Wilko Johnson (1947-2022)
A TRIBUTE TO THE UNSTOPPABLE, INCOMPARABLE DR. FEELGOOD GUITARIST
I FIRST BECAME aware of Wilko Johnson back in 1975 when I saw Dr. Feelgood playing live on the weekly music show, 45. Unfortunately, that tape is now long lost, but the performance was unforgettable — the naked aggression of singer Lee Brilleaux allied to the psychotic, disconnected stare of Wilko as he skittered across the stage, spraying juddering, chopping, staccato rhythm guitar lines. The Feelgoods looked and sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. With their sub-threeminute songs, raw, naked guitar, cheap suits and skinny ties, they unwittingly lit the spark under the revolution that would become punk rock.
Johnson died November 21, 2022. Armed with only a Telecaster and an HH transistor amp, he created one of the most instantly identifiable sounds in guitar history. “I was left-handed, but I decided to play right-handed. I couldn’t manage to hold on to the pick, though. I kept dropping it, so I thought I’d just use my fingers. I really loved Mick Green from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. He’d played a Telecaster, so that was it for me. I’ve only ever owned four guitars, and I’ve still got them — three Teles and a Strat.”
Dr. Feelgood recorded four albums with Wilko, including their live record, Stupidity, which entered the U.K. charts at Number 1 in 1976. Relations between the band began to fracture, with Johnson feeling under pressure to come up with new material. Things came to a head in 1977 during the recording of their final album, Sneakin’ Suspicion, and he was sacked. Johnson went on to front his own bands and even spent several years as a member of Ian Dury’s Blockheads in the early Eighties.
Wilko’s career path seemed to be set, as he became a steady fixture on the live circuit, releasing the occasional album. Everything changed when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2013. It seemed that the world suddenly realized what they had in Wilko — and were about to lose. As he was completing what he expected to be the ultimate in final, farewell tours, he recorded Going Back Home, with Roger Daltrey singing Feelgood and Wilko classics. Amazingly, and against all odds, the improbably named Charlie Chan, a surgeon and a fan of Wilko, contacted Johnson to suggest a radical procedure that could cure the cancer. Johnson agreed to the 11-hour surgery under Emmanuel Huguet,
“I was left-handed, but I decided to play right-handed. I couldn’t manage to hold on to the pick, though. I kept dropping it, so I thought I’d just use my fingers” — WILKO JOHNSON
a colleague of Chan’s, and made an amazing recovery. His career was transformed, playing bigger shows than anytime since the end of the Feelgoods. Criminally underrecorded, Johnson only made one more album, Blow Your Mind, in 2018. Fittingly, it was one of the best records in his catalog. Tantalizingly, Johnson recently told me that he had a garden shed full of home recordings that he’d never listened to in decades. Hopefully, someone will now comb through the archive and deliver a fitting endnote to an extraordinary career.