The whole thing was a sort of projection of Lee's personality. Which meant going down the market and buying cheap suits with narrow lapels - a bit like the The Blues Brothers fantasy but before the film, y'know? We used to laugh until we thought we were going to die. We just used to sit around, get stoned and have these fantasies - about ourselves as authentic Chicago bluesmen transported to Canvey. "It wasn't a designed thing, not as such. "Well, yes," says Wilko, folding his legs under himself like yogi. The Feelgoods' R&B redux was a music of structure, cadence and revealed energy. The songs were short, their hair short-ish the words came at you like blow-torched Chuck Berry, while Johnson hacked at a black and red Telecaster without a plectrum (you were as likely to find a widdling solo in a Wilko song as a quote from Ravel). Unquestionably, the group reclaimed rock's lowlands for punk - a fact acknowledged by Patti Smith of all people - standing for everything that was neither prolix, nor self-indulgent, nor made out of offcuts of cheesecloth. Feelgood songs proposed a small world of harsh existential integrity: paranoia and sexual jealousy ran in their lines like amphetamine. Before they were deposited by history into the generic dump-bin known as "Pub Rock", Dr Feelgood bestrode the weary world of British boogie, a beacon of economy, cogency, elegant scansion and grimy suiting. I chose to do what I did and I shouldn't 'ave done it." And he sinks his gaze into the fireplace again and disappears into another of the silences which open up in his conversation like empty cupboards.ĭr Feelgood were one of the perfect groups one of the few British ones ever to wrestle with what Greil Marcus called the invisible republic of American song and come away with something comparable to the original model yet somehow wholly English. I was on me own - it was like being kicked out of a family. If someone commissioned you to go out and find the most useless arseholes you can, AND GIVE THEM ALL YOUR MONEY, would you do it?" He shoots me a basilisk stare, then smiles. "For the next three or four years," he says wistfully, staring into the fireplace in the front room of his yellow, crenellated house in the suburbs of Southend, "I made nothing but wrong moves, including the Solid Senders. And though the pudding-basin moptop has greyed and diminished to a crop, his eyes are still stark beneath their beetling brows, his mouth as wide and firm as a park bench. He is clearly still the Brueghelian assassin he so resembled in 1975. Dear little Johnny Martin, no longer quite so dependent on his teddy, had transformed himself into the very definition of the word "henchman".īut perhaps these things did not trouble Johnson as they might trouble most of us. That meant rubbing up The Big Figure, Sparko and Gentleman Lee Brilleaux the wrong way, a friction not to be sought lightly given that, viewed together, the three of them resembled the staff of an Essex second-hand car dealership on a loss-making awayday at the bookie's. He parted from his most celebrated group, Dr Feelgood, under a thunderhead of a cloud 28 years ago, having fallen out with the other members in no uncertain terms. The Figure: the first Feelgood to get on the airwaves." There he was singing 'Me and My Teddy Bear' on the blaaardy radio. He's five years old, in his first year at school, and 'e's goin' to sing us a song!' And thiiiis," says Johnson, his vowels reverting with a snap from cod-Lancastrian to torque-y estuarine, "this was The Figure. "And he said, 'I gorra a little lad wi' me. "They were just waves." He also remembers listening to the radio in Sheffield and hearing Wilfred Pickles reporting live from the refugee reception centre in the school on the island. Wilko Johnson, who evolved out of John Wilkinson more than 30 years ago (and ratified the fact by deed poll), vividly recalls being carried to some sort of vehicle that night and looking out over the fields behind the house where he lived with his family.
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