#WILKO JOHNSON DOCUMENTARY SERIES#
#WILKO JOHNSON DOCUMENTARY TV#

Ironically, the last piece of artwork I did was the Dr Feelgood logo – my most famous piece.' And then the band just seemed to happen by accident and I stopped, but it never left me. I continued painting after the travelling, especially when I got back to Canvey. The sagas I was reading, they blew my mind, just so poetic and brutal. 'I played in bands before university, but when I went up to Newcastle I couldn't find a band, so I quit playing. His paintings hang on the wall above him, surreal things that seem to echo the literature he was reading at the time. He wasn't your average working-class Canvey Island lad. Before that he'd been a political activist who'd travelled the hippie trail through Afghanistan and India. Before Dr Feelgood, Wilko was an English teacher who'd graduated from Newcastle University with a degree, specialising in medieval literature and the Icelandic sagas. The differences Wilko refers to are literature, poetry and art. I regret we never expressed that to each other – our admiration of each other.' It's almost as if he feels things might have turned out differently. The animosity we felt for each other was something else. I mean, if we walked into the same room, one of us would walk out – it got that bad. 'I think it was Lee and me, we just didn't get on in the end. Wilko left in 1977 when things turned bitter. I can feel everything bursting through me.' Everything? 'Yeah, you know. It's a beautiful thing that makes me tingle. He says this with a smile, casting a glance at his garden. I'm embracing the present.' It's easy to believe him, too. The things that used to matter – bills, worrying about the future, thinking I could change the past – don't matter to me any more. 'It's one of the most intense years I've had. Seems, because last year he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He seems well and in a good mood, relaxed.

Now 66, Johnson grew up a mere stone's throw away, on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary: a flat, densely populated land mass surrounded by creeks and marshland, famously dominated by a colossal oil refinery, a rich source of inspiration for songs he wrote while guitarist in Canvey's cult heroes Dr Feelgood.

#WILKO JOHNSON DOCUMENTARY TV#

TV stardom or a life of rock'n'roll seems far away as he sits cross-legged on his sofa at home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.

#WILKO JOHNSON DOCUMENTARY SERIES#

To a generation born long after punk, Wilko might be better remembered as the executioner in the TV series Game of Thrones. His idiosyncratic choppy playing style is credited with influencing a legion of punk guitarists. Wilko Johnson is one of the world's most famous guitarists you've never heard of.

Wilko johnson documentary