Featured Project - March 2010
Wilko Johnson - OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL
Simon Poulter interviews guitar legend Wilko Johnson at Chalkwell Hall
"I never meant to do this...I wanted to be a painter I think", says Wilko. We are sitting on the top floor of Chalkwell Hall looking out over the Thames Estuary in Southend and I am immediately struck by Wilko's sense of humour and candour. "Dr Feelgood was really a local band...we started the band to play that kind of music cos we liked it and nobody had any idea of doing it professionally or anything like that." By October 1976 the four Canvey Islanders had reached number one in the UK charts with their live album 'Stupidity'.
With the release of Julien Temple's film 'Oil City Confidential' there has been a renewed interest in Dr Feelgood and particularly Wilko. Of Temple's Seventies rockumentary trilogy, this is by far the most interesting work, as it portrays the way in which the band literally grafted their way to the top through a combination of stripped down songs and amazing stage presence. Dr Feelgood rehearsed their menacing stagecraft in pubs and clubs around the Thames Estuary and as Wilko says: "Violence is the wrong word..but there was a certain violence about it...people liked it and it attracted their attention and of course you do it more."
After two years playing locally, the band were regularly heading up the A13 to London and things started to take off, not through chart success, but word of mouth about the sheer energy of the band. The cover of the LP 'Stupidity' is a frozen moment in time, showing the band's lead singer Lee Brilleaux directly addressing the audience with his blues harp. To his right Wilko gazes up eyes bulging while delivering another volley of machine gun guitar. Behind them and out of shot are one of the tightest rhythm sections known to mankind, thudding out a relentless 4/4 power train. That is pretty much the deal and it is only through subsequent iterations of the Feelgoods, post-Wilko that we realise that this was in fact the Dr Feelgood - all other versions to be considered poor clones of the original. Temple's film poignantly confirms this through a wonderfully moving interview with Lee Brilleaux's mum in which she states that it was never the same without Wilko. Naturally, in a world full of myopically assembled X factor culture, it is reassuring to encounter a situation that was absolutely unique and unrepeatable.
"It was always a live thing, to do with the reaction between an audience and the performers", says Wilko. At the age of 62, Wilko is still gigging regularly and although, by his own admission, a shy man, he is addicted to the fix of the live moment. "I've always been a bit of a miserable so and so...and when we started getting famous this was something that people expected of me; to be melancholic, paranoid or whatever", he says. This of course became an expectation from fans and in Wilko's words "if you met Keith Richards and he offered you cucumber sandwiches you would be most disappointed."
"It's fairly well known that I tried to rip off everything that I did from Mick Green", says Wilko. Green developed a combined lead and rhythm guitar technique while working with Johnny Kid and The Pirates. (Mick Green sadly died in January 2010.) Although Wilko is very modest about his own guitar method, he clearly set the scene for stripped down, no effects, syncopated thrash guitar. The consequence of this innovation can be traced from early punk right through to Talking Heads, Nirvana and Franz Ferdinand. "You should plug straight in, I don't like effects pedals", says Wilko. Despite this, Wilko is generous in his praise of Jimi Hendrix - "He was a one off, there were no disciples, he just had his thing." There are long pauses as Wilko gathers his thoughts. Talking more about his own technique as a guitarist, he is effusive about 12 bar blues and again self-effacing in summary - "It's all I can do".
At the time that the Feelgoods emerged in the Seventies there was a burgeoning scene around Southend aggregated under the heading 'pub rock'. Along with this came the tongue in cheek description of the area as the 'Thames Delta'. I ask Wilko what he thinks of the concept of the Thames Gateway? Wilko seems uninterested in the rhetoric surrounding the 'gateway' but is unequivocal about where we are: "In many ways the connection between the music and this landscape is intense". Anyone witnessing the changing light on the water at the estuary's widest point would agree. I am reminded of one of my favourite lyrics from a Feelgoods song - 'where the big ships go gliding by'. "I would love the Thames Estuary if I never learned to play the guitar", says Wilko.
Wilko's relationship to South East Essex seems tightly bound into both music and place. Oil City Confidential confirms this very strong sense of ordinariness and comfort with origin. He is both music historian and eye witness. He talks about The Paramounts and The Orioles, two R&B bands from the Sixties, clearly favouring Mickey Jupp's latter outfit. The mimetic properties of music act as an historical trace that in the case of Mickey Jupp lead off to the most unlikely places, including Procol Harum, T Rex and even Ry Cooder. Cultural specificity clearly arises from spores, scenes and social interactions that distill over time; so for instance I am hard pressed to name one influential band or musician arising from Milton Keynes. (Note I have lived in MK, so this is not as glib as it may seem.) Wilko picks out Mo Whitham, who played with Mickey Jupp, as the best guitarist of the period, describing him as twice as good as himself - then quickly revising this to ten times - "he's got a feel".
'Back in the Night' is Wilko's favourite song from the Feelgoods period. "It's an up" he says, before recounting how at eleven o'clock at night sitting at home with his wife he started to write it. By the morning a roughly tape recorded version was taken to 'Feelgood House' and played to the other band members. Their reaction an unenthusiastic "s'alright".Wilko's term as guitarist in Dr Feelgood ended abruptly during the period in which the 'Sneakin' Suspicion' album was recorded. Personal issues and the mounting pressure of being the sole song writer had placed him under enormous pressure. Wilko describes how lost and confused he felt at this time, "It is really like a family, a band, and suddenly you're losing everybody you know." Veteran music producer Vic Maile advised him to take a year off, but at the time Wilko saw this as being unthinkable. Perhaps the most evident outcome of Wilko's reflection and Julian Temple's film is the importance and high regard that he had for Dr Feelgood vocalist Lee Brilleaux - "He was the leader, he was just great."
On the matter of Southend's bid to become UK City of Culture 2013, Wilko describes the town as a 'nerve centre' of the South East and encouragingly talks about how over a year you could do things that otherwise could not be achieved with such status. Politically, he compares the relative disengagement of young people to the most recent Iraq war with the mass protests in the Sixties surrounding the Vietnam war. Despite evident cynicism he reflects - "I still wish for the kind of world that I wished for when I was eighteen...and now it's perhaps with luck that we can survive."
We conclude the interview talking about Wilko's wife Irene Knight who died in 2004. "I can honestly say there's not a waking moment when I'm not thinking about her", he says. The song 'Paradise' on the Sneakin' Suspicion album is a tribute to this enduring love; a poetic and catchy track that since her death has prompted a lyric change. I am too shy to ask what the lyric change is but inevitably end up wondering about it, concluding that prurient probing is unnecessary. Wilko has no intention of giving up playing and clearly relishes every moment of jumping on stage with the legendary Blockheads bass player Norman Watt-Roy. "I'll keep doing it until I'm struck down", he says.
OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL (15) is on limited release in the UK
Recommended listening:
Down by the Jetty, United Artists, 1975, Dr Feelgood
Malpractice, United Artists, 1975, Dr Feelgood
Stupidity, United Artists, 1976, Dr Feelgood
Sneakin' Suspicion, United Artists, 1977, Dr Feelgood
Out of Their Heads, Warner Brothers, 1977, The Pirates
Legend, Vertigo, 1971 (aka the 'red boot album'), Mickey Jupp
