‘It’s not a jukebox musical,” an indignant Wilko Johnson (Johnson Willis) says midway through the evening. “It’s a play – with music.” Fair enough. Playwright Jonathan Maitland tours the mind and memory of a pub rock pioneer (Dr Feelgood, the Blockheads) whose ambitions roamed beyond music.
Although guitars and drum kit lurk tantalisingly at the back, we’re well into the show before we hear a lick of the Feelgood sound. Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s light, scrubbed design seems ready for either a gig or an operation – and we begin in hospital as Wilko is given a cancer diagnosis and less than a year to live. He’s undaunted: “I can be more alive than I have ever been,” he exults.
A rhapsodic Wilko quotes Wordsworth, Eliot and ancient Icelandic poetry. He traces his roots back to a Canvey Island childhood with a bullying dad and ambitious mum (“snobbery is the bastard offspring of aspiration”). A proud but unsentimental Essex boy, he turns its everyday into myth. The oil refinery is an “Essex-based suburb of Hades”; a date at the jetty becomes “percussive poetry”.
