Wilko Johnson

Saw him supporting the Stranglers a few years ago with Norman Watt Roy on bass,it was a great night RIP Wilko
 
RIP Wilko. an individual, mad as a bag of frogs, the best guitar player I personally ever saw Iive.

Still touring, still the same high energy choppy style in his seventies. Shall spend the evening rewatching his playing.

The band is getting back together 🙁
 
RIP Wilko

wilko.gif
 
When I first saw him at the Kite Club probably 25 years ago he blew me away, how he got all the notes out of his guitar whilst seemingly fanning it with his finger tips. I sort of sussed it out after a little research. As a guitarist I always thought he was quite limited. But what he did was brilliant & certainly very catchy. He had the perfect partner in crime with the fantastic Norman Watt Roy on bass. He openly admitted he shouldn't have left DR Feelgood as early as he did. That probably meant he had to tour the smaller venues, which from my POV was great as you could get within spitting/shooting distance. They seemed to travel light & usually had a support band on first then just made a few tweaks to their equipment plugged in & went for it. After the emotional last tour in around 2013 I never expected to see him again, but I managed another 3. Pretty much the same set, but that didn't really matter. Just shows you don't have to be able to play hundreds of notes at lightening speed to be considered an outstanding guitarist, just a few & a choppy rhythm ain't too bad either. 👍
 
Sky Arts showed a tribute (of sorts) tonight - Oil City Confidential - probably available on catch up. The programme after...a documentary about The Jam......early influence... Dr Feelgood.

Would rather watch a good music documentary than a film, bar maybe a few exceptions.

Here to help,

Dirky
 
Mark Radcliffe, who I've known through a mutual friend and spent a little bit of time with down the years, is a huge Feelgoods fan. Mark and Phil did a brilliant radio documentary for the Beeb a few years ago tracing the path to and from Canvey. I had a tape of it, but I think it went West in my second break up. They realised a lifetime ambition a few years ago prior to Wilko's first brush with cancer, supporting him, Norman Watt Roy and the band at Birkenhead Tram Sheds. Phenomenal gig. Great times.

Obituary for Wilko
 
Lead obituary in today's Times (too long for one post, so split into two)....

Wild-eyed guitarist and songwriter with Dr Feelgood who paved the way for punk and defied the odds after a devastating cancer diagnosis

Eyes popping and strutting like a marionette on speed, Wilko Johnson cut a striking figure on stage, both as lead guitarist with Dr Feelgood and in a long and respected solo career.

He made his name with the band known affectionately as “the Feelgoods”, a raucous rhythm and blues outfit that helped to reinvigorate British rock music in the mid-1970s and opened the door to the insurrection that was punk. His guitar playing eschewed the self-indulgent, extended solos of his peers in favour of a stripped-down style built around frenetic, choppy chords and primal R’n’B riffs, dispatched with slashing ferocity.

Johnson and Dr Feelgood emerged from the amiable 1970s phenomenon known as “pub rock”, but there was nothing amiable about the “in yer face” style of their music or the sweaty, boozy anarchy of their live shows. They looked as threatening as they sounded, too, scowling out from beneath short haircuts and dressed in ill-fitting off-the-peg jackets — a pointed “no fashion” statement, which seemed openly to mock the theatrical garb of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones.

Their refusal to follow fashion was in itself eye-catching and Johnson was the group’s main visual attraction, a tall, gangly man dressed in a grubby black suit that made him resemble a nightclub bouncer rather than a rock star, the anti-fashion look offset by an institutional “pudding bowl” haircut and an unsettling stare to rival Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

Yet Johnson was remarkable not just for his style and musicianship. In January 2013 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, told it was terminal and that he had only months to live. He met the news with equanimity. “It was a surprise,” he said. “But it didn’t disturb me. I was alive and realised you are existing in the moment. You’re not worried about the tax return. And it’s a bloody good feeling being alive.”

He chose not to undergo chemotherapy and announced a farewell tour, so that he could go out doing the thing that he said had made his life “such an extraordinarily full and eventful experience’’. His attitude led to an outpouring of emotion from fans, yet he defied medical science and was still around for another tour in 2014. “I have had a brilliant year,” he declared. “I honestly didn’t know people felt about me like that. I knew they liked the music, but I’ve had so many letters full of personal affection for me, as though they were writing for a friend. I think that was the most moved I’ve ever been.”

Going Back Home, an album recorded with the Who’s singer Roger Daltrey and released in early 2014, earned him his best reviews in years. He promoted the record with a series of self-deprecating interviews in which, without a hint of self-pity, he declared: “I’m really sorry I’ve got to die because I want to do a lot more of this. But otherwise dying’s not so bad, you know.” He told The Times’s Will Hodgkinson that before his diagnosis he suffered from depression, but “now I just want to stop worrying and do as much as I can in the time left”.

Daltrey, visibly moved by his collaborator’s fortitude, noted that “our postwar rock’n’roll generation taught people how to live and enjoy their lives. Now here’s Wilko showing us how to die.”

A plan for Johnson to make an appearance at Glastonbury in June 2014 had to be cancelled due to his illness; after almost 18 months of refusing treatment, he was admitted to hospital for an operation to remove a tumour and parts of his stomach and intestines. “It was an 11-hour operation. This tumour weighed 3kg — that’s the size of a baby. Anyway, they got it all,” he said, announcing that the disease was less aggressive than originally thought. After a period of convalescence he was, astonishingly, “cancer-free” and coming to terms with the idea that he would live — which he did to the full for another eight years.

When Johnson rose to fame with Dr Feelgood in the 1970s, he insisted that the band, based on Canvey Island, played tough R’n’B, mixing covers with his own songs that cut across the decade’s prevailing trends of prog and glam-rock. There had been nothing like Dr Feelgood since the heyday of the Who and the Rolling Stones during the first British R’n’B boom a decade earlier. Their records were unsophisticated and wilfully so, a conscious attempt to revisit the raw energy that had fuelled the birth of rock’n’roll and which had, somewhere along the way, got lost in half-baked triple concept albums and drug-addled excess.

In Julien Temple’s 2009 documentary film, Oil City Confidential, Johnson and the Feelgoods were portrayed as a gang of bank robbers with guitars, dashing into town to pull off a job at one venue or another, then heading back to the badlands of Essex and their home in the shadows of the refineries on the island they renamed “Oil City”. Johnson lived in Essex all his life, later moving to Westcliff-on-Sea. “I love the Thames estuary,” he said. “This part of Essex, with the powerlines and the windmills and the industry, it makes the landscape what it is.”

The Feelgoods’ natural forte was the three-minute single — clipped, classic R’n’B tunes such as Roxette, She Does It Right and Back in the Night, all written by Johnson. When the group came to make their debut album, Down by the Jetty (1975), they recorded it live in the studio with no overdubs and released it in mono, an act of defiance at a time when making a record for most groups involved months of multi-tracking and studio trickery. It was followed by the equally earthy and strident Malpractice. Both albums sold reasonably but it was their third release, Stupidity, that was their breakthrough. Recorded live, it brilliantly captured the guts and gore of their club performances, with storming covers of songs by the likes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

The album made its way to the top of the British charts in the first week of its release in 1976, just as the first wave of punk groups was noisily starting to kick over the traces. It briefly made Johnson and his colleagues the biggest new band in Britain. They were not punks in the accepted fashion, but were a crucial influence on the revolution. “John the Baptists to the Sex Pistols’ savage messiahs, an advance guard for the havoc that followed,” as the Melody Maker editor Allan Jones later put it.

Yet Johnson did not hang around to enjoy the kudos. During the making of Dr Feelgood’s fourth album, he fell out acrimoniously with the group’s singer Lee Brilleaux and walked out, never to return. He subsequently claimed he had been fired, although the rest of the group said he had walked. Relations had soured on a disappointing American tour (not helped, perhaps, by Johnson being teetotal at the time, unlike his hard-drinking bandmates), but he later said that he was at a loss to explain why he had fallen out with them. “It grew into this great animosity between Lee and myself,” he said. “As far as I know, I never did him any wrong, and I know he never did me any wrong. So what that bad feeling was based on, I do not know. But it was certainly strong.” The pair remained unreconciled when Brilleaux died of cancer in 1994........
 
Last edited:
.........Born John Peter Wilkinson in 1947 on Canvey Island, Essex, he attended Westcliff High School for Boys and played guitar in various juvenile bands, modelling his style on Mick Green of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. After graduating from Newcastle University, where he read English and developed an ability to quote Shakespeare and Piers Plowman with ease, he travelled the “hippy trail”, the overland route to India. By 1972 he was back in Essex, where he worked for a year as an English teacher and joined the Pigboy Charlie Band, changing his stage name to Wilko Johnson, an anagram of his birth name.

Shortly after his arrival the group became Dr Feelgood (an American slang term for a doctor willing to prescribe mind-altering drugs), with a line-up that included Brilleaux on vocals and harmonica, John Sparks on bass and his childhood friend John Martin (known as “the Big Figure”) on drums. Johnson and his colleagues found work as the backing band for Heinz (formerly of the Tornados), supported Hawkwind and Brinsley Schwarz on tour and built a sturdy reputation playing their own gigs on the London pub circuit.

Acclaim in the music press led to a recording contract with United Artists. Yet by 1977, Johnson was out of the band. At the time the loss of the group’s essential force looked like a fatal blow to the Feelgoods, although in the event they soldiered on and found renewed success. Johnson formed the Solid Senders, who released one album in 1978, which made little impact. He then joined the Blockheads and played on Ian Dury’s 1980 album, Laughter. After that he concentrated on leading the Wilko Johnson Band, with an ever-changing line-up. He released a string of albums including Ice on the Motorway (1981), Going Back Home (1998) and Red Hot Rocking Blues (2005).

1669279661846.png
Johnson, left, with John Martin, John B Sparks and Lee Brilleaux c 1977

He was devastated by the death of his wife Irene (née Knight) from cancer in 2004. She was his childhood sweetheart and the couple were married for more than 30 years; he once said that if he had believed in an afterlife, he would have killed himself to be with her. Music was his solace: “You just snap into a different consciousness. The broken heart is suddenly not the important thing. The important thing is doing the show.” He is survived by their two sons, Matthew, who works in Dubai, and Simon, who plays guitar in the band Eight Rounds Rapid.

Away from music, he was a keen painter and amateur astronomer who built a dome on his roof to house a telescope. He published an autobiography, Looking Back At Me (2012), and never reunited with the Feelgoods, but played a big part in assembling the group’s box set, All Through the City, a collection of the four Dr Feelgood albums on which Johnson had played, augmented by unreleased material from his archives.

After his brush with death he felt he had won “extra time” and continued to play with the Wilko Johnson Band, releasing another album, Blow Your Mind, in 2018. His last gig was at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London only last month.

In recent years Johnson also had a role in the hit fantasy TV series Game of Thrones as the mute executioner Ser Ilyn Payne. The familiar eye-popping stare before wielding his sword was all the talking he needed to do.

Wilko Johnson, musician, was born on July 12, 1947. He died on November 21, 2022, aged 75
 
Mark_GT said:
Mark Radcliffe, who I've known through a mutual friend and spent a little bit of time with down the years, is a huge Feelgoods fan. Mark and Phil did a brilliant radio documentary for the Beeb a few years ago tracing the path to and from Canvey. I had a tape of it, but I think it went West in my second break up. They realised a lifetime ambition a few years ago prior to Wilko's first brush with cancer, supporting him, Norman Watt Roy and the band at Birkenhead Tram Sheds. Phenomenal gig. Great times.

Obituary for Wilko
Click to expand...
Your mutual PW?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top