An Interview with Wilko Johnson

“When I was real young I just played in bands because it was great fun,” says Wilko Johnson, recalling, “It wasn’t one of my ambitions to be a musician. It was in fact a few years later that again we started a band, Dr. Feelgood, for fun.” 

Out of the industrial malaise that characterized the band’s native Essex in the early seventies Dr. Feelgood emerged with the sort of vengeance and back-to-basics vitality that the punk movement would espouse only a few short years later, earning a reputation as an indefatigable live act armed with raw, ecstatic blasts of rhythm and blues. “It wasn’t fashionable or anything, what we were doing,” says Johnson. “We just wanted to play that good old music, and we did and it got successful.” 

Johnson continues to play music for fun just as he did in those early days, even as he approaches his final ones. Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer last January he seems to have taken the news as but further incentive to cherish the here and now, embarking on a string of live gigs and teaming up with fellow rhythm-and-blues connoisseur Roger Daltrey on the runaway hit LP, Going Home. 

While it may be the last of his lifetime the album, which save for a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” is comprised of ten Johnson originals from throughout his career, offers no maudlin farewells. And neither does Johnson, who with his signature red and black Telecaster at hand continues to perform despite the specter of his diagnosis. “I’ve got this great big lump in my stomach, which irritates me a bit,” he says. “When I’m standing on stage my guitar is actually rocking on this thing, but apart from that I feel fine.” 

When his day-to-day wellbeing begins to decline he’ll stop performing for good, Johnson insists, adding, “I don’t want to come crawling on to the very last moment.”

Once you guys were in the studio, was there a particular moment when you and Roger both recognized some chemistry or spark between each other?

As soon as we started, really. I mean, we only had a short time to do this album—eight days actually. It was a good atmosphere in the studio. Everybody got on well. We just started working ferociously. Yeah, we got on well right from the beginning.

Being that you wrote the lion’s share of the songs that are on the album—and obviously you’re no stranger to these songs, having performed them live for years—did you gain any new perspective on your songwriting in revisiting them in this way?

Yeah, I think so. Roger treated each song… He really gets into it. He’s got to find his own way into a song. It was like hearing my stuff in a different way.

Roger sounds really engaged on these songs.

I think so. I think that was the kind of atmosphere of the whole thing. As I say, we had to do it quick, though, and everybody just got totally into it. It was good fun. 

Whose idea was it to do the Dylan song?

That was mine, actually. I really like Bob Dylan. It’s a great song.

Were there songs that you recorded that didn’t make the album?

Yeah, there were several that didn’t get on there for one reason or another. 

Are they going to be released in the future?

They may well be. I think Roger has been so pleased at the way things worked out that he wants to do some more.

I’ve read that you’d written some new songs within the past couple years. Are you still writing?

I haven’t been lately. Actually, when I got my diagnosis the beginning of last year I immediately started writing quite a lot of songs. In fact, I was intending to do a last album at the end of last year, but in the end what we did was the Roger Daltrey thing. So yeah, I’ve still got quite a bit of new material. I don’t know how much time I’ve got. Maybe I’ll get in there and do them, I don’t know. I hope so.

You’ve got some festival gigs lined up in June and July. How do you approach those sorts of things? They’re still a couple months away.

Well, exactly. Having the cancer as I have, I was supposed to be dead back in October. I’m still alive, but it does mean that I can’t look very far into the future, because I don’t know when I’m going to get sick. So anything more than a couple of weeks away is a bit of an illusion for me. 

It was heartbreaking to see your name misspelled on the Glastonbury poster.

Yeah well… How long has that festival been going, I ask you? And how many times have they asked me to play? I’ll tell you how many times! Never! And when they finally ask me to play they can’t even spell my name! 

Are you still enjoying playing live, though, as much as you seem to be?

Oh yes. These days I just really, really enjoy gigs because you never know if it’s going to be the last one.  

Not to get too philosophical, but it seems like the approach to a live concert is almost a metaphor for how you have to live now: you must live in the moment.

You’re exactly right. That’s all you can do. Here I am, I thought I was going to be dead six months ago and I’m sitting here looking at the sunshine and thinking, “Well, this is pretty groovy.” 

Going Back Home is available now on Hip-O Records (North America) and Chess Records (UK). For more information on Wilko Johnson, please visit his official website.

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Guitarist James Williamson Previews “Re-Licked” Stooges LP with Record Store Day Exclusive

Iggy and the Stooges achieved a sense of having come full circle with last year’s Ready to Die, their first album of new material since 1973’s Raw Power. For guitarist James Williamson, however, some unfinished business remained, namely with music he'd composed with Iggy Pop in the mid-seventies—songs that were intended to comprise the follow-up to Raw Power—which was neither properly produced nor officially released. 

“I think that body of work is very, very strong,” says Williamson, “and the only thing people have ever been able to hear are the bootlegs of us performing it live back in the day, but a lot of the songs were only partially developed.”

In a Record Store Day exclusive 7” vinyl release of “Open Up and Bleed”/“Gimme Some Skin,” Williamson teams up with Texas blues troubadour Carolyn Wonderland to preview Re-Licked (due this fall), which features a batch of lost Stooges classics (including “I Got a Right,” “She Creatures Of The Hollywood Hills,” and “Wild Love”) interpreted by a roster of vocalists that also includes Ariel Pink and Mark Lanegan, among others.

One artist not on the roster? Iggy Pop. “If we had done them with Iggy singing them there would be the comparison between the early Stooges and current Stooges,” says Williamson, “and we decided that was not a good idea.”

Recalling his ambition for “Open Up and Bleed,” Williamson says that he sought a vocalist in the vein of Janis Joplin. An old friend tipped him off to Wonderland by way of a YouTube video, which was incentive enough for Williamson to hop on a plane bound for Austin, Texas to behold the singer in the flesh. “I was just floored,” he says. “This girl has got the voice that Janis Joplin wished that she’d had. She’s phenomenal.”

“Oh hell, I can’t live up to that,” says Wonderland with an unassuming chuckle, adding that she appreciated the opportunity to stray beyond her blues-drenched stomping grounds. “It’s neat to challenge [yourself] to do somebody else’s stuff, especially something so groovy.” 

Of course, like the rest of the songs on Re-Licked both “Open Up and Bleed” and “Gimme Some Skin” were written for Iggy Pop to perform in his inimitably virile way, a realization that Williamson suggests became all too apparent in working with Wonderland.

Thinking back to the “Gimme Some Skin” session in particular, Williamson says, “That lyric is like a total Iggy-throwaway lyric—‘Typhoid Mary, she’s got soul/Fucks all night on an old asshole...’—and here’s Carolyn Wonderland, and I’m asking her to sing this song. I told her right up front, ‘Hey, look, I don’t want to offend you with these lyrics,’ because I didn’t know her at all. 

“But shit,” adds Williamson, “she’s a Texas blues singer; she doesn’t care. It’s actually kind of a fun song. Anyway, she got on it—she brings it alive.”

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An Interview with Scott H. Biram

Scott H. Biram didn’t set out to achieve any radical breakthroughs (musically speaking, at least) with his latest studio LP, Nothin’ But Blood, but creative stability seems to suit him just fine. “Part of that has to do with how much I’m on the road these days,” says Biram. “I don’t really get a chance to sit down and just play guitar for hours and hours and hours on my porch anymore.”

Fair enough. Actually, such a hectic touring schedule likely serves the self-proclaimed “Dirty Old One Man Band” better than being cooped up in a recording studio for months on end would, what with the various people and places that inform his songwriting. Still, as Biram suggests, the characters and circumstances he writes about in his music ultimately reveal more about himself than anyone else. “I guess they’re kind of a way for me to work through inner pains and anxieties and stuff,” he says, “and they’re not necessarily metaphors. They’re vessels for emotional release.”

What’s songwriting like for you? Is it something you’re in tune with all the time?

I think some of my best songs that I’ve ever written are the ones that come to me at five o’clock in the morning and I write them down in five minutes. Those are some of the best ones I’ve ever written. The ones I sit down and really work on for a long time, sometimes those are just really frustrating and they don’t do for me what I want them to. Occasionally I get those ones where I work on them for a long time and they do end up being pretty good; stuff like “Slow and Easy” on this new record, I struggled with that song a lot and I really didn’t like to play it on stage or anything. I had to figure out a new way to play it on stage because I can’t really pull it off the same way as the record.

You draw from different influences in your music—gospel and punk and country and blues—and you have songs of every stripe on the same album. Like, on this latest one you have “Amazing Grace” but you also have a song called “Alcohol Blues.”

Yeah that’s part of what I call the human condition. I think that’s what brings a really good human element to my music is that I cover the good, the bad, and the ugly … It’s just that struggle in my heart every day of my life with rejoicing and being depressed, or trying to be a good person and at the same time getting sloshed.

It’s the difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

That’s exactly right, and I think this record is a lot like Saturday night and Sunday morning and anywhere in between.

So basically you see all of those different elements and influences as tapping into the same vein.

Yeah, tapping into my heart and my liver. [Laughs]

Are there subjects or ideas that are too personal or too compromising to share in a song?

I don’t feel like I have too many walls as far as subject matter goes. I feel like I could pretty much write about whatever I need to and get as personal as I want. I don’t have too much to hide. One of the things I have a little trouble writing—that I don’t really go into too much—is the straight-up love songs. When I play them I feel kind of cheesier; it’s just a little too white. [Laughs] It’s leaning too much into that Kingston Trio kind of things. I feel like there’s more for both me and the listeners in the struggles and the trying-to-get-through-things subject matter … With the love songs and all that, there are so many great love songs written already I tend—if I’m gonna do those—to play the ones that somebody else already wrote. 

The “one-man band” thing, is there some fundamental reason you do that? Obviously it allows you the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it, but is there something that appeals to you about that beyond not having to pay a band?

Yeah, beyond not having to pay a band it’s definitely… I’ve got a kind of control-freak nature when it comes to music. I’m kind of a visionary as far as that goes. I’ve got a way I want it to sound. I don’t really want to stray from the way that I picture it in my head, but also as much as I’m on the road these days for the last ten or fifteen years I don’t have the time that it takes to really put together a great band and do all the practicing that it’s gonna take and rehearsing to get up to show-quality performances. 

I would like to put a band together and I’ve got some ideas about that, but I also feel like it’s one of those things that’s gonna have to fall into place naturally and not something that needs to be forced—kind of like those songs I was telling you about, how the ones that come to me really fast are the best ones; the ones that you have to force seem a little contrived. I’m really not a fan of contrived things.

When you’re writing a song do you feel any obligation for it to reflect what your audience may expect of you?

No. Some people want to keep their finger on the pulse of trends and culture, but I keep my pinkie on it. I try to keep a little bit of a mind of what people want out of me and what they want to hear, because you have to in order to keep your fans a little bit, but at the same time I’m really true to myself with all of this. That’s always gonna be the main drive behind it is what I feel. Honestly I don’t put that much thought into all of this. I don’t think that it’s shallow or thoughtless, but I feel like my subconscious is what guides my efforts more than really trying to analyze it so much. The most analyzing I do to any of this is when I’m doing these interviews.

Nothin’ But Blood is available now on Bloodshot Records. For more information on Scott H. Biram, please visit his official website.

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EP Review: Beth Thornley - Septagon

Beth Thornley has a knack for composing deceptively simple, soulful pop songs that cut to the quick with heartrending command. Maybe it’s a skill she’s honed over the years, having written for both television and film where the music often needs to encapsulate a specific scene; maybe she’s just innately gifted. Either way, Thornley illustrates this proficiency throughout the four-track EP Septagon (Stiff Hips Music). 

As a follow-up of sorts to her eclectic 2010 LP Wash U Clean, which was at turns wistful and rambunctious, this latest effort is more subdued by comparison, with subtler melodies and rich, immersive synth-pop textures betraying an unshakable sense of gravity in some moments and, in others, regret. From start to finish, though, it packs quite an emotional punch. 

  

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