In the title track, a tale of the frustration of everyday urban life, he observes “I got a girl, a man’s best friend, I’d have her now, if she’d just come back again. He is also a talented songwriter, with a wry line in lyrics. Johnson has a unique, idiosyncratic guitar style, producing choppy, urgent rhythms with flailing fingers rather than a pick, which help to drive the songs as much as the rhythm section does. Featuring re-recordings of ten classic Wilko songs from his Feelgood days and subsequent solo career, together with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”, if this is to be his final album, it’s a cracking way to exit. ![]() Foreswearing treatment, he went back on the road for a final tour and recorded Going Back Home with Roger Daltrey. In 2013, Wilko announced that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. Little surprise then that they exerted a significant influence on the nascent punk movement in the UK – Joe Strummer of The Clash played a Telecaster because Wilko did. The Feelgoods had short hair, wore ill-fitting suits, produced high-energy live shows with songs rarely lasting over three minutes and exuded an aura of menace. When his former band, Dr Feelgood, first appeared in 1975, their stripped-down, speed-fuelled, high-octane R’n’B was the perfect antidote to the self-absorbed, pretentious and long-winded music being produced by many rock bands at the time. An authority on astronomy, one of five or six people in the UK able to speak Old Icelandic (he learned it at University in order to be able to read the Sagas in the original language), an actor (he played the mute executioner Ilyn Payne, in the first and second series of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones) and one of the most influential R’n’B and rock guitarists ever produced in the UK. Recorded in a mere seven days, the songs have all the energy and power of a band, and a man, working against the clock.Although not a household name in the United States, Wilko Johnson may be as close to a renaissance man as one can find in the modern world. His touring rhythm section of Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy and drummer Dylan Howe provide a rock solid foundation and additional keyboard magic is supplied by Dexy’s Mick Talbot. Johnson’s guitar is equally versatile – but never so intoxicating as when at its choppy, percussive best. Teaming up with Roger Daltrey for this outing was an inspired choice: the latter’s robust, powerful tones and rich vocal range bring an extra dimension to the Johnson classics, refreshing them anew.įrom solo titles such as ‘Ice On The Motorway’ and ‘I To Keep It To Myself’ to Feelgood hits ‘All Through The City’ and ‘Keep It Out Of Sight’, Daltrey nails it every time. ![]() Living on borrowed time he continuously extends his farewell tour and has even taken the time to craft a bitter-sweet swansong. ![]() Wilko’s defiance in the face of his terminal cancer diagnosis has been remarkable. But, of course, in the company of Dr Feelgood’s Lee Brilleaux et al, back in the 1970s, Johnson took the sound of the Chicago label and reinvented it for a new generation. Releasing an album on the legendary Chess label is the recording equivalent of Moz’s appropriation of the Penguin Classics imprint.
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