WILKO JOHNSON BAND | LIVE REVIEW
Tramshed, Cardiff, Fri 26 Apr
In their Roxette days in the mid-70s, Dr. Feelgood’s rawest rhythm & blues weapon was Wilko Johnson: an unstoppable hammer of a right arm impossibly attached somewhere to a man, turning a pub band into a spartan rock‘n’roll powerhouse that predicted British punk. Even more than that, Johnson’s choppy abuse of a Fender Telecaster was treated by every guitarist who came across him with the kind of veneration usually reserved at the time for big heavy metal solo-ers or howlin’ American bluesmen, often by those British punks feeding on the energy for what was about to happen.
Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze opened on Friday, an accomplished guitarist himself and more than enough to hold his own while solo in the echoey Tramshed hall with a rundown of some of the era’s biggest, but a different side of the 70s British coin than Wilko Johnson’s band. Johnson had collapsed on stage the day before in Cambridge, so for the band to emerge so blistering as well as after so many years set my hair on end. All the classic Wilko parts emerged with him; the burning death stare, the duck-walk, the Telecaster, that merciless right hand that chopped indiscriminately through rhythm and lead (often simultaneously), as the band ploughed through the decades’ worth of snappy back catalogue Johnson has accumulated.
It was such a joy to see Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy, a man who looks at his instrument as if the two had been married on a beach the day prior, rolling through the scales beyond Johnson’s rhythm strikes and blending together into an energy I would normally consider undanceable, if the crowd that evening hadn’t put me in my place. The audience was comprised entirely of old farts who observed Wilko Johnson machine-gunning the front row with his headstock with all the energy of observing the menu board at a chippy. Grumpy statues winced as less than 10 of us rattled around the middle to the 12-bar blues, stepping on toes and sending flecks of beer over woollen jumpers. A crowd owes something to a great band beyond an entry-fee: the response. The Wilko Johnson Band are a hell of an act who didn’t get the response they deserved.
words JASON MACHLAB