The Stones, y’see, or even geniuses like the Pretty Things or the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, somehow insisted on themselves, made you notice and admire their work the Feelgoods just did it.
WILKO JOHNSON VIDEOS MOVIE
If there was a machine that you just plugged in and it played rock’n’roll without any distraction that somehow the process would result in movie stars or tabloid stars or concept albums, that was the Feelgoods. What the Troggs had sought to create on “I Want You,” what the Kinks attempted on “Beautiful Delilah,” what the Sonics or the Trashmen aspired to, well, this is what the Feelgoods did as a matter of course, as a rule, with no aspiration to anything else but a celebration of the purity of fat-stripped Sun Studio boogie. Feelgood, as it is with utterly no other acts of the era. Everything we came to associate with Punk Rock – rapid rhythms discarding absolutely all instrumental or stylistic frills the utter absence of hippie fashion or prog flairs and spaceships an absolute reduction of rock’n’roll to stock and bone a frenzied race from the start of the song to the end with an absolute minimum of rainbows, streamers, indulgence, or solos is all wholly evident with Dr. Feelgood were Punk Rock’s proof of concept.
Feelgood – who Wilko played guitar with between 19 – with this wonderful phrase: Dr. And of the whole list, Wilko was the most accessible, the most radical (he utterly streamlined the instrument, he used it as a rotary sander/power drill/surgical saw opening up Chuck Berry’s chest), Wilko was the one who coupled the quadruple-time overdriven attack with a radical stage presence, Wilko was the one that was perfectly punk rock before there was even punk rock. The bands these people formed owe an enormous debt to Wilko Johnson. The ones who roared – Steve Jones and Mick Jones, for instance – leaned towards Ronson the ones who blurred, chattered, buzzed and sawed an’ went chop-chop-choppa-chop, then ones who played in a Saint Vitus Dance frenzy – Joe Strummer, Paul Weller, Hugh Cornwell, Brian James – were Wilko’s children. That’s who you wanted to be.Įssentially, all roads in the first crop of Punk Rock guitarists lead back to this pair. circa ’75 – ’77, it was Mick Ronson and Wilko. This is not hyperbole: If it was 1975 or ’76 and you were forming a band and you knew something had to change (or if you knew nothing and wanted immediate satisfaction), there were, essentially, only a very small handful of guitarists you sought to model, a small handful of guitarists who could be put on a high but accessible pedestal: Of course, there was Mick Ralphs, Johnny Thunders, James Williamson/Ron Asheton, Townshend and Dave Davies, but mostly, mostly in the U.K. Feelgood and thought, I want that, I can do that, I can thrash and hiss and holler and stomp.
This is not hyperbole: Without Wilko Johnson, friends, there would be no Joe Strummer, no Paul Weller, no Stranglers, certainly no Costello (who not only adapted Wilko’s guitar style but his stage act, almost litigiously), there would be none of the bands who saw Wilko play in Dr. And we heard that in everything Wilko played, and we said, we want that, we want an entire movement in that image. Because that’s what you heard when you first heard punk rock, yes? It was the way we always imagined rock’n’roll would and should be: It ran, it rolled, it burst without fading, it buzzed without flowers, it went from A to B and back again, again and again, it went uphill and downhill at the same time, it was the visit to the dentist and the candy store at the same time, and it ended before it could be anything else. The English Punk Rock movement that emerged in 1975 and ’76 was created by musicians (and non-musicians) who were inspired to play by Wilko Johnson who saw in his staggering, caffeinated-zombie stage movements a model for their own alternative to the extant, decaying Plant/Coverdale cockstrut model who wanted to imitate his roaring, chopping-board overdrive mechanic strum, which somehow spoke to the deepest heart of rock’n’roll while revealing a path to an ecstatic, streamlined future who were in awe of the way he condensed rock’n’roll to the most tightly wound extreme. Wilko Johnson was Punk Rock Patient Zero.
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