![]() It’s been very strange doing it, thinking about those times and then seeing it all up there, it evokes the whole time and what happened really well, considering it’s been done by a stranger if you like, but it absolutely… you know, if somebody asked me what went down back then, I’d just say, "Well, watch that!" It’s just like it was. I was sitting next to my son, and as soon as it got going it was just… it was like the first time I’d seen Dr Feelgood really, up there on the big screen, I was digging him in the ribs, going "Get a load of that!" I know that he was impressed, which is great, afterwards I could tell he was impressed. Wilko Johnson: They’d given me a DVD but I didn’t watch it, so the first time I saw it was in fact at a screening at the South Bank. What were your thoughts when you first saw the film? We bundle into in an Italian café on Great Titchfield Street (after Wilko is stopped in the street by an admiring Mark Lamarr) but despite the café’s enticing window display of full bottles of wine a-plenty, there is apparently no such delight on sale, so coffee it is. Wilko Johnson, very much the star of Oil City Confidential, has been plunged into press interviews and by the time the Quietus grabs twenty minutes with the perennially black-suited one, he is in sore need of a drink. It will be, Koko insists, ‘a groundbreaking cinematic event.’ The gig, already sold-out, will be beamed live into cinemas across the country. The trio will play live, accompanied by special guests including Alison Moyet, at Koko in Camden on February 2nd after the launch screening of Oil City Confidential. Johnson has had his own blues trio for the past three decades which also includes Blockheads bassist Norman Watt Roy and, since last year, Blockheads drummer Dylan Howe. ![]() Johnson left Dr Feelgood in 1977 after the antipathy between himself, the unstoppable force, and frontman Brilleaux, the immovable object - or vice versa depending on the circumstances - became unbearable, and this is where the film ends, although Dr Feelgood would continue without him. ![]() Johnson also speaks of his deep respect of the recently deceased Pirates guitarist Mick Green. The film even includes a star turn from Lee Brilleaux’s elderly mother in her chintzy bungalow (“He was a nice boy really,” that sort of thing), a prized glimpse into Wilko’s fascination with astronomy (there is already a Facebook campaign for Johnson to present The Sky At Night) and the amusing discovery that Brilleaux became such a gourmande that he would only play gigs close to Egon Ronay restaurants. It’s dangerous, it’s stylish, it is Canvey Noir. In true Temple-style, this perfect slab of rock doc gold is cut with black and white movie clips of robberies, car chases and fights, edited with slick, machine gun rapidity. The pair are complemented, never upstaged (that would be impossible) by John 'Big Figure' Martin, looking like a meaner, madder Jake Blues and John 'Sparko' Sparkes, scooting relentlessly back and forth like a sleazy-looking chess piece in a "bastard suit" (his description). The bleak mud-flats and pearly skies of ‘Oil City’ (Canvey Island’s Americanised sobriquet) are captured beautifully, and of course, there is plenty of live footage of the Feelgoods in all their visceral, wild-eyed, dirty-suited, smash and grab glory, Brilleaux glaring, growling, pumping his fist and often doing the odd press-up on stage, Wilko hurtling by as if on wheels, eyes bulging, mock-gunning down the audience with his guitar. This, the third in his ‘punk trilogy’, is easily Temple’s finest hour, rich with frank, insightful contributions from guitarist and songwriter Wilko Johnson, The Big Figure (drums), Sparko (bass) and an archive interview, in the pub, appropriately, with the sadly departed Lee Brilleaux. I came out quite shaken, definitely stirred and feverishly in love. When I first went to see this film, I went in unsure of what to expect – the words ‘pub rock’ had previously put me off. Surely the reductive term pub rock must be obliterated once and for all by the arrival of Oil City Confidential – Julien Temple’s stunning new documentary, a gritty paean to the oft-overlooked 1970s R&B proto-punkers Dr Feelgood, their alcohol-steeped motherland, Canvey Island, Essex, and the relationship between the two.
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