Wilko on wheels

I went to see Wilko Johnson at the Half Moon in Putney on Saturday night – my first proper blues gig for some time, I’m ashamed to say. Watching the great man up close and personal – from a position just a few feet from the stage – was a remarkable experience.

For those who haven’t seen Wilko, or the fabulous Oil City Confidential documentary about Dr Feelgood, the first thing to say is that he looks odd enough when he’s stationary. Bald, boggle-eyed and intense, dressed all in black, he sings into the mic and thrashes away at his stylish guitar (matt black with a shiny red fingerplate) in his own unique manner. (My friend Chris, who understands more about these things than I do, says he manages to play lead and rhythm guitar at the same time, which ought to be impossible.)

But it’s when the verse ends that it gets truly strange. Freed from the need to stand still, Wilko suddenly veers across the stage, extremely fast, soloing as he goes, with an almost trance-like expression on his face. Given that, from the audience, you can’t see his legs, you end up wondering if he’s on wheels, because surely no one can move that fast sideways. Sometimes, by way of variation, he shoots up to the front of the stage and back again, and it’s like an effect a cameraman might try, zooming in and out while keeping the subject in focus.

Meanwhile, off to one side of the stage, bassist Norman Watt-Roy is feeling every note, hunched over his guitar and sweating profusely as he twists and turns and grimaces and gurns. He’s the antithesis of the Bill Wyman school of bass playing.

With all this going on, it’s easy to forget about the music, a powerful, percussive r’n’b, including a few Feelgood classics for the old-timers in the audience (which was most of us). It’s just a shame that Wilko barely uttered a word from the moment he arrived on stage to the moment he left. I thought he might have wanted to share a few stories from his long, strange career. But clearly he prefers to let his guitar do the talking.

Confidential thoughts

I finally caught up with Julian Temple’s excellent Dr Feelgood documentary, Oil City Confidential, the other night. A few thoughts that arose while I was watching it:

• That Wilko Johnson is a bit odd, isn’t he?
• The songs I knew Dr Feelgood for - the chart hits like ‘Milk and alcohol’ and ‘Down at the doctors’ – were actually recorded after Wilko left the band. I never realised that
• Dr Feelgood were to the early 70s what The Yardbirds were to the early 60s: a shot in the arm for British blues, a shot of pure adrenaline. I wish I’d seen them live at their peak, but it was before my time
• Did I mention that Wilko Johnson really is quite odd?
• It’s also odd that no one really followed the Feelgoods’ lead. The accepted wisdom is that the energy and on-stage aggression of the band was a major influence on punk, but I’m not aware of any blues bands who picked up the baton and ran with it. Maybe it’s just that punk was so all-pervading that any potential new young blues bands went down that path instead

Talking about the Feelgoods also gives me a chance to repeat one of my favourite pieces of trivia: that every member of the band had the same name. Bassist John B. Sparkes kept his, drummer John Martin became The Big Figure, guitarist John Wilkinson became Wilko Johnson, and singer Lee Brilleaux’s real name was Lee John Collinson. What’s more, when Wilko left the band, he was replaced by Gypie Mayo, whose real first name was (guess what?) John, and he in turn was replaced by Johnny Guitar. He was eventually replaced by someone called Gordon, and that’s when the rot set in.