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.