Johnson had collapsed on stage the day before in Cambridge, so for the band to emerge so blistering as well as after so many years set my hair on end. Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze opened on Friday, an accomplished guitarist himself and more than enough to hold his own while solo in the echoey Tramshed hall with a rundown of some of the era’s biggest, but a different side of the 70s British coin than Wilko Johnson’s band. Even more than that, Johnson’s choppy abuse of a Fender Telecaster was treated by every guitarist who came across him with the kind of veneration usually reserved at the time for big heavy metal solo-ers or howlin’ American bluesmen, often by those British punks feeding on the energy for what was about to happen. Feelgood’s rawest rhythm & blues weapon was Wilko Johnson: an unstoppable hammer of a right arm impossibly attached somewhere to a man, turning a pub band into a spartan rock‘n’roll powerhouse that predicted British punk. I like to sit there and think of all the good things.In their Roxette days in the mid-70s, Dr. I go for the music mostly, but I also like it in the day, when it's quiet. "I've never been a pub man, but lately I've started going to the Railway in Southend. And I guess they won't know until their doctor sits them down with the dreaded news." You don't know what it means to be alive. "I look at people now, walking to and fro through the city, along the streets, and I can't help but think: you don't know. I see him as Dr Feelgood." Wilko is laughing as he recounts his love of Burroughs. I can't think of Dr Feelgood without thinking of Dr Benway in Burroughs's Naked Lunch. William Burroughs has always felt like a friend. It's always there, reverberating through my head. "The great literature I've read has never left me. It's as if he is sitting in his own control room, tuning into the outside world around him, listening to snippets of life before the signal fades, or he moves on to something more interesting along the dial. His living room is packed with electrical recording equipment, radios, dials and spools. His voice carries the scars of a life on the road in a rock'n'roll band that you don't hear in younger musicians these days. He speaks in loops, repetitions and tangents. Ironically, the last piece of artwork I did was the Dr Feelgood logo – my most famous piece." And then the band just seemed to happen by accident and I stopped, but it never left me. I continued painting after the travelling, especially when I got back to Canvey.
The sagas I was reading, they blew my mind, just so poetic and brutal. "I played in bands before university, but when I went up to Newcastle I couldn't find a band, so I quit playing. His paintings hang on the wall above him, surreal things that seem to echo the literature he was reading at the time. He wasn't your average working-class Canvey Island lad. Before that he'd been a political activist who'd travelled the hippie trail through Afghanistan and India. Before Dr Feelgood, Wilko was an English teacher who'd graduated from Newcastle University with a degree, specialising in medieval literature and the Icelandic sagas. The differences Wilko refers to are literature, poetry and art. I regret we never expressed that to each other – our admiration of each other." It's almost as if he feels things might have turned out differently. The animosity we felt for each other was something else. I mean, if we walked into the same room, one of us would walk out – it got that bad. "I think it was Lee and me, we just didn't get on in the end.
Wilko left in 1977 when things turned bitter. I can feel everything bursting through me." Everything? "Yeah, you know.
It's a beautiful thing that makes me tingle. He says this with a smile, casting a glance at his garden. I'm embracing the present." It's easy to believe him, too. The things that used to matter – bills, worrying about the future, thinking I could change the past – don't matter to me any more. "It's one of the most intense years I've had. Seems, because last year he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He seems well and in a good mood, relaxed. Now 66, Johnson grew up a mere stone's throw away, on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary: a flat, densely populated land mass surrounded by creeks and marshland, famously dominated by a colossal oil refinery, a rich source of inspiration for songs he wrote while guitarist in Canvey's cult heroes Dr Feelgood.
Wilko johnson equipment tv#
TV stardom or a life of rock'n'roll seems far away as he sits cross-legged on his sofa at home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.
Wilko johnson equipment series#
To a generation born long after punk, Wilko might be better remembered as the executioner in the TV series Game of Thrones. His idiosyncratic choppy playing style is credited with influencing a legion of punk guitarists. Wilko Johnson is one of the world's most famous guitarists you've never heard of.
0 kommentar(er)
