He is interested in William Blake, Milton, Marlowe. “He is the poet of Canvey Island, his songs are fused with the Canvey sensibility, humour and poetry. “Wilko was a revelation to me,” Temple tells me, as he wrestles with the film in an editing suite off London’s old Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street. Johnson is a less explicable, darker figure: as waywardly fascinating as Temple’s more famed punk film heroes.Įver since I can remember, I liked to boast to people I was born below sea level, and this gave me something special The tales that accrued around him were of a fearsome but kindly Essex gentleman drinker. Brilleaux stayed with the Feelgoods till his death from lymphoma in 1994. Johnson left the Feelgoods acrimoniously in 1977, going on to a solo career potent enough to inspire Manu Chao, among many others. Tickets: shows them to be as thrilling a live band as the UK has seen, Wilko the classic, black-garbed guitar gunslinger patrolling the stage with a manic stare, at the right hand of prowling, threatening singer Lee Brilleaux. Wilko Johnson's autobiography 'Looking Back at Me', co-written with Zoe Howe, is published by Cadiz Music tomorrow. perhaps I could play Romeo?" he ponders, and judders out his machine-gun laugh. "I have all this Shakespeare lodged with me and useless. What next for Wilko Johnson? More acting, perhaps – he played a mute executioner in Game of Thrones and so enjoyed the experience that he would love a belated career as an actor. He is a mine of Shakespeare quotes (he was a schoolteacher before he joined Dr Feelgood), and, in his Estuary accent, draws on the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sydney when he talks about the way his fellow band members regard his torments as a song-writer: "They don't see all the 'Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,/ "Fool," said my muse to me," Look in thy heart and write". Christ, how embarrassing."īut Johnson the poet is never far from the conversation. "I thought 'This great victory needs a poem, so I will write it in alliterative verse style, pseudo Anglo Saxon'. As an answer to the Anglo Saxon text The Battle of Maldon, which records an ancient Viking victory, Wilko once wrote some verses on the great moment in Canvey history that was the Battle of Benfleet in AD894. At university he studied the Icelandic sagas and he still likes to read Anglo Saxon poetry. On the table in front of him are a chess set, a copy of Private Eye and a book on the Aztecs. On the roof of his house is a dome with a large periscope where he spends hours studying the stars. Wilko once had ambitions to be a painter and a poet, and the publication of the book is the first time that his artwork has been seen outside his home. Looking Back at Me also reveals the myriad cultural touchstones of a working-class rock'n'roller and deeply complex man. I always think that he really was the wellspring of Dr Feelgood." "There was this sequence and it was just me and Lee Brilleaux on stage together and suddenly I got this powerful flash and I remembered what it was like to be on stage with him. He admits to an emotional moment when watching Oil City Confidential, a recollection that makes him twiddle his fingers. Wilko now sings lead vocals with his band, and when he speaks of Brilleaux, it is with admiration. It was a bitter personality clash between Brilleaux – who died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 41 – and Johnson that caused the break up of the original Dr Feelgood in 1977. "Lee took the knife off him without interrupting the show – which shows quite a bit of class, I think."
Wilko mentions an exception when the band's late singer Lee Brilleaux jumped into the crowd to confront a man with a knife who had started a brawl. The audience understood that and, despite the aggression in songs such as "Riot In Cell Block #9", there was rarely trouble at Feelgood shows. don't it feel like a gun? You really, really do it! And it's exactly the same on stage! It's no machine gun, man, it's a Telecaster!"
"When you're kids playing cops and robbers you're using your fingers as your gun and you know you are just playing but.
"The way you were looking at people, you were doing that because that was what people want," he says, making his hand into the shape of a gun. In the classic Wilko pose on stage, his eyes are popping and he is pointing his Fender Telecaster at the audience like a Sten gun, gliding to and fro on the end of his red guitar lead.
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