Pub rock’s emphasis on live performances in small cramped venues signaled the importance of audience interaction and presenting music with energy and passion. The roots rock, country, and R&B played in the pubs of Essex and London during the first half of the ‘70s did not foreshadow punk rock so much as its attitude and infrastructure. His films frame Wilko as punk before punk, dredging up a faded history by putting both the guitarist and Canvey Island back on the map as key participants in forming punk aesthetics. Indeed, the title of their debut album, Down by the Jetty, helped feed the kind of psychogeographical significance Temple emphasizes. Feelgood (out of the Pigboy Charlie Band) in 1971. Sparks (bass), and John Martin (drums), no doubt fantasized as such when they formed Dr. Wilko and his neighbors, Lee Brilleaux (vocals), John B. Seen through a romanticist’s eyes, as it is by director Julien Temple in Oil City Confidential (2009) and The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (2015) music documentaries, Canvey Island can be imagined as a London equivalent to the Mississippi delta, its jetties and beat-up boats providing the source material to create an alternative British bayou blues. Feelgood, the region was also home to Mickey Jupp, the Kursaal Flyers, and Eddie and the Hot Rods, all pivotal acts in the incipient scene. It is also recognized as a hub of early ‘70s pub rock, boasting key venues like The Lobster Smack Inn, The Monico Nightclub, The Canvey Club, and, across the water in Southend, The Railway Hotel. Situated on the River Thames estuary 15 miles west of Southend, Essex, Canvey Island is known for its creeks, mudflats, and petrochemical plants. On returning to England, he commenced a teaching career, settling back into his childhood home of Canvey Island. After pursuing an interest in Anglo-Saxon literature at Newcastle University, he satisfied a standard hippy yearning by travelling extensively around India. Feelgood offered few signs that Johnson would become a godfather of punk. It was the resulting intensity, rather than the blues riffs themselves that subsequent punk players were drawn to.

His “own way” involved an acceleration of speed, no doubt driven by the copious amounts of amphetamines he ingested during the ‘70s. But I’ve got my own way of doing it,” Wilko later reflected (“Wilko”). Feelgood took their name from a song the Pirates had covered and included a cover of Green’s “Oyeh!” on their debut Jetty album. Green’s playing showed the young aspirant how one guitarist could sound like two by integrating brief solo licks into the gaps of staccato rhythm playing. Jagged and frenetic, Johnson’s style emerged from listening to Mick Green of the late ‘50s/early ‘60s British combo Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. A new generation of guitar heretics and anti-heroes was paying attention. Nothing could have sounded further from the rock “god” theatrics of contemporaries like Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, and Brian May. Cutting through their tight, barren rhythm section was Wilko’s Fender Telecaster, emitting elemental blues-based patterns via a simple tube amp.

In that subtraction, the band added speed and unadorned rawness. Feelgoods stripped rock and R&B down to its bare bones, leaving only a skeletal sound that time and technology had seemingly bypassed. When Stupidity hit the top of the British album charts during punk’s breakout year, 1976, it was apparent that a new spirit was in the air, and it was out of step with the pop gloss of glam and the complexity of prog that then ruled Britannia’s rock waves.

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