Wilko Johnson

A couple of weeks ago I went to see “Oil City Confidential” at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. It’s a film about Essex R and B band Doctor Feelgood, that centres heavily on guitarist Wilko Johnson.

Last Friday I saw Wilko play live at Walthamstow pisshole, The Royal Standard.

I wish Wilko got to spend more time performing at the South Bank, curating Meltdown Festivals or one off showcases at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but he will forever be treading the boards of the Half Moon at Putney.

Wilko Johnson doesn’t mind though. In ‘Oil City Confidential’ Wilko explains how down he has been since the death of his wife and that the only lift he gets is being on stage.

Wilko plays a set possibly identical to one he played in 1974. Wilko doesn’t care if the song is thirty years old or five days old. He doesn’t care how many times he’s played “She Does It Right.” He doesn’t even care that he’s in Walthamstow. He duck walks, he ‘machine guns’ the audience with his guitar, he plays it behind his head. But at all times he looks completely dignified, at home with his age and his surroundings.

This is what old men playing rock and roll should look and sound like.

I want to be like him when I grow up.

I understand why you may dismiss the Feelgoods and Wilko as boozy pub rock, and you’re half right. But at it’s best it’s vital, caustic and visceral music and forms an often forgotten link between your beloved sixties and your hallowed punk.

Special mention must also go to lank haired, buck toothed, sweaty, silk shirted bean pole Norman Watt-Roy on bass. Have you seen this man live? He played bass in the Blockheads, he played bass on Sandinista, he played bass on Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

He will survive a nuclear war. He looks like he has survived a nuclear war. My wife can’t take her eyes of him, she can’t close her mouth.

Here is a young Wilko teaching you how to play guitar like him on Rock School.



Here is Norman Watt-Roy in the worst interview ever.

Trains in Science Fiction: Deathline (1972 Dir: Gary Sherman)

These obsessive interests are havens; they are warm duvets on November nights.

When two merge, the resulting ellipsoid in the venn diagram becomes the mother lode.

Deathline is not quite science fiction, although what else can you call a group of stranded London Underground workers who evolve and mutate into a family of cannibals? It was promoted then, and packaged now, as a horror film (in America the film was called ‘Raw Meat’). Blink and you’ll miss Christopher Lee’s cameo, an obvious attempt to associate the film with the British Hammer series.

It really isn’t a horror film either though. Like many of my favourite films it doesn’t know quite what it is. It almost climaxes too soon with a blistering title sequence, featuring blurred neon, overloaded Moog, funky Helvetica and prostitutes.

Here it is if you don’t believe me.



You want to see all of it now don’t you?

The film was shot largely on location at the Russell Square and Warren Street Underground Stations. Writer/Director Gary Sherman takes his time with the camera and plot. Many tense minutes are spent slowly panning over the monster’s lair in the imagined abandoned ‘Museum’ station. As the cannibal tends to his dying family we are made to feel sympathy for him. This is a beauty and the beast story. He hesitates before eating the pretty heroine but the only words he knows is a garbled version of ‘Mind the gap’.

The best thing about the film is Donald Pleasance, but then Pleasance is the best thing about any film he is in. He plays a surprisingly realistic Policeman in an unrealistic London. The disappearances on the underground seem to be a minor annoyance to him. In fact even though his character has plenty of screen time he does nothing to advance the plot or find the underground train monster. We get a expanded look into the life of what could have been a bit part. It’s as if all the scenes from ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ had been inserted into ‘Hamlet’.

In my imagined version of the 1970’s Donald Pleasance continued to play, Inspector Calhoun in a whole series of London set horror films. He wouldn’t investigate, or ignore, pirate zombies on the River Fleet, phantom Route Masters and ghost dogs along the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

At the time of writing ‘Deathline’ costs about £5 on Amazon. Go get it.