, must be quite disparaging for an artist with a wealth of other works. I asked him how he felt about it at the time, and how he feels about the label now.

Not to blow my own trumpet, he replied, “if I think of all the interviews I’ve done in recent times, that is the best question I’ve ever had! No one has ever asked that of me because they’re always scared. And you’ve asked, so that’s fine. I’ve got to tell you the truthful answer, right? And I mean this with all my heart. I know a million acts who’ve never had a hit. And I have. That ahead gave me the doorway to be here forty years later, playing festivals all over the world. So I don’t think it’s disparaging at all. I think it’s a complete opposite. I think I’ve had a hit, when I know people more talented than me,” Owen exampled a mildly successful Scottish band called The Blue Nile, “they had ‘Tinseltown in the Rain,’ the closest thing to them having a hit, (reached No. 87 on the singles chart in 1984) They’re an incredible act, but I had a smash that went global. They never had. So I don’t think of it as disparaging at all.”

In this I think Owen misunderstood my question, that it wasn’t the having a one-hit-wonder which I thought might be disparaging, rather being labelled a one-hit-wonder which could be, but hey, it was a calculated and flattering response anyway!

Being I’m walking Owen down memory lane, I wanted to take him further back, being aside My Favourite Waste of Time being an acoustic guitar-led feelgood anthem delineating eighties pop, Wikipedia claims it was the Sex Pistols which first inspired him.

“The basic story is this, and this is completely true,” Owen elucidated, “we had a basement, which makes us sound posh, but it was a council flat. My brother and his mates from school used to come back to our house, and they used to rehearse and make an absolute racket of a noise! And this is like 1975-76ish. I was too young; I wasn’t allowed to go downstairs. I used to sit upstairs and listen to what they were doing, and they would play singles of whatever was going on, and they played the Damned, The Clash, The Strangers, and then played the Sex Pistol’s Anarchy in the UK, and I’m upstairs going, what, the, hell, is, that?!”

“And I’m going off the back of the seventies when it was prog rock and all the stuff where you had to be a virtuoso and play for ten hours. And it really changed me, and the guys who’s downstairs in our basement, turns out to be Simple Minds; you wanna write that down?!!”

Noted in awe, Owen, thank you. His brother Brian was the Simple Minds drummer, and guitarist Charlie Burchill, he informed me, “would come upstairs to my room, ’cause I was not allowed down there, and I had a guitar. My dad was publican, and when people couldn’t pay their bill, you make them get on and perform.” Owen told how Charlie showed him an E chord, an A chord and a D chord, “and he said that’s all you need, and I said ‘thanks!’”

We talked of the 3-chord simplicity of eighties pop, Owen extended this by getting technical on learning structures from the likes of The Velevt Underground. “And then,” he explained, “off the back of that, I started to make my own noise.”

On his first band, Venigmas, Owen explained how at just sixteen they left Glasgow for London, and he told his mum, “I don’t think we’ll be back.” Owen spoke of the changing scene, the new romantics, but was adamant he was a “rock guy.”

“Because everyone thinks you’re an overnight sensation. I was eight years or more in the industry before I got signed to Sony. They signed me as a rock act, and then I stupidly made a pop record! And that became my real problem. Because I saw myself as a Bowie guy, I thought you could do anything. I thought you could do funk, you could do rock, soul, and pop; that’s what I thought. How naive was I?!”

Owen recorded two songs for Sony, the one we all know was nominated for a Brit award. He spoke fondly of recording it and how they immediately knew it was a hit, then suggested “but at the same time, in my heart I went oh-no. I’m in trouble here.”

I speculated aloud, asking him if it was because the music industry will typecast him as pop, and he replied, “you’re absolutely right; that’s what happened. So the record comes out, it’s a worldwide smash. It got me on Smash Hit’s cover, on Saturday morning, telly; I’m shiny, bubble-gum pop guy. That’s where I am, right? Now, the record label wants ten more tracks which sounds like that…. but I’m a rock guy!! You can see the problem?!”

If all sounds weighty, I must point out Owen finished this sentence with a giggle, recalling his moment in the spotlight playfully. But we compared it to his freedom now to write, and his new song Fly With Me, which I observed reminded me of Cat Stevens or George Harrison. Again, he found my question about it, “interesting. I don’t get it asked much. I think ultimately, I’m a Celt, Scottish and folk music is everything to us. I’ve always been like that, every song I hear in my head, when I’m doing new tracks sounds like a folk song. But when you’re in the eighties and you’ve got a record deal, they don’t want that, you turn that into a pop song.”

Owen continued to explain how, with his guitarist Howard, decided to produce a folk album after an acoustic gig, but clarified, “folk is the fifth of it all.” This seemed like a convenient time to move away from the roots and back to idea he was coming to Devizes to do an eighties show, and people will lap that up. “I love that about eighties shows,” he revealed, “I didn’t do them for a long time, nearly twenty years. I pretended that I wasn’t Owen Paul or sang that song. And then, I did a thing on telly called Watchdog, Rouge Traders. They were investigating this company with security cameras and asked me to walk in at the end and sing (and he did sing it for me!) you’re mine…!”

“I thought, hang on a minute. Is this because I didn’t pay my tax bill?!  Are they actually chasing me?! I double checked, and it turned out that it was the BBC, and it was fantastic and really funny! The next day, my phone was exploding. My website was exploding with pictures going ‘oh my God, Owen Paul isn’t dead,’ can you do this show?!”

Owen recalled with joy, how it felt to now do retro festivals where, “the most amazing thing occurred to me. After me not wanting to be Owen Paul, that guy, that song. I get to the beginning of the song, and obviously it’s not like there’s an intro, it just goes bang, you know? And then suddenly, I’ve got 20,000 people singing that back at me.”

Regardless of how you might feel about the commercialisation of it, I try to imagine that and offer to Owen that it is truly is the testament to his work. “Yeah,” he responded so positively, “I think I grew up as well. You know, I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’ve realised if you’re the wrong side of forty-five, so you’re an eighties kid and you’ve got two kids, a mortgage, bills and you’ve got all your rubbish; you want five minutes away from it all.”

Which is, in turn, the best advert for the upcoming show! We continued for some considerable time, I was enthralled he spoke about Howard Jones on first name terms, being asked to do a number of celebrity shows, like Strictly. We talked about dance music, Britpop, and the changes these brought, and even from the effect of streaming services on the industry, to the youth of today identifying with the songs of the eighties. It was becoming clear one of us needed to break the chat through fear of day becoming night, and maybe back again.

It was a wonderful conversation which knew no natural end, because though I was honoured and slightly in awe of Owen Paul, we chatted like old school friends at a reunion. If the nineties saw me shun the commercialisation of the pop of my youth, Owen caused me to rethink it again, and it was a pleasure.

Owen Paul brings his eighties show to the Corn Exchange on Friday 21^st March. Tickets are aptly £19.80, because it’s promised you’ll be transported back to the 1980s! Have I got time to grow a mullet?

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