John Watts is Fischer-Z’s frontman and has also released some material under his own name. Another band he lead was The Cry (John Watts).
John Watts is from a family of singers. He progressed through school and college bands inspired equally by the late 60s Trojan catalogue and great maverick artists, from Alex Harvey to Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart to Tom Waits and the ‘Hunky Dory’ David Bowie. Watts moved to the point where punk, art-wave and reggae crossed over. With college friend Steve Skolnik and rhythm section Steve Liddle and Dave Graham, Watts landed a record deal as Fischer-Z with United Artists in 1978 alongside the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers. They became well known throughout continental Europe and achieved chart success as far abroad as Australia.
Watts has amassed a considerable body of creative work since. His quality song-writing has evolved steadily against a variety of musical colours. It has encompassed written word, poetry and humour as easily as rap-scape, rare groove and indie guitar influences, all with a characteristic singing and written ‘voice’. The original Fischer-Z split up in 1981.
The double worldwide release of the Real Life Is Good Enough and related It Has To Be albums represents a fresh new era for John; a return to more organic music-making and humorous writing. He is touring extensively solo and in a three-piece format with drummer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Walker and Matthew Gest on keyboard.
The album Morethanmusic was released in october 2010, with the songs he used to play on the MoreThanMusic live shows in the prior year. In 2010 he had a couple of shows as Fischer-Z with Sam Walker on drums, Matthew Gest on keyboards and Matthew Wear on bass. This appeared to be a quite succesful revival. In april 2011 he released a remix album of the most succesful Fischer-Z songs via crowd funding site PledgeMusic.com. This album was titled Fischer-Z.
