Wilko for Christmas

Good interview with the immortal Wilko Johnson, conducted at his Westcliff-on-Sea gaff, in this week's New Statesman. Writer Kate Mossman has a good point when she writes:You wonder if he responded to his approaching end in the manner he did because jobbing musicians are programmed to think, breathe, live and be happy in the short term. It also includes an Essex epiphany at the start of Doctor Feelgood's fame: “And there’s one moment I’ll always remember. We were returning home from London and when you get to Barking there’s a big flyover, and we were right at the top of it. I looked out and I could see the lights of Essex out before us, and I said to myself, ‘I wonder what is going to happen . . .’” Click on the link to read.

Wilko alive and gigging

Great to see Wilko Johnson still with us and performing songs like Paradise to 30,000 people in Chalkwell, Southend, at the Village Green Festival (short video of his set on the link). A fitting farewell to the Thames Delta. Also check out his thoughts on mortality in this Guardian interview. He does it right.

Wilko does it right

Sad news arrives that Wilko Johnson has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The man is a Southend and Canvey legend and his book Looking Back at Me is a great off-the-wall read of Dr Feelgood madness and mayhem, life on the hippy trail and stargazing. His Canvey Island gig features in my book The Joy of Essex as well as his telescope in a dome on top of his Southend gaff. Wilko is now embarking on a farewell tour so let's all give him a cosmic send-off and a blue plaque outside the Labworth Cafe.

Looking Back at Wilko

Went to the launch of Wilko Johnson's excellent new biography Looking Back at Me (Cadiz Music) at Rough Trade East last night, where Wilko played a great set and then signed 200 copies of his book. Written with Zoe Howe, Looking Back At Me is expensive at £25, but is brilliantly designed. It's a coffee-table book with full-page photos, pull-out quotes, old school reports (“A self-styled, yet probably genuine revolutionary”) and thoughts from Wilko on everything from the Canvey Island floods to the hippy trail in Afghanistan, science fiction, art, guns, aliens, the Moon and how to build your own rooftop observatory in Southend. A great read. Wilko does it right.

Back in the night

Went to see Wilko Johnson at the Oyster Fleet hotel in Canvey Island last Sunday with my mate Robert. We had an agreeable pre-gig drink at The Lobster Smack, past the gas silos down Haven Road.

It’s a lovely old pub, clad in white weather boarding and sheltering beneath the huge earth banks topped by the concrete sea wall. A sign outside revealed how the pub was used by smugglers, who could nip out of their boats through the back door and take their dodgy goods to Hadleigh and Rayleigh. So nothing much has changed there then.

WHAT LARKS!
It’s also featured in Great Expectations as The Sluice House, the riverside pub where Pip and Magwitch stay when they attempt to return the transported felon to Australia. It still has low ceilings and old beams and apart from the laminated menus can’t have changed much since Dickens time. From the pub you can climb up on to the sea wall and view the tide lapping impatiently at the other side waiting for a breach. And see the tremendously long and useless old jetty designed for the never-completed Occidental oilworks and the marshland stretching off towards Coryton. A great place to have a drink.

As for Wilko, the former Dr Feelgood legend and greatest living Englishman comes on stage with a minimum of fuss. He has the most amazing face these days; a bald veiny head, huge eyebrows and mad stare. No wonder he recently got a part as the mute executioner Ilyn Payne, in fantasy series Game of Thrones. All he had to do was look dangerous, which comes easily.

His first song, Everyone’s Carrying a Gun, adds to the general feel of lunacy as he careers across the stage with his trademark guitar bursts. An added plus is that we also get Norman Watt-Roy on bass, famed for his time with another Essex legend Ian Dury. He performs some amazing funky solos and you realise just what a good musician he is. He also has a bald head, staring eyes and like Wilko looks like he would make an admirable villain in Harry Potter. Meanwhile there’s a younger drummer working admirably hard to keep up with the old codgers.

STOP WORK WHISTLE BLOW
The room is sweaty and packed with 300 people. The old Feelgood favourites are there, starting with Sneakin’ Suspicion and the Canvey lyric of Wilko looking at the flares by the river. It’s not quite the same without Lee Brilleaux of course, but Wilko is a great performer in his own right. Then Wilko brings on a harmonica player for a storming Roxette.

“This is a song I wrote in those brilliant seventies,” he says before performing Back In The Night, scattergunning riffs into the night. There’s She Does It Right too, with Wilko holding his guitar up by his head and machine gunning the audience. Then a great Paradise and an impassioned cry of “Irene Irene Irene!”

It feels like some mad convention of Essex eccentricity with electricity as Wilko puts his guitar behind his head and plays it backwards. What’s also striking is how hard the band are working, they’re all covered in sweat – it’s a very Essex characteristic to put in a proper shift in your night-job. Somehow the sea walls hold as Wilko encores with Johnny Be Goode.

It’s a special moment to have seen Wilko in his home town where he’s still very much loved. Like Canvey he’s in a place apart, a geezer metaphorically a few feet short of sea level, but strangely addictive and still loved by the locals.