Looking Back At Me

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After being rushed to hospital in Southend for an unknown condition, Johnson was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in January 2013. He reacted with remarkable stoicism. Given 10 months to live, but having declined chemotherapy which might have given him a few more weeks, he talked frankly about his condition on Radio 4’s Front Row and arranged a string of farewell gigs that March. His philosophical attitude was perhaps shaped by the fact that Irene had died of cancer in 2004, and Johnson had never reconciled himself to her loss (“the only time I don’t feel heartbroken is when I’m playing,” he admitted). Others to pay tribute included Sleaford Mods, who called Johnson “the unsung inventor of post Mod, Mod,” and The Stranglers.

Zoë and Wilko will be in conversation on 3rd June at Stoke Newington Town Hall for the Stoke Newington Literary Festival; Wilko and his band will be performing. Despite, or in spite of Johnson’s significant influence as a guitarist and songwriter, he is paradoxically now most well known due to his diagnosis with terminal cancer and his subsequent recovery from same. Johnson writes about this particular part of his life with honesty and it’s a particularly troubling but ultimately uplifting section of the book to read. Shortly afterwards, he began to focus on the Wilko Johnson Band, his longest-running musical project, with whom he would go on to release seven albums over the next three decades, including the 1981 debut Ice on the Motorway, 1988’s Barbed Wire Blues and, most recently, 2018’s Blow Your Mind. What emerges from this book is a passionate, private, intelligent, funny, eloquent and warm human being. Perhaps understandably, the only thing that seems to be wrong with Johnson today is an advanced case of bemusement. As anyone who has seen Julien Temple’s 2009 Dr Feelgood documentary, Oil City Confidential, knows, Johnson has quite a speaking voice, veering between a measured drawl and breathless tumble. But today, his speech comes peppered with long silences, during which he stares into the middle distance, as if trying to collect his thoughts, to work out exactly how he feels.

He laughs again. “When I was making the album with Roger, I really thought I was at the end. I’d think, ‘Man, I can’t complain, I’ve lived to be fairly old, I’ve had a really good life and I’m making an album with Roger Daltrey! What a fantastic ending!’ It built up to this fantastic climax, and then suddenly the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet by a brilliant surgeon! It is a bit of an anticlimax in a way.” In his post-Feelgood career, Johnson formed a new band, the Solid Senders, which played at the Front Row festival at the Hope & Anchor pub in Islington, London, alongside many of the new punk acts. Johnson was surprised and gratified to discover that many punk luminaries, including Joe Strummer and John Lydon, were Feelgood fans who had seen them as an influence. Tensions that had always been present between Johnson and his hard-drinking bandmates began to stretch towards breaking point. The others were content to let the guitarist handle all the songwriting, and the relentless touring schedule denied the perfectionist Johnson the time he needed to come up with new material. The following year however, Johnson underwent an operation and declared himself cancer free, revealing later that he was told he only had 10 months to live and remarking: “I shouldn’t be here at all.”

Always remember that all the music before punk was self indulgent and lifeless. God bless Wilko https://t.co/noA3e4wqfTHis economical songwriting, jerky guitar technique, clangorous sound and manic stage act stayed for the next 35 years exactly as they had been in his Dr Feelgood heyday. He remained resolutely out of style. His plectrum-free guitar technique, simultaneously playing rhythm with thumb and lead with fingers, produced a spasmodic, chopping accompaniment to Brilleaux’s growly vocals. It was a masterful display of menace and musicianship, and Johnson rode a wave of manic energy night after night. Wilko Johnson as the executioner Ser Ilyn Payne in the HBO TV series Game of Thrones, 2011. Photograph: HBO

There’s also this really sweet story that Jools Holland told in the early days of Squeeze. Squeeze supported the Feelgoods in Southend-on-Sea and they were really nervous in the presence of their heroes when they came offstage. They’d just played a set and had been watching from the wings all drenched in sweat. After the show Lee Brilleaux came in the dressing room and said, ‘I don’t want to be an old mum, but if you don’t put a cardigan on you’re going to get a cold, ‘cos you’re all wet…’. Squeeze thought that was insane! Lee Brilleaux! This wolfish man onstage, just being really sweet.” Wilko Johnson started from scratch and invented a new way to play guitar. Manifesting in his rhythm hand the amphetamine intensity of an era, he inspired a generation of twitchy dorks like me. Without him, I probably play clarinet. Requiescat. https://t.co/2VwlLt05u3

He developed a tight stage rapport with the Feelgoods’ vocalist Lee Brilleaux, who was helpfully signposted by his contrasting white – or once white, at least – suit. Johnson said he “felt like a lot of the power I had in whatever I was doing was radiating from him”. It was their partnership that drove the band to huge success in Britain just before the arrival of punk.

There’s a woman at the heart of this tale too: Johnson’s wife, Irene, who died in 2004. She’s the glue that holds this story together – the title an obvious nod to his grief – and she sounds a remarkable person, tolerating as she did her husband’s myriad indiscretions. Johnson and Lemmy had “trouble over a woman” in the mid-1970s, he says, in a fine section full of punk’s great and good, including John Lydon, but there’s no sign of any marital guilt. The section where Irene dies, however, is full of raw, affecting sentiment, especially when Johnson watches his sons “sat together under the trees… I wondered what they were feeling”. Here, he throws his hands up, showing all of his flaws. Zoe: “It’s all a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character isn’t it? They all drank a lot apart from Wilko – the drinking culture in the Feelgoods is one of the first things people think about. But I always think that if you are drinking that much and you are still a nice guy then you’re alright. The Jekyll and Hyde was more on-stage versus off-stage.” He was born John Wilkinson on Canvey Island, Essex. One of his earliest memories was of the 1953 floods, which hit low-lying Canvey badly and caused many deaths. His father, a gas-fitter, was “a stupid and uneducated and violent person”, according to his son, and died when Wilko was a teenager. Canvey became a romantic place in Johnson’s mind, with its lonely views of the Thames estuary overshadowed by the towers and blazing fires of the nearby Shell Haven oil refinery. Johnson and his contemporaries dubbed the area the Thames Delta, in homage to the Mississippi Delta, which spawned the blues musicians they admired. I didn’t plan to feel that way about death,” he says. “That’s the way it got me. One of the ways I dealt with it was to absolutely accept it, and think: ‘Right, they’ve told me this thing is inoperable – if I’ve got 10 months to live, I just want to do it, I don’t want to spend 10 months running around after second opinions or false hopes.’ In a way, it was a kind of comfort zone, accepting that I was going to die and all the questions of mortality had been sorted out for me. I dunno, if that communicated something positive for people, that’s marvellous, but I didn’t intend to.” Sometimes the insights and ecstasies and whatever were so intense, I’d think, ‘Man, this is almost worth it!’He was born John Peter Wilkinson on July 12 1947 on Canvey Island, Essex. He grew up in this below-sea-level community – at that time remote and rural – in the Thames Estuary. He went to Westcliff High School – while playing in local bands – then studied English at Newcastle University.