![]() It was just one piece of the Canvey landscape through which he explored the idea of Johnson – an English graduate with a love of Anglo-Saxon sagas – as a kind of rock’n’roll psychogeographer, explaining how this strange spit of Essex land fed into the “submarine consciousness” of Dr Feelgood, an R’n’B band that looked like a bunch of used-car salesmen at a time when glam rock and prog were preening their way through England. “We called ourselves freaks.”Īcross the water, the “Miltonic flame” of the Shell Haven refinery, which featured symbolically in Temple’s film, no longer burns. But he doesn’t like the word “hippie” – that was invented by the newspapers. He once walked to Afghanistan with 50 quid stuffed down his Y-fronts. They both had long hair back then: Wilko can be seen in news footage from ’73, protesting against the Occidental oil company, which was building a road through his home town, Canvey Island. There are pictures on the wall that Wilko painted in the early Seventies, including one of his brother playing a lute. Wilko’s much-loved wife, Irene, died of cancer 11 years ago: he has a plot next to hers at a green burial site near Harwich. It’s one of those curiously uneven bachelor spaces where all the stuff seems to have floated down to one end. The living room could do, to use the old-fashioned parlance, with a woman’s touch. ![]() He’s six foot four, but spent the first few months living in the smallest room in the house. Simon seems to have understood that if he was going to become a carer for the most stubborn man in rock, he would have to do so with minimal fanfare. His younger son, Simon, moved in to care for him, to this pale yellow house in Westcliff-on-Sea, the one with the telescope on the roof. After he got better, he went into what he likes to call a “senior depression”. We talk through the serving hatch between the living room and kitchen as he makes two cups of milky filter coffee. Folk heroes, in a way: for every Townshend there is your Otway or John Cooper Clarke. He represents a whole world of jobbing musicians of the Seventies and Eighties who now live in modest terraced houses in Brighton, or Bournemouth, or Hove, still playing in bands, weathering the periods of quiet, riding the waves of interest when they come again. Wilko is the kind of figure the British rock press has always favoured above the big draw. He gets on with Van Morrison – though he must be the only person in the world who does. He has shaken Pete Townshend’s hand in the past, he tells me he’s supposed to be touring with the Who next year. He barely knows Status Quo, with whom he has just done an arena tour – though he has a soft spot for their song “Pictures of Matchstick Men” because it was big when he got married 47 years ago. ![]() He was a bit of a fish out of water among the other old rockers. A few weeks back, Wilko and his Mercedes turned up at a music awards ceremony that, he tells me, had particularly naff goody bags. “They call it the Mercedes,” he says, lifting up his T-shirt and showing me a scar a foot long that forks out on either side, just like the logo. Above all, Wilko’s was a story about a man’s ability finally to appreciate his time on earth precisely because he knows it’s going to end. It was a story about the morbid appeal of watching someone fade away in real time: once the stuff of sci-fi films, then of Jade Goody and Clive James, who has described his prolonged farewell as embarrassing. It was a story about someone having faith in science – too much faith, as it turned out – and about a person’s right to die as they want. Wilko’s tale was bigger than a soap opera, though. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.
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