"As we discovered earlier, Willy lived just up the road from the Otways. By now he had grown his blonde hair to his shoulders and left school at the earliest opportunity. Willy also had musical ambitions, but for far more realistic reasons than John. His father had started teaching him music at the age of four and Willy was a naturally gifted player. Just having left school, and not wanting to get a "proper job", most of his days were spent wandering up and down Wendover Road with his guitar slung over his shoulder. "If you get a guitar you're going to grow up like Willy Barrett," his mother would frequently tell him. "You're not getting one and that's final."

The quote above is taken from Otways autobiography, "Cor Baby, That's Really Me", and is quite correct in saying that "Wild Willy" Barrett was (and indeed, still is) a naturally gifted player. Having seen him live on several occasions - both with and without Otway - I can certainly confirm that he is one of those players who could turn his hand to any instrument within minutes of picking it up.

Willy has one other major redeeming feature as far as I am concerned, and that is his fascination with strange and bizarre instruments (one of my own pet fascinations). As an example, he forgoes the traditional bottleneck or metal tube when playing slide guitar, and instead favours an egg. Yes, you did read that correctly, and it wasn't just a spurious glitch in the wires; Wild Willy plays slide guitar with a raw egg. For some obscure reason, he also seems to get less heckling than Otway does!

Aside from this, I have seen him play a cardboard box (as a percussion instrument), fiddle, banjo, bouzouki (is that spelt correctly?), a guitar with no back to it (occasionally strumming it from behind), a guitar with a deliberately mis-seated string (giving a sitar type sound), and my favourite, a perfectly normal guitar, which he then proceeded to stab and cut up in order to provide an excellent percussive rasp to a song.

Willy's relationship with Otway, however, has not proved quite so successful. From an early age Willy had taken a dislike to John, to the point of physical violence, so quite how they ever got together in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Quite why they keep on reforming their partnership is even more so.

On their last reunion tour, for example, not only did Willy stab and cut up "Otway's" guitar (after sending him to the van to get something), but also led the crowds in chants of "Who's a prat?....Otway!!!". Otway's slightly less impressive retaliation simply consisted of the occasional "hippy" joke. Even poor jokes like these only serve to show how naive Otway can be, though, since Willy would always exact his revenge at the end of the show as he crushed Otway's head under his arm, and rammed it into the microphone for the song "Headbutts".

I'm not entirely sure what Willy is up to at the moment, although he can sometimes be tracked down with his "friends" performing acoustic gigs. I'm not sure if this is his full time job now or just a hobby, though he has recently released an album called "Open Toed And Flapping". I last saw him at the 1995 Cropredy festival (an annual nominally-folk festival for the excellent band Fairport Convention), but if anyone can provide more details about Willy and friends, I would appreciate it.

From the Cropredy Festival guide, Willy's friends are:-

• Paul "Whisky" Ward - Church Harmonium
  
• Jake Jalfreezi - Harmonica
  
• Mark Freeman - Cardboard Box
  
• Cat "Flap" Radford - Cello

My particular respects go to Cat for managing to keep a straight face all the way through one of the songs (I shan't spoil it for those who haven't seen them by explaining why this should be so hard (I'm also sadistic like that (and like brackets))) and for making a very pleasant distraction from the antics of Willy (keep one eye out for eggs though) - although she does come across as the sort of woman who would beat you round the head with a wet tench in the name of women's lib if you told her that to her face!!!

Willy has been spotted standing next to Rolf Harris playing the fiddle in the video of the antipodean one's release of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". Could he have found his calling in life, as Rolfies straight man - or is it simply an attempt to rub Otway's nose in it after his failure with "Two Little Boys". Who knows? Who cares? What I can tell you, however, is that Rolf's "Bohemian Rhapsody" is now available from the official Rolf website. Follow the link above for more information.

Many of you may also know that when he's not performing, Willy likes to carve "interesting" furniture (indeed he enjoys his woodwork so much that he once released an album in a hand-carved wooden sleeve). Well, there's now some more information about Willy's furniture - as well as some nice pictures - in the further reaches of the information super-B-road, so follow this link if you're interested.