GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

Wilko was the twisted angel demon. The speed king Avatar with them mad, intense, white and staring, pinhead pupils on black eyeballs. Looking out with them peepers over the eternal end of the urban night Wilko looked like some zealous radon emitter. That was the image of Wilko Johnson (Born John Wilkinson Canvey Island, Essex on July 12th,1947) that I saw on a postcard flyer giveaway, a series by an evidently gifted and perceptive graphic artist, given out free at the Spitz in the early December 2006. The Spitz is in the midst of the Jack The Ripper tourist trail in Spitalfields Market, a groovy London alt rock and interesting music venue, just yards from my mansion! I picked the postcard image up at an excellent Spitz show by The Last Town Chorus 2 days earlier. It sure took me back, back some 30 years - and a coupla months - to October 19th 1976 Belfast Northern Ireland. Should I say “the grim October of 1976”? - A cold night on the streets outside the Whitla Hall, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland. There outside, where my father slept in the car awaiting my 15 year old self breaking my ‘join the church of rock n roll’ cherry, the city was slowly carving itself up. But inside, aah inside, the soul was warmed because there was Wilko Wilko the speed king demon and with him there was, oh yes, Doctor Feelgood nestling atop the chart with the Gawdlike live album Stupidity. There was a moment there, right near the start of the show when I felt Wilko, like a Shaman Instigator, a thing of such forcefulness and wonder, transmitting pure electric energy. Energy expressed through though not just produced by his electric guitar. Energy that came from his soul itself, a vibrating ball of energy, a sacred power of the universe, right there – coming to us like a purifying cauterizing fireball. Washing clean our sins, lifting us up, up to a new realm. Beyond the eternal end of the urban night. It was like in a single instance that Wilko, with the chicken neck strut, the exaggerated staring, the eyes on stalks, the groin thrusted slide and fanning buncha finger fired guitar, was beseeching us, raising our hearts. Who said – and of what - that it gave them an erection of the heart? Well, I think that then and there Wilko gave me an erection - of the imagination. My brain burst on the edge of his city of endless night. There was something there, something magic in that look of shock and fear and ecstasy writ on his face. Even captured in the pictures that were to be seen in the UK music press, the NME specifically, it was a striking look. Now with The Feelgoods in Belfast 1976 show (such an affirmation coming after the grisly Miami Showband murders that had practically marked a pre punk end to rock n roll in Belfast) the sound together with that look - the impossibly suspended in mid air split leg athleticism of a fucking mad eyed speed fuelled freak with his exhilaratingly choppy guitar lines! –became something else. Something beyond the time and reason of a city slipping into war. Something, man, something so damn fine looking and sounding. Man. Yeah, something else. Wilko, even the name was like another Marx Brother, presented and machine-gunned his Axe of love spewing forth like a fire hydrant. A shot of the mystic sea, just rolling over us, rock n roll insurgent priest, the Starman that Bowie had promised, come to life. I couldn’t even see him make that first mad run. I was small and at the back of the crowd and it was the most exciting night of my life so far. Goodness – there was people smoking weed at the back of the hall! They were drinking and smiling and it was an open church. There was no asking where you came from, what football team you supported. We were bonded together by a higher power. I didn’t know that sort of thing could happen there, in Belfast, back then in 1976. All I knew was that I felt damned lucky not to have been brought up there, blessed that my parents had escaped the dead lines of East Belfast for the coastline of Bangor. But I could feel him, feel Wilko, take the already excited crowd further, elevated as they gathered there in Belfast on a cold night in October 1976 when nobody went out, when the city of Belfast was dying. When the killers were on the move Mad men secreting explosives, gelignite in cars, soldiers young as you could think of, on the streets, fear - and the ever burning question -what happens next? - the constant dynamic. But suddenly – and none of them political men in the press or what passed for a Parliament realized it, because they weren’t THERE - there was a man musician clown and psychic avatar embodying the pain and the heat and the madness of the city in a single flying firepower string strum chord. 3 minutes into the show, maybe more, maybe less and Wilko goes into one of his clockwork amphetamine chicken runs. Awwch I couldn’t see a thing but, Christ, you could feel the elevation in the audience, the breaking through to the other side and we rose, we all rose higher than the feet on which we were standing allowed and … Well, we left the ground, actually. And there in an instance you could feel Wilko and his genius. And the genius of whatever it was he had felt in the music, the feeling he had, with every power his soul allowed, communicated so fully to us. So, of course, of course, I had to go there to the Spitz. I had to, 30 years and coupla months later on December 8th 2006 go and see Wilko. Find if that light burned for real in his soul, if the connection back beyond Belfast back to something timeless and burning and real and good at the centre of the universe, still held. Wilko, I knew, had or had had “drug problems”. In the 30 years since that night when he, by his very vitality and rapacious zeal, had inducted me into the Sacred Church of Rock N Roll I had seen him but once. There he was going gray now, looking wasted on the street on a notorious hard drug run hang out in London’s West End - sometime in the 80s. Or was it the 90s. So what, man? We all had drug problems - be the drug a chick, or a fag, or a spliff, or a drink or a horse, or caffeine… or whatever. The thing was, Wilko was not among the fallen he was still here and seemingly wild as an old warhorse and ready to fucking rock. Again. And the first thing I notice, or the first thing I am drawn to when I push up to the front of the crowd (a maneuver impossible back in Belfast in 1976) the first thing I notice in Wilko’s combustible trio is Norman Watt Roy. The great Indian born Blockhead, Brit bassist extraordinaire, like Free’s Andy Frazer (half Guyanan was he) Watt Roy has a singular, gloriously emblematic style. This guy, like Wilko, is a true one off, someone whose very being is expressed through the music, through the elasticity of facial muscles which move in concert with his need to uwrap the groove within, revealing them gleaming teeth like a rapacious predator of da boogie. And what boogie is to be found in his pulverisingly sexual and pugnaciously joyful style. There was a tune early on where the drummer took the 3 piece’s groove down to gothic bubbling reggae funk. Kneeing up the sound, with a gentle humping loving forcefulness from their crotches, these guys, these ageless minstrels, exerted a spell of sorts, a deep and lasting energy that sort of filled that space, killed the dead air in The Spitz. And that was the way Wilko filled the air that night in The Whitla in 1976. The ways that, even from the back of the hall, you could see him flying like the angel of death in a fiery rage. Wilko and his guitar - like the madman fondling his luger on the backstreet, exorcised. The bad and the beautiful all embodied in one – and turned to the love of electric geetar God gold. What does Wilko look like now, actually? How does he differ from the 1976 psycho with the pudding bowl, mentally ill haircut and the chords that cut through glass and steel? He is pale, sleek suited, black shirted - progressively sweat basted as the evening progresses and unfolded. I know because I am – oh joy – right there up close and personal, right at the front beside the living flame of Wilko. Now completely shaven and dome headed he is nonetheless a stick insect, not gone to chubby seed, at 59 he still has the default sullen pose. A pose that but so readily in an instant turns to outrage and the deadeye mystic power of the ageless blues marauder. Like Robert Johnson reborn in the Canvey effluvial, perhaps. Wilko is still an extraordinary thing this rock n roll vampire has been a lifelong harbinger of mercy and outrage, clemency and complete retribution. Does Wilko know or feel what he did there, back there those 30 years and two months ago in Belfast? Does he know how he changed that city, that night, in that one instant? Hell it was probably a routine he did every night about that time. 3 minutes in and in many instances after, as he repeatedly ignited the collective heart and lifted us, en masse, a single body electrified in the current of rock’s very own holy blessing. That Belfast back then I only ever knew the city from a distance. It would be a full year before the clearing act off punk freed the city for personal exploration and adventure. We’d cross the town, stuffed in the back of a petrol leaking family car, a family up from down the coast-visiting relatives beyond the capital. There was Lisburn and Muckamore Abbey to see my, in those days they called him mentally handicapped, brother Paul. There was always a chill up there at the house on the hill, frost rimming the rose bushes, up there in Muckamore. To get there to see Paul we’d pass through sundry Belfast road blocks manned by the police, by the army or the paramilitary organization representatives. Belfast was full of pregnant silences that held secrets and divisions; the city was being divided up on pseudo ethnic, pseudo religious lines. It seemed, from my vantage point that there was always explosions, kidnappings, bullets or talk of the same. Ever since that night in August 1969 when my father, a World War 2 veteran, had arrived in the kitchen of the family home, real fear in his eyes, having seen the arrival of British Army tanks on the streets of the city, it had seemed to be bad – and getting worse. Talk of a country slipping into civil war, something terrible coming to fill those silences was not uncommon. Then of course came punk – the something we were waiting on to answer them sectarian, sins of the father, visited on the son, and the sons of the son, blues. “All crimes are paid,” screamed Johnny Rotten on NO Future. That was the deliverance of punk, sacred words and a quasi-religious thought, combined to antagonize and inflame the status quo of the No Future Ulster heading toward the abyss. But before punk there was Wilko - then and now still the same - a hellhound and a firebrand a real lightning conductor. I mean Wilko now, please check out the pictures, a living testament to the ever-shining glory of a soulful vampire. Listen – Wilko sucked us into his world and he’s still that same avatar, 30 years on with the white out complexion and the shrunken skull and those mad blazing eyes, burning deep into the soul. And the music is not some same old variation on dem ole electric blues. No - its not old, its wild and wirey and always new, so real, so livid, so now and created out there on the road down over 30 years. Aside from that cartoon image there’s so much flesh on Wilko’s blues bones. One way his really deep and lasting link to the deeper meaning and meter of the blues is in constant references to Dylan’s electric tropes. Back in 76, a few weeks before the Belfast show Wilko collapsed, an excess of speed, apparently, the cause of his exhaustion. The eyes on stalks had spun like cartwheels coming off the cart and he got carried away, lost his balance. But he kept on keeping on and tonight it seems he has never stopped being his natural self - a generous performer full of showman physicality and mercurial music. And he is not just burning candles at both ends - he has learned to pace himself. Don’t, please, talk to me about the record industry as being in any way or any day the same as the death of music. Music IS NOT dependent on what men in suits do to prevent technology working its wonders of replication. Music lives here in the direct communion between Musician magician and the gathering, a ritual as old as courting. It is something precious that must not be lost and doesn’t depend on playbacks or watermark CD or the future welfare of Mister Warner, Sony BmG EMI or what ever. Wilko lives beyond the record industry now, he’s done his part of the corporate whoring. You can stick all the rock and pop machine conveyor belt products in a blender, beat em til they form a souffle - there still aint nothing - no how no way – that can substitute for the magick of the live art. A rock roll art, not to be practiced by the weak the lame or the (un)insane . Really, Paul, its still something to melt the snow round the rose bushes. Something to wake the city from its death throes. Something to make you feel the world beyond and the myriad possibilities inherent in the grand totality of existence. The day before Wilko tore up the Spitz there was a crack in the ozone above London and there came a tornado knocking over houses, a real whirlwind. We are reaping the whirlwind now in so many ways. Psychos, rather than the good and honest and true men of the 70s, in power in Belfast. Internationally we are facing the payback for ancient and modern crusades, there’s the small matter of the planet hurtling toward a ecological dark age. No wonder Wilko’s shock and awe sound and look still appears so real and feels so vital. We have Wilko the weatherman to help us know and feel what way the wind blows. Long as he and his kind are there to bear witness we are, all of us, blessed and alive. Tuned into the vital power at the heart of the universe. Made whole. Pilgrims in the mystic church. Oh, my soul…..