“So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.Īfter a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.” “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”īy the time his father died, when Mr. “But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.” So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.” Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. The older I get the more I look like him. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the British music magazine Mojo. His father, a gas fitter, was violent and abusive, Mr. Wilko Johnson was born John Peter Wilkinson on Canvey Island on July 12, 1947. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.” “My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry. While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.” The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s. Johnson and his bandmates - the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin - helped make Dr. Bragg added that John Lydon (otherwise known as Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul Weller of the Jam “learned a lot from his edgy demeanor.” “His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence - twitchy, confrontational, out of control - was something we’d never beheld before in U.K. “Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk,” the British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg said on Twitter after Mr.
His playing was explosive, as percussive as it was melodic. Johnson, who was born left-handed and learned to play right-handed, avoided basic rock staples like barre chords and even picks, relying instead on quick, aggressive finger strums - he called them “stabs” - on his black Fender Telecaster.
His staccato guitar phrasing formed a sound all his own. Johnson, who was prone to amphetamine use in his early days, appeared equal parts robotic and manic onstage, glaring murderously at the audience while pacing the stage frantically. In performance, he cut a wild-eyed figure. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow. His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” - and removed it in an 11-hour operation. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor - Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live.
His death was announced on his social media channels. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England.
Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr.
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