Age no barrier who just keep
HAS THE LATEST NEWS ON THE ROOTS MUSIC SCENE IN THE AREA
THE relentless march of time does not appear to hinder the will of many musicians to simply get out in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Artists who have seen it all many times before seem to draw on bottomless reserves of stamina when it comes to performing live. Two such stalwarts are back on Tyneside this week when they will be treated, once again, to the warmest of recep- tions.
Wilko Johnson and his band play a new venue (for them) when they take the stage at Wylam Brewery (former Science & Engineering Museum in Exhibition Park) next Thursday night.
The former John Peter Wilkinson morphed into Canvey Island’s very own living monument to a muscular form of R ’n B which was originally inspired by his guitarist mentor, Mick Green, of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates.
Wilko, fresh from gaining an English degree at Newcastle university, even copied Green’s orthodox approach by playing his Fender Telecaster guitar in right-hand mode despite being left-handed.
From the early ’70s. he plied his trade in the powerhouse quartet which was Dr Feelgood.
The vagaries of a life in popular music soon saw to it that the bright lights eventually faded and the top-10 albums – Stupidity (1976) was a number one album – of that decade ceased.
When he left Dr in 1977, he formed the Solid Senders, then the Wilko Johnson Band before stints with The Blockheads. However, the machine-gun stance and jerking, walkabout stage antics left an indelible impression, not least on the nascent punk movement, and the world was not about to forget him.
The widely reported health issues have thankfully been consigned to history – covered in infinite detail in his autobiography, Don’t You Leave Me Here (2016) – and Wilko, bassist Norman Watt-Roy and drummer Dylan Howe are back in live action with a recently released “new” album. The record, on the iconic Chess Records imprint, is called I Keep It To Myself :The Best of Wilko Johnson. Johnson has many gifts (poetry, painting, astronomy among them) but he is a magnetic presence on stage (WattRoy runs him close at times) and the music is as potent as it ever was. Welcome back to Tyneside, as he once told me, his home from home. More senior than Wilko in terms of age, if not recording experience, is Ste-