What more can I say? How relevant is Blues music to the current music scene? Up until the ‘60s or whatever in America, the black guys would be learning the Blues, but now its rap-music that is ‘the thing’, so they’re very closely interlinked it’s just a modern way of putting across that thing. My songs are restricted by this formulaic style and I won’t deviate from that for example, I won’t play any jazz (wry laughter). The twelve-bar-Blues is the basis of the Blues and rock ’n’ roll, and a lot of my songs fall into that pattern and are simple. The musical elements I use are that my songs usually have three-chords. To me, it is American music, and its Black-American music, and I love it! When you see Muddy Waters playing ‘live’, you think “Bloody Hell – I can’t do that!”…what he has is special! I like to think that the music I write and play is in that kind of spirit, although from and English point of view. There are a lot of musicians who play the Blues badly. I’ve seen some of the great Bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Chicago-Blues like Howlin’ Wolf, and I remember when I first heard Blues music I thought “Christ Almighty, this has so much power”… Compared to the pop music of the time which all sounded so ‘blah’, and I thought “Well, I love this stuff!” But I never tried to play the Blues in the exact same way. Httpv://What elements do you take from the Blues and incorporate into your own music? How relevant do you think Blues are to the current music scene and what do they mean to you personally? Often, it can be difficult to write the lyrics, the guitar riffs come easier to me. The song-writing process for me generally starts with a guitar riff, so I’ll sit there twanging on a guitar, or I’ll hear one in my mind… So I’ll listen to this guitar riff and think that it’s saying something it may be something stupid or something sinister, or something happy or whatever then I try to hit on some words that are saying the same kind of thing and that’s it. It’s not like some kind of impulse in me to write songs.

So yeah, song-writing is important to me but on the other hand, I only tend to write songs if we’re going to make a record, so unless something like that comes up, I’m not writing – it’s not that important to me. Some of my songs are ok – a lot of them are just like everything they’re like three-chords and they’re about love (laughs). I’ve written quite a few songs, and there are some of them that I’m really glad I wrote – I think that they’re worth something. How important is song-writing to you and you give us some insight into your writing process?

However, when I went to university, to study English Literature, I stopped for four years. I got my first guitar when I was fourteen or fifteen. I learnt to play guitar by listening to these two bands, and, under their influence, I started listening to American R&B and Blues stuff and decided I wanted to do that. I saw The Beatles at the Southend Odeon – or rather I heard them, as there was a lot of screaming going on – and also The Rolling Stones who played what we then called R&B music. That style combined with his unique, almost surreal, style of stage movement (Chaplinesque strobe meets Rock n’ Roll) has left Wilko as one of the most consistently entrancing figures in modern Blues and R&B.īM: Can you tell us about your earliest exposure to music? Wilko: My teenage years were the ‘60s and like a lot of teenage boys I wanted to play the guitar. It is a deceptively simple yet very full-sounding style that adds a turbo-charge to any music that he is involved. Wilko and the band retain a solid following, and Wilko still exudes a unique fascination with his brand of punk influenced R&B. Secondly Wilko is renowned for his innovative guitar style – a highly charged sharp and percussive style that combines rhythm and lead. All the while Johnson’s own ‘Wilko Johnson Band’ had been rolling along in the background despite several line-up changes the band continued and is still rolling.

His stay with them was brief and produced one album ‘Laughter’. There was a punk element in the band’s style that came also influenced Johnson’s stay with Ian Dury and The Blockheads. The liaison was brief but produced several classic songs and albums and established the Feelgoods as one of Britain’s most loved bands. Wilko Johnson is famous for two things firstly his contributions to one of Britain’s most respected band’s R&B bands of the early 70s the celebrated Doctor Feelgood, they did more than anyone to establish pub-rock/R& B and to put life back into a jade rock scene just before the emergence of punk. Advertisements Photo by Giacomino Parkinson

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