The beloved Dr Feelgood guitarist left us on 21 November 2022. We salute the livewire stage presence and piston-pump guitar style that lit the fuse of punk
WILKO JOHNSON
July 1947 – November 2022
Jaw clenched and eyes bulging. Skittering across the stage, boltupright and belligerent. Shouldering his black and red ’62 Tele in the style of a machine gun to mock-strafe the crowd. The sight of Wilko Johnson in full flight – aspectacle so visceral that only the antics of Pete Townshend come close – would have been electrifying at any point in rock ’n’ roll history. In the early 70s, when the presiding guitarists of prog stood statue-still and studious, nobody could take their eyes off the late Dr Feelgood guitarist.
“His playing was angry and angular,” wrote Billy Bragg after the news broke of Johnson’s death on 21 November. “But his presence – twitchy, confrontational, out of control – was something we’d never beheld before in UK pop.”
Born John Wilkinson on Canvey Island, Essex, Johnson quickly rejected the path of his gas-fitter father (“a stupid, uneducated and violent person,” he said). The imported blues vinyl of Chicago’s Chess Recordssignposted another way – “When I first heard Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley,” Johnson told this writer, “it was just so exciting and mysterious” – as did the defining guitar influence of Johnny Kidd And The Pirates’ Mick Green.
By extension, just as Johnson had dubbed his bleakly romantic estuary homeland the ‘Thames Delta’, so the music he made upon teaming with singer Lee Brilleaux in 1971 to form Dr Feelgood was a chippy, brittle and unapologetically British take on rhythm and blues. “It was so basic,” he told Guitarist, “but we instantly caught on and were packing the places out because we were just so different from whatever else was happening.”
Debut album, Down By The Jetty (1975), featuring Johnson’s She Does It Right, was followed the same year by Malpractice, home to his classic Back In The Night. But the surprise UK No 1 of 1976’s live release, Stupidity, confirmed the Feelgoods as a band that thrived on the stage, where Johnson’s piston-pump Telecaster technique – known as ‘the stab’ – was at its most thrilling.
The guitarist dismissed his abilities (“I can play three chords and 12 bars”). Yet his rhythm-lead hybrid was often uncanny, even suggesting a second unseen guitarist, with his robotic right hand also hitting riffs and solos without breaking the up/ down groove. Another ingredient was his pickless technique, Johnson instead fanning his fingers like a particularly ferocious flamenco player. It was
