Talking to Temple, Johnson seems like a man whose eyes have been opened for the first time Meanwhile, a motif inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal places Wilko on a sea wall playing chess with Death, reflecting playfully upon the transformative power of mortality.
Significantly, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death proves an alchemical element amid a brilliantly chosen blizzard of clips from FW Murnau, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky et al (although I could have lived without the decapitated chickens of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates). In some ways, this companion piece is more universal, its focus broadened from the deconstruction of 12-bar blues to wider issues of the soul.
Wilko johnson telecaster movie#
Using scattershot movie clips (a directorial trademark) to emphasise the band’s outlaw status, Temple painted Wilko as a star-gazing seer – a one-time teacher and future astronomer erudite, energetic and electrifying. Temple previously documented Johnson’s life and works in 2009’s Oil City Confidential, a blistering account of the “Thames Delta” blues that once made Dr Feelgood Britain’s best live act. Yet here he was – larger than life, stranger than fiction, and cooler than Canvey Island on a rainswept afternoon. Indeed, Temple’s unexpectedly celebratory film began life as a chronicle of a death foretold, doctors having given Wilko less than a year to live following a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2012. It was an extraordinary show, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Johnson wasn’t supposed to be there at all. “B loody hell, man, I’m supposed to be dead!” Following the recent London premiere of Julien Temple’s latest kaleidoscopic documentary, Wilko Johnson played a sweat-streaked gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, strutting up and down the small stage like a berserker, swapping gleeful looks with the great Blockheads bassist, Norman Watt-Roy, machine-gunning the audience with the staccato strumming of his black Telecaster.
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