Gig 073
Wilko Johnson’s Solid Senders
Oxford Polytechnic
12 October 1978
Wilko Johnson left Dr Feelgood at the height of their fame, which at the time seemed like a perverse decision. It later – actually much later, in the form of personal testimony – emerged that he didn’t get on with the rest of the group, was difficult, cantankerous, and worse than that, university-educated and teetotal. Hindsight would suggest that Dr Feelgood in their original form had already peaked. Their last album with Wilko, Sneakin’ Suspicion, was patchy, and by far the strongest song, Paradise, turned out to be the one that caused the split since Lee Brilleaux – a much more authoritative singer than Wilko – refused to sing it due to what he felt were overly personal lyrics detailing the guitarist’s complicated vie affective. Given that Wilko was the only songwriter and himself not particularly prolific, that was that; irreconcilable differences, your honour.
So Dr Feelgood recruited a new guitarist (see Gig 039) and Wilko eventually got his own group together, and subsequently fell out with them too, but not yet, at least as far as was obvious. In reality Wilko was only slightly less conservative than his old bandmates, but as a literary scholar and Dylan fan he sought to write in a more lyrically expansive style while remaining more or less true to the old school r’n’b blueprint, and he did this rather well in songs such as Dr Dupree, Everybody’s Carrying a Gun and Walking on the Edge. While he wasn’t a great singer in any commonly recognisable sense, there was a neat take on Dylan’s Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window which worked well sung in an Estuarine drawl, the only voice Wilko possessed. Elsewhere there was a fair amount of sweaty up-tempo blues, not that anyone seemed to mind too much; ‘John the Conqueroo’ evoked in a Canvey Island accent was always going to hit the spot. The keyboard player added an extra musical dimension which probably wasn’t necessary, since part of Wilko’s appeal was his apparent one-dimensionality; I suppose it meant he didn’t have to take every instrumental solo as well as singing lead, in a voice which might kindly be described as singular. He still looked and dressed the same, and did the bug-eyed monster/clockwork mouse thing on every solo, knowing full well that this was very much what the punters wanted. Personally my musical preferences had moved closer to what would come to be known as post-punk, however, since Wilko came to be acknowledged as a major influence on the jagged, staccato guitar style prevalent in that sub-genre, enjoyment of this gig didn’t feel like a counter-revolutionary lapse. Or maybe I was just learning to become more open-minded. I was down the front with a bunch of friends, had high hopes and wasn’t disappointed.
Wilko never really changed; he couldn’t, and didn’t want to. Eventually he formed a regular trio with whom he played for many years, and enjoyed a late-career burst of fame and something approaching national treasure status. For this we should be grateful.
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