…was the news that Wilko Johnson has recovered from pancreatic cancer. I’ve loved Dr Feelgood since buying Stupidity from Woolworth’s with my paper round money. Wilko invented that sharp, choppy guitar style that was the basis of their sound. A couple of years later, that very sound formed the basis of punk but for thirty-odd years, the Feelgoods never got the credit they deserved. Maybe because they came from Essex and had no pseudo-anarchic “message” that they went unrecognised by the middle-class punks who went on to work for the BBC or Channel 4. But then Wilko got cancer. Oh, my word. Suddenly they were all retrospective Feelgood fans, claiming to have been there at the Roundhouse in 1975. The wonderful thing about this – apart obviously from Wilko surviving – is that these awful charlatans are now going to have to keep up the pretence.
