Before John Lydon’s wild eyes alerted the world to punk, there were Wilko Johnson’s: two saucers on splints, sticking out of a handsome Easter Island head, on an angular body firing away on the guitar.
Before punk’s gobby rush, there was also Johnson’s band – four oddbods from Canvey Island called Dr Feelgood. Fired up by early rock’n’roll, their lyrical landscape was one of girls, drink and the estuary industry around which they grew up: real life with a rough kind of glamour, stripped down to brass tacks. The man behind the lyrics was a schoolteacher who’d studied old Icelandic at university. Johnson foreshadowed punk perfectly: it was always smarter than people thought.
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