Down By The Jetty

"Black Telecaster, red scratchplate ... Doesn't show the blood. Don't want to scare the men"


Once in a blue moon something comes along that brings me up sharp. That happened today. Proper sharp. It was an on-line announcement from the manager of one of my lifelong musical heroes. Guitarist, Wilko Johnson, has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He has decided against chemotherapy and will see out his last few months playing farewell shows and producing one last album. He's 65.

I'm not embarassed to say I welled up. Perhaps it was the painfully measured dignity of the announcement, the news hasn't left me all afternoon. I decided to get out, have a walk and a think about exactly why this awful, personal tragedy for a man I've never met, is affecting me quite as much as it is.

I guess everybody has a place and a time for thinking. For me, particularly when troubled, it's evening time and a walk down Newlyn Harbour. I spent hours there as a boy, day and night. Most evenings with a bag of chips and batter bits from the fryer. I bought some tonight. The vinegary whiff of those chips  was like a time machine. 

I could already tie the odd knot, but would have been 13 or 14 when I learnt to roll fags, in Dummy's shed down on the harbour. And it was the same time, I suppose I was 14, that I first saw Wilko play. I like to think it was The Old Grey Whistle Test. Most likely, though, it was Top Of The Pops or one of the pale ITV imitations. I had no idea who he was, but his bowl haircut, lanky, edgy persona and dodgy suit made an immediate and indelible impression. He didn't look weird to me. He made perfect, instinctive sense, though I've no idea why, even now. Here was a grown man running and jumping around, quite literally running and jumping, as though the red curly lead from his battered Telecaster guitar was plugged in to the mains and rammed up his arse. I didn't know what he was or where he was coming from but I wanted some. People talk about the first time they heard Elvis, it's not over egging it to say this was my Elvis moment. 

I was already messing about with guitars. I had a cream coloured Jedson, bought with savings from Fred Olds' second hand shop, which I fondly imagined as a Telecaster. Fred had thrown in an Audition amplifier (Woolworths own brand) with the deal. A 15 watt, solid state, intermittently earthed, Japanese nightmare. The guitar was like an egg slicer with action to match. Even with the subsequent, thrilling addition of a yellowy-orange plastic, Kaye fuzz box, I had no idea how I was going to use it to play "Sylvia" by Dutch instrumental loons, Focus. Worse, I was buggered if I could get the hang of Mama We're All Crazee Now. I had a rough approximation of a couple of Gary Glitter songs and Status Quo seemed to offer something I could get my head around, but that was about it. Whatever the noisy musical delusions my parents had to suffer night on night, I was what Donald Fagen terms, a guitar "owner".

That all changed after Wilko. There was something bonkers about his playing that set me alight that winter. I spent hour, after hour, after hour trying to be him. No Youtube, no video, just a low quality cassette recording to pour over. Then one night, I dont know how I realised it, but I did, I figured he wasn't using barre chords. Revelation number one! By fingering the chord over five strings with all four fingers and using my thumb on the sixth, wrapped over the neck instead of my, by now, very sore index finger I was starting to sound like him. This was more to do with pain and a playing action measurable in centimetres than actual design on my part, but blimey! It worked! I was off. My playing came on in leaps and bounds and within a short time I was starting to look at playing with other people. Other people! Imagine! A band!

So, anyway, I was thinking about all this as I walked back along the seafront. I was fourteen, growing up in a Methodist fishing village, 8 miles from Lands End and a strange man from Canvey Island had burst in to my consciousness, me a Grammar School boy, and changed everything. I say "a strange man" because the other members of Wilko's band, Dr Feelgood, were just coat hangers for his extraordinary presence, as far as I was concerned. I had no appreciation of John B Sparks' bass or Big Figure's metronomic drums. Singer, Lee Brilleaux seemed like a growly, scary man. Their names struck me, the names were cool, but I was interested in Wilko.

Over time I've learned a lot more about the mysterious "Wilko". I learned that his real name is John Wilkinson, his nick-name being a classically cheesy play on words. That at one time he was an English teacher, he had studied Anglo-Saxon literature and the ancient Icelandic sagas at university. That he painted. In the early 70's he travelled overland to India, a proper hippy, and in more recent years he nursed his late wife, Irene, until her own untimely death through cancer. I had often wondered who the "Irene", who suddenly popped up in song, was. He still talks about her, with a glassy-eyed broken heart. He has lived in the same house since his early success and after Irene's death he built an astronomical observatory on the roof and spends most nights up there. Watching the stars. I hope he's doing that this evening.

Watching the stars. That's what I was doing. I think I picked a good hero.

SONGLINES

"... the labyrinth of invisible pathways ... known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.


Well, for a while atleast, the blogging fell into disrepair.  Despite, I'm sure, frequent appearances to the contrary, I'm not that comfortable talking about myself. Particularly as I haven't gone down the anonymous route. I'll talk all day about my opinions, but I've never really been much for talking about what makes me tick. There's reasons for that; people don't always want to know, I have dignity to consider, but most importantly, I haven't always known myself. Nonetheless ...

Here I am, with a stinking cold and it's gone for my weak point. It's bringing me down. To be honest, at times over the last weekend I've been wondering if I've ever really got better. If the fog of depression ever left me or if I've just become used to it. I'm haunted by a nagging idea I may have reduced my expectations and life experiences to reach an accord with it. A state that doesn't challenge and presents little risk of hurt. 

Looking at me from the outside, I'd like to think anyone would say that's rubbish. I play music in front of people, I keep house and home together, I'm inclined to take up social invitations, I'm romantically involved again after too long on the sidelines. 

But, hey, don't give me that positivity while I'm busy being hard on myself. 

I find it surprising, having reached this stage in my life, that these emotions still lurk. Old, unsettling feelings that I find hard to pin down, let alone adequately describe. Maybe like a fever from childhood. That. Anxiety, deep in the stomach and tingling the scalp. 

I've been doing everything I should. Eating well, reminding myself that I tend to cope and how I've changed. I may seem the same to people who have known me, though the way I look at things is different now. Different so that my new internal dialogue is still, occasionally, unrecognisable to me and my thoughts get jumbled. That's where I was this weekend.

"Jesus, the self pity", I hear you say. "A bad day with man-flu. We all get them. Man-up". Well, yeah, fair cop. It was just a bad day, it didn't last forever. The thing is, if you've ever had that bad day feeling, and it's lasted for months, the first inkling of it sets off alarms.

That's what prompted this entry. When things go askew we all of us tend to follow a kind of script. Hard-wired behaviour in trying circumstances. It's the basis of the great tragedies, how big stories get written and, on a more mundane level, I guess it's why I feel that same old panic whenever I get down.

A while back, I had what on first impression is a rather bland, self-helpy kind of thought: The familiar patterns, my personal songlines, mired in myth and hazy memory, are in large part a struggle against accepting. The struggle makes things ten times worse. It sets me up to lose every time,  because I need to accept how I feel as a part of who I am. If I accept my feelings as the fleeting sensations they always prove to be, as a familiar part of me, they begin to lose their negative charge.

What's required isn't a passive acceptance of circumstance, but pro-active acceptance of my own feelings. It's not pulling my socks up nor putting on a brave face. But I have the blessing of self awareness. By being aware I can start to influence my emotional environment.

The surprise ingredient for me, the thing that starts me moving out of these doldrums, is an acceptance of responsibility for how my feelings and mood impacts on those around me. It's a matter of trying to maintain emotional responsibility when things aren't right with me. Maintaining at least a semblance of something. 

Much in the same way as I keep doing the dishes.