Rhythm doctor

Flood and drugs and R&B - the life and works of Wilko Johnson have been fast and turbulent. But the Essex Assassin is still rocking like he means it. Nick Coleman beards the former Feelgood in his lair

The Island of Cana's People. Canvey Island. A muddy pat in the Thames estuary connected by a single bridge to the western approaches to Southend. Seven miles long, five miles wide. Home to fat-tailed sheep and oil refineries. Drained and walled in the 17th century by the great Vermuyden. Slapped around by the North Sea ever since.

The Island of Cana's People. Canvey Island. A muddy pat in the Thames estuary connected by a single bridge to the western approaches to Southend. Seven miles long, five miles wide. Home to fat-tailed sheep and oil refineries. Drained and walled in the 17th century by the great Vermuyden. Slapped around by the North Sea ever since.

The sky is big on Canvey but horizons are not wide. You can drive for miles in figures of eight on the island and nothing much changes. Look west across the island's flat, green hinterland and the stacks, burners and tanks of the oil industry be-grime the limits of sight. Look the other way and your gaze is buffered by brick and concrete and power lines twitching in the wind, street after avenue after drive of bravely decorated little houses hunched against the blast; and then The Wall, a heavy grey slug dividing road from sky, sea from land. You can't see the water from Main Drag, Canvey, or from any other street for that matter, not unless you're 25 feet tall. That's because whenever you're at street level on Canvey, you're always below sea level.

John Wilkinson was five at the time of the great storm of 1953. This was a major event in his life, as it was in the lives of every coastal East Anglian. The sea simply overwhelmed the defences, smashed inland, carried away buildings and lives and left stretches of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex underwater. Canvey suffered more than most. 58 died in the flood and the entire population was evacuated over the bridge to the mainland - John Wilkinson to his mother's family in Sheffield. Canvey people don't say "post-war" when they want to define recent history; they say "after the flood".

Wilko Johnson, who evolved out of John Wilkinson more than 30 years ago (and ratified the fact by deed poll), vividly recalls being carried to some sort of vehicle that night and looking out over the fields behind the house where he lived with his family. "They were just waves." He also remembers listening to the radio in Sheffield and hearing Wilfred Pickles reporting live from the refugee reception centre in the school on the island. "And he said, 'I gorra a little lad wi' me. His name's little Johnny Martin. He's five years old, in his first year at school, and 'e's goin' to sing us a song!' And thiiiis," says Johnson, his vowels reverting with a snap from cod-Lancastrian to torque-y estuarine, "this was The Figure. There he was singing 'Me and My Teddy Bear' on the blaaardy radio. The Figure: the first Feelgood to get on the airwaves."

Wilko Johnson is now in his mid-fifties. He parted from his most celebrated group, Dr Feelgood, under a thunderhead of a cloud 28 years ago, having fallen out with the other members in no uncertain terms. That meant rubbing up The Big Figure, Sparko and Gentleman Lee Brilleaux the wrong way, a friction not to be sought lightly given that, viewed together, the three of them resembled the staff of an Essex second-hand car dealership on a loss-making awayday at the bookie's. Dear little Johnny Martin, no longer quite so dependent on his teddy, had transformed himself into the very definition of the word "henchman".

But perhaps these things did not trouble Johnson as they might trouble most of us. He is clearly still the Brueghelian assassin he so resembled in 1975. And though the pudding-basin moptop has greyed and diminished to a crop, his eyes are still stark beneath their beetling brows, his mouth as wide and firm as a park bench.

"For the next three or four years," he says wistfully, staring into the fireplace in the front room of his yellow, crenellated house in the suburbs of Southend, "I made nothing but wrong moves, including [his next group] the Solid Senders. If someone commissioned you to go out and find the most useless arseholes you can, AND GIVE THEM ALL YOUR MONEY, would you do it?" He shoots me a basilisk stare, then smiles. "Well, I fulfilled that commission. I was on me own - it was like being kicked out of a family. I did things all wrong." A sigh. "I don't wanna blame other people. I chose to do what I did and I shouldn't 'ave done it." And he sinks his gaze into the fireplace again and disappears into another of the silences which open up in his conversation like empty cupboards.

Dr Feelgood were one of the perfect groups; one of the few British ones ever to wrestle with what Greil Marcus called the invisible republic of American song and come away with something comparable to the original model yet somehow wholly English. Before they were deposited by history into the generic dump-bin known as "Pub Rock", Dr Feelgood bestrode the weary world of British boogie, a beacon of economy, cogency, elegant scansion and grimy suiting. Feelgood songs proposed a small world of harsh existential integrity: paranoia and sexual jealousy ran in their lines like amphetamine. Unquestionably, the group reclaimed rock's lowlands for punk - a fact acknowledged by Patti Smith of all people - standing for everything that was neither prolix, nor self-indulgent, nor made out of offcuts of cheesecloth. The songs were short, their hair short-ish; the words came at you like blow-torched Chuck Berry, while Johnson hacked at a black and red Telecaster without a plectrum (you were as likely to find a widdling solo in a Wilko song as a quote from Ravel). The Feelgoods' R&B redux was a music of structure, cadence and revealed energy.

But more than that, Dr Feelgood were a package. You could not separate the sound from the look from the fundamentalist ethos from the psycho-geography (should one have had access to such language in 1975). They were discrete, self-sufficient, entire. You could, at a pinch, take Dr Feelgood out of Canvey but not, even for a moment, separate them from their vision of themselves.

"Well, yes," says Wilko, folding his legs under himself like yogi. "It wasn't a designed thing, not as such. We just used to sit around, get stoned and have these fantasies - about ourselves as authentic Chicago bluesmen transported to Canvey. Which meant going down the market and buying cheap suits with narrow lapels - a bit like the The Blues Brothers fantasy but before the film, y'know? We used to laugh until we thought we were going to die. The whole thing was a sort of projection of Lee's personality. And there were just enough oddities in the landscape to fit in with our thing: the ships, the estuary, the oil refineries across the water - the big chimneys with flames making the sky go orange on cloudy nights..."

It sounds infernal...

"Well, I did grow up feeling slightly ashamed of coming from there. You were definitely working class... You can't pass through Canvey on the way to somewhere else. You had to go over the bridge onto the island, and there we all were, below sea level. My mother always felt she'd been dragged down by having to live there. My dad was a gasfitter and it was all a bit Lawrentian - he met my mother in an air-raid shelter in Sheffield..."

Wilko was an English teacher at the time of the Feelgoods' birth, with a taste for Dylan, Shakespeare and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Brilleaux was a lanky student of cool. "They were a very bright couple of guys," says Will Birch, the Pepys of Pub Rock (see his estimable No Sleep Till Canvey Island, Virgin Books) and, before that, drummer with Southend spiv-rockers, The Kursaal Flyers. "But they played their intelligence down. Wilko and Lee knew what they were about and they played off each other to the hilt: one of rock's great double acts."

And so the edgily handsome, dangerously charismatic bluesman-lothario Brilleaux and his unhinged sidekick Johnson (plus unsavoury rhythm-henchmen) took the ride and went all the way. The first album, Down by the Jetty is an unsurpassable blast of estuary mythopoeia, produced (and designed) in belligerent mono. It still looks and sounds as viciously eloquent as it did back then. But the Feelgoods' commercial ride peaked with Stupidity, the live album that pinged them straight to the pinnacle of the album charts in 1976.

Wilko claims it was all an accident, that they never meant to leave the island, any more than they ever intended to embroider the fantasy of their invented identity. But people just loved to watch them act it out. Johnson's psycho-duckwalk, Brilleaux's pumping fist, spittle-spray and leg-twitch.

"I'd always felt that violent movement is exciting to watch and it just went perfectly with that sound. Enhanced it even. And Lee, cwoar... he just had that thing: he just RADIATED violence and neurosis. And the thing is we kind of meant it. It was funny but real. How can I explain it? You know when you're a kid and you play cops and robbers? Well, you're really firing that gun - even though you know it's not a gun. And the guy you're shooting knows that you're not really shooting him - but he's really taking those bullets..."

And then they really did shoot each other up, metaphorically, in a recording studio in Monmouth over a number of issues, but chiefly, according to Johnson, "because I cared so much about it that I got too... sullen." His fast-moving friend Lemmy from Motorhead took a slightly different view. "His theory was that this is what happens when three-quarters of the band're drinkers and the other one's a speed-freak." At all events, "they'd all be at the bar on tour having a drink and I s'pose they'd got to have something to talk about. So they talked about THAT BASTARD upstairs. And to tell you the truth, I was pretty unbearable a lot of the time..."

"Let's just say," says Will Birch, "that Wilko enjoyed his success to the hilt and in the end got pretty, um, alienated."

The alienation was only intensified by the failure of Wilko's Solid Senders, but then redeemed when his old pub-rock mucker Ian Dury invited the Canvey Assassin to become a Blockhead, which he duly did to glorious effect. And then calamity began to pile on calamity.

"I've lost quite a few people to bloody cancer," says Johnson, eyes down. "Two singers, a drummer, a mother - close people all of them." Brilleaux died in 1994, followed in due course by Dury and Blockhead sticksman Charlie Charles. "But losing my wife, it's like... well, it changes all the time. I can sit here all day long surrounded by all our stuff, and I'm OK. And then I'm up the shops or on the bus and... God almighty, what an embarrassment. Y'know, get out the way..." He parts the air in front of him.

Wilko's wife Irene, to whom he'd been attached since school and who remains the only woman he's ever named in a song, died in September, following a diagnosis in April. Grief is still in flood.

"Irene. Fucking hell, man. She was something else. She never took drugs, drank; she was such a good... person. And she always looked after me and protected me. I always assumed that one day I'd finally overdo it and that she'd be there holding my hand as I died. It never occurred to me that she'd go. And despite all my best efforts to ruin everything over the years, I've been completely healthy throughout." He looks up wanly. "Maybe I'll drop down dead this afternoon after you've gone."

It doesn't happen. In fact later that week I see the Wilko Johnson Band perform an uproarious set to a sold-out audience of middle-aged men and younger women at that most apt of London venues, the 100 Club in Oxford Street. They're great. But it would be wrong to say it is just like the old days, because about 10 minutes in, as the rhythm section locks down and the red and black Telecaster starts to ring like a bell, Wilko smiles. Just like that. Bing. It's a strange and moving sight. *

The CD plus DVD package 'Going Back Home: Dr Feelgood Live at the Southend Kursaal 1975' is out tomorrow on EMI