#Wilko johnson farewell tour full#

When he succeeded, he captured both the American roots of the music and the south Essex he lived in, as with the jewel-like opening line of All Through the City, describing the fires shooting from the chimneys of Shellhaven: 'Stand and watch the towers burning at the break of day.' Johnson and Dr Feelgood created a mythology for Canvey and the Thames – their homelands became the Thames Delta, and Johnson set about writing a blues that was rooted in his own life. We had to turn back because we hadn't got lights. The furthest we got was, we tried to cycle to Canterbury one day, and realised by the time we got there we'd need lights. 'We used to go out cycling a lot – me, him, his brother Malcolm. 'Then it was open land,' recalls his childhood friend John Martin, who later became The Big Figure, the drummer for Dr Feelgood. The Canvey he knew as a kid was different. And I looked across the marshes at the refinery, and in the early morning it would be blue in the distance, and I used to think: 'It's Babylon.' And in this city was all the freedom I didn't have.' 'This part of Essex, with the powerlines and the windmills and the industry, it makes the landscape what it is.' He remembers a short-lived job in London in his teens, and getting the early morning train from Benfleet, 'feeling so absolutely wretched and defeated and just nothing. All of the safety pins and bondage gear, and that was another world.'Īpart from three years at university in Newcastle, and a year on the hippy trail afterwards, Johnson has always lived around here, first on Canvey, then in Southend. 'I thought, as our success was growing, that this was gonna lead to a rhythm and blues thing like the Stones did in the 60s,' Johnson says wistfully. They gained a reputation as the most incendiary and exciting live band in Britain, and had a No 1 hit with the live album Stupidity, but those they inspired promptly rendered them obsolete by inventing punk.

In Julien Temple's masterly 2009 documentary Oil City Confidential, they're portrayed as a gang of bank robbers with guitars, dashing into town to pull off a job at one venue or another, then heading back to Essex, to their homes in the shadows of the refineries of the island they renamed Oil City. Kicking against the prog-rock trend of the time, Johnson insisted the band, based on Canvey Island, play tough R&B, mixing covers with Johnson's own songs. Johnson's legend rests largely on the six years he spent with Dr Feelgood, from 1971 until he left the band in 1977.

#Wilko johnson farewell tour full#

Then a couple of weeks in, I turned the corner and there was the full moon rising, man, and it was upside down!' It's the result of a fascination with astronomy that developed when he began wondering, ahead of a tour of New Zealand, which way the moon hung in the southern hemisphere: 'I got down to New Zealand and there was no moon. 'Ooh! No 10's up late!' Me, I sneak about in the dark.') And it's there in the observatory on the flat roof, behind the battlements he shares with the other half of the semi. She knew everyone in the street and what they were up to. ('When my wife was alive, she was a very friendly person. The oddness is now benign – footage of him in Dr Feelgood in the 70s shows a deranged, intimidating stage persona, and contemporary interviews suggest he could be a bit of an arse sometimes – but it's there, in his paintings, which hang on the walls, and the closed blinds. Johnson, now 65, is one of English rock's great eccentrics, a man who radiates oddness so intensely that his recent appearances in Game of Thrones as the dumb and psychotic executioner Ser Ilyn Payne seem like typecasting. If that sounds a bit odd, then it's entirely in keeping. Sometimes this feeling is almost ecstatic, and I can say that I haven't plunged into despair at all.'

And it's a bloody good feeling being alive. I'm just sitting here in my room, and I love this room, and ain't this nice just sitting here? And I realised: you are alive and you are existing in the moment. And I thought: 'I love being in my room.' Normally, I'd be sitting there thinking: 'My room is very groovy … but I'm really hung up about this.' I'd be worrying away about some rubbish. I've got my room really nice, and it feels great sitting in there with my things around me. Normally I suffer from depression, and I thought maybe this was a reaction, but then a few nights later I was sitting in my room upstairs. We came out of the hospital and I was feeling high, elated. 'It was a surprise,' Johnson says, 'but it didn't disturb me.