You might imagine that if no-one else raised the incident, then neither would John Otway.
Everyone has a right for some things to be quietly forgotten — at least if they happened before the internet.
But then, Otway has made it his business to assiduously avoid any quiet forgetting. So, he brings it up himself.
"I did this performance on a programme over here called The Old Grey Whistle Test, which had an audience of five and a-half million, and I leapt on top of an amplifier and fell astride it on my testicles," he says down the phone line from London, relaying what appears to be a favourite anecdote.
And in truth, that 1977 TV appearance worked quite well for him, helping win a six-figure five-album deal with record label Polydor — which was at the time busy adding cultural giants such as The Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees to its roster.
"We had this song, Really Free, out at the time and all the punks thought what I was doing was remarkably wonderfully punky, which meant it went into the charts," Otway continues with the story.
Fair enough too, video of the performance circulates still online, and there’s a Geldof-esque raggedy energy to it.
"I was on a couple of big pop programmes over here and was a pop star," he says, accurately enough.
It would not be fair to say it was all downhill after Really Free peaked in the English charts at 27. But it would be quarter of a century before he charted again — with a song, Bunsen Burner, written to help with his daughter’s science homework that was boosted to No. 9 in the charts by a campaign among his loyal followers on the occasion of his 50th birthday.
There have also been two biographies, and a film, Rock and Roll’s Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie, and regular albums. And another campaign to win his ’70s song Beware of the Flowers Cause I’m Sure They’re Going to Get You Yeah a seventh placing on a BBC list of the greatest lyrics of all time, just behind Yesterday.
Along the way, he kept gigging, notching his 5000th last year.
Otway’s happy to own it all, it’s the empire he has built. There’s merit there, he insists, proof of which is that the punters have kept turning up.
"It obviously wouldn’t have been a hit if people hadn’t liked the record," he says of that 1977 songwriting success, "Really Free and the B-side of it, Beware of the Flowers Cause I’m Sure They’re Going to Get You Yeah, were really popular songs at the time."
He’s continued to apply himself diligently to the craft of songwriting, he says.
"There is nothing worse than writing lyrics that you listen to a couple of years later and they give you toothache."
The dedication extends to his humour.
"I suppose in that sense, I take the humour seriously. I mean, it has to be funny."
If the humour wasn’t there from the beginning it seems to have been elevated to something approaching equal billing quite quickly.
A 1981 video for his single Headbutts anticipates the anarchic fun of The Young Ones (on which he later appeared), mashed with The Goodies DIY ethic.
"I have never had a problem with going from a ballad that you have written that you thought about a lot and you cared about a lot to complete buffoonery, just backing from one to the other," Otway confirms. "All I have ever done is I have imagined myself in the audience and tried to entertain myself. Be it with humour that involves me banging my head against a microphone or a string of nicely written lyrics."
So, the show he’s touring has both, including the head butting, an item that involves playing electric drums with his body, a theremin, and a cover of House of the Rising Sun that requires the audience to respond with the appropriate heckles. Thus:
Otway: "There is."
Audience: "What?"
Otway: "A house."
Audience: "Where?"
And so it goes. Auckland crowds knew the drill, he says.
In the end this quintessentially English, eccentric mash-up has sustained a career. "I have always described it as micro-stardom, it is not mega-stardom but it has got there enough to at least be a bit stardom."
The gig
John Otway plays The Crown Hotel, Dunedin, on Friday.
