The Figure: the first Feelgood to get on the airwaves."Wilko Johnson is now in his mid-fifties. He parted from his most celebrated group, Dr Feelgood, under a thunderhead of a cloud 28 years ago, having fallen out with the other members in no uncertain terms. That meant rubbing up The Big Figure, Sparko and Gentleman Lee Brilleaux the wrong way, a friction not to be sought lightly given that, viewed together, the three of them resembled the staff of an Essex second-hand car dealership on a loss-making awayday at the bookie's. Dear little Johnny Martin, no longer quite so dependent on his teddy, had transformed himself into the very definition of the word "henchman".But perhaps these things did not trouble Johnson as they might trouble most of us.
He is clearly still the Brueghelian assassin he so resembled in 1975. And though the pudding-basin moptop has greyed and diminished to a crop, his eyes are still stark beneath their beetling brows, his mouth as wide and firm as a park bench."For the next three or four years," he says wistfully, staring into the fireplace in the front room of his yellow, crenellated house in the suburbs of Southend, "I made nothing but wrong moves, including [his next group] the Solid Senders. If someone commissioned you to go out and find the most useless arseholes you can, AND GIVE THEM ALL YOUR MONEY, would you do it?" He shoots me a basilisk stare, then smiles "Well, I fulfilled that commission I was on me own - it was like being kicked out of a family I did things all wrong." A sigh "I don't wanna blame other people. I chose to do what I did and I shouldn't 'ave done it." And he sinks his gaze into the fireplace again and disappears into another of the silences which open up in his conversation like empty cupboards.Dr Feelgood were one of the perfect groups; one of the few British ones ever to wrestle with what Greil Marcus called the invisible republic of American song and come away with something comparable to the original model yet somehow wholly English. Before they were deposited by history into the generic dump-bin known as "Pub Rock", Dr Feelgood bestrode the weary world of British boogie, a beacon of economy, cogency, elegant scansion and grimy suiting. Feelgood songs proposed a small world of harsh existential integrity: paranoia and sexual jealousy ran in their lines like amphetamine. Unquestionably, the group reclaimed rock's lowlands for punk - a fact acknowledged by Patti Smith of all people - standing for everything that was neither prolix, nor self-indulgent, nor made out of offcuts of cheesecloth.
The songs were short, their hair short-ish; the words came at you like blow-torched Chuck Berry, while Johnson hacked at a black and red Telecaster without a plectrum (you were as likely to find a widdling solo in a Wilko song as a quote from Ravel). The Feelgoods' R&B redux was a music of structure, cadence and revealed energy.But more than that, Dr Feelgood were a package. You could not separate the sound from the look from the fundamentalist ethos from the psycho-geography (should one have had access to such language in 1975) They were discrete, self-sufficient, entire. You could, at a pinch, take Dr Feelgood out of Canvey but not, even for a moment, separate them from their vision of themselves."Well, yes," says Wilko, folding his legs under himself like yogi "It wasn't a designed thing, not as such.
