![]() ![]() I recently watched it again to brush up for this article. Canvey Island features prominently in Oil City Confidential. ![]() Julien Temple, the English documentary filmmaker, made a trilogy of movies about British rock and roll, namely The Filth and the Fury (about The Sex Pistols), The Future is Unwritten (about Joe Strummer and the Clash), and the final one Oil City Confidential (about Dr. Feelgood were gangsters all right, but of the Johnny Guitar Watson variety. Feelgood albums, Down by the Jetty, Malpractice and Stupidity are gems that belong in any serious collection. Feelgood, there might not have been the Punks, who came soon thereafter and made a living out of rejecting the usual. Joe Strummer of the Clash recalls them as “like a fucking machine.” They sweated their way into the hearts of a disaffected young hungry audience, one that felt abandoned by the sheer pomposity and non-accessibility of what surrounded them. Feelgood was a mesmerizing band and they took the London club and pub circuit by storm. But instead they were rock and rollers.ĭr. One commentator of that period described them as a bunch of characters who might have come from “an unsavory faction of the army.” They could have easily been mistaken for English gangsters, stick-up artists or smash and grabbers, genuine spivs. The band all wore suits, the kind that locals referred to as “bastard suits” (wide lapels and flared trousers). ![]() Feelgood lineup was Lee Brilleaux, the Big Figure, John B. Feelgood arrived at the time of the Pub Rock movement, an up-from-the-bottom reaction to prog rock and the over-excessive production afforded bands whose members usually had double-barreled names like St. They played a hybrid brand of rhythm and blues with mucho gusto, replete with songs from the likes of Chuck Berry, Lieber and Stoller (especially Riot in Cell Bock Number Nine), Muddy Waters, Rufus Thomas, and their own Wilko-penned songbooks. This is where Wilko and his bandmates grew up. If you would carry on walking east through the mud flats and they miraculously formed a bridge, you would wind up in Belgium. ![]() A still functioning oil and gas refinery with storage tanks stood across the creek. Large oceangoing freighters and tanker ships were piloted up and down the channel. During Wilko’s formative years, Canvey Island was all busted up and broken, reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park after its demise as a carnival seaside town. Canvey Island was a holiday resort popular in the 1950s amongst London’s East Enders, mostly working people, the proverbial have-nots. It is on the Thames River estuary, an off-the-beaten track wasteland then, southeast of London. That neighborhood is Canvey Island, Essex. They had a hit song called “Shakin’ All Over.”Īround 1971, Wilko Johnson teamed up with some neighborhood pals who were toying with the idea of forming a musical group. The latter was the guitar player for a British band called Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Wilko’s major influences musicianship-wise were Bo Diddley and Mick Green. Wilko Johnson is an English electric guitarist and a singer. But I started my Wilko listening journey before that even with the band Dr. And way before that, I listened to his various Wilko Johnson Band efforts, the records made when he was a member of Ian Drury’s Blockheads, and his own outfit called The Solid Senders, going all the way back to 1977. A few years before that, I listened a lot to his previous album Going Back Home, a joint venture with Roger Daltrey, The Who singer. I’m listening to the latest Wilko Johnson record called Blow Your Mind. Bang! – The Unstoppable Force Meets the Immovable Object ![]()
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