![]() ![]() Inside, an indelibly male, musicianly scruffiness prevails – Wilko’s beloved wife Irene succumbed to cancer eight years ago – and the low coffee table at which we sit is covered in bills and newspapers, next to an open laptop. Wilko answers the door dressed head to toe in regulation black, and grins shyly, as if mildly bemused anyone should want to drive all the way to the extremities of Essex to talk to him. ![]() The Admiral Jellicoe, the 1930s pub in the High Street where the band took journalists for marathon booze-ups, is also a recognisable stereotype – mock Tudor front, forecourt parking, brewery ales.Ī 30-minute drive up the road, the man who found poetry and inspiration in Canvey awaits us in his present home, a seemingly ordinary terraced house in a suburb of Southend – ordinary, that is, until you spot the observatory he has built on the roof to facilitate his passion for astronomy. But today its industrial landscape and bleak views across the Thames to north Kent seem less romantic than familiar – one of many down-at-heel English coastal towns. Feelgood in the early 1970s is still as it’s portrayed in the band’s mythology: a shabby, end-of-the-line seaside resort, abutting miles of oil storage tanks, refineries and jetties. The town on the Thames Estuary that gave birth to Dr. Low skies streaked with grey clouds, rain spitting noncommittally. I’m sure I would have asserted my stupidity somehow.”Ĭanvey Island, Essex, February 2013. Sometimes I think, If only I had followed a conventional career path… but it wouldn’t have happened with me. “I’ve had more than anyone could ever ask for,” he says. Yet before he goes, he’s happy to speak several times to MOJO about his inspirational and often downright strange life and times in music, from having Number 1 records in the mid-’70s before being fired from the Feelgoods, to finding sanctuary among the punk fraternity and fielding phone calls from Elton John. Very soon the cult hero who influenced a generation of performers – The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Jam, Madness, and beyond to today’s groups like The Strypes – won’t be with us any more. Everyone acts ‘normally’ around Wilko tonight, a reflection of his own remarkably sanguine proclamations about his illness, but everyone knows the score. ![]() The exhibition comes 13 years after Dury’s passing from cancer in 2000, making an uncomfortable link with Wilko, who in January this year was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which will end his life in the coming months. “It just reminds you once again – what a guy.” At the makeshift bar, he talks warmly about Dury’s art. Resuscitated as a cultural icon after the extraordinary success of Oil City Confidential, Julien Temple’s 2009 documentary on the Feelgoods, Wilko’s reputation as a loveable English eccentric – equal parts bullish R&B purist, working-class intellectual and star-gazing loner – is well established. ![]() Around 9pm there is a flutter when a pale figure clad in black suddenly makes an appearance – some might recognise him as the mute, gnarly executioner Ilyn Payne from the HBO sword and sorcery TV series Game Of Thrones, but to most he is simply Wilko Johnson, the Dr. Tonight is the preview of More Than Fair, an exhibition of Ian Dury’s paintings from the ’60s and early ’70s, featuring self-portraits and Pop Art-style pictures of vampish women with bare bosoms. Before Johnson was given a surprise all clear in 2014, Pat Gilbert witnessed his remarkable act of defiance and chronicled a life less ordinary.Ī hot, sticky evening amid London’s summer heatwave, and a crowd gathers at the Royal College of Art on Kensington Gore. Rather than subject himself to the medical treatment the former Dr Feelgood legend spent the next six months living life to the full. In January 2013, Wilko Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. ![]()
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