WILKO JOHNSON
Fiery Feelgoods guitarist (1947-2022)
WILKO Johnson was resurrected several times in his later years. In 2009, Julien Temple’s Dr Feelgood documentary Oil City Confidential rescued the band’s guitarist from career oblivion, reminding viewers of his electric-shock stage presence and poetic mind. Ironically, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 would raise his career to even greater heights, as people began to realise what might be lost. “I could contrive to feel miserable in the Garden of Eden,” he later reflected. “Whereas, the valley of the shadow of death – it’s not all downside!”
An album with Roger Daltrey, Going Back Home, hit the Top 3, and a farewell tour concluded with the balconies of Camden’s KOKO bouncing with communal love. One second opinion and tumour-removing op later and the dead man walked. “We have remarked many times, my chums and I,” Johnson mused, “that if you wrote the story of that year down, it would be condemned as an improbable fiction.”
This was the strange sequel to Johnson’s landmark musical achievement as Dr Feelgood’s songwriter and guitarist. He and singer Lee Brilleaux rooted the band in a mythic version of their refinery-lit Essex home, Canvey Island. Johnson’s songs were steeped in Canvey mystique and rough romance, the likes of “Down By The Jetty” giving specific poetry to the Feelgoods’ hardcore R&B. “I made a conscious effort,” he acknowledged,
