Just as Dr Feelgood wasn’t the same, and certainly didn’t sound the same, without Wilko’s idiosyncratic guitar style, Wilko’s solo releases generally suffer from the lack of a good vocalist. He too often has a shrill yelping style of singing, which is all right for three or four songs on an album, separated by songs with a better vocalist but listen to 12 or 14 of them consecutively becomes a teeth gritting challenge to say the least.
Wilko was out of the blocks as solo artist quickly enough, though not as quickly as Dr Feelgood who released an album with new guitarist John Mayo within months after Wilko’s departure, with teh Solid Senders album in 1978. I expect that the band name suggested that it was indeed intended to be a band and not just a solo project but it didn’t last.
The Solid Senders featured keyboards, a decent vocalist and songwriters other than Wilko Johnson, and the album is pretty good. The rhythm section swings solidly, like the Feelgoods, and the addition of keyboards and another vocalist to gives us a varied set of originals and covers that Is highly enjoyable and is a more satisfactory follow up to Sneakin Suspicion than Be Seeing You is and in a way shows a direction Dr Feelgood could’ve explored if sense had prevailed and they’d stuck together. The production is excellent too.
In 1981, the follow up was Ice on the Motorway, this time just a Wilko Johnson album with mostly bass and drums backing, and some keyboards, and it’s a great disappointment. The production is basic to say the least, and is almost no better than demo quality, with a disturbingly tinny guitar sound. The tempos are also much too frenetic and Wilko’s thin, reedy voice is hardly the instrument to carry an entire album. He was good for a couple of songs per album, with Dr Feelgood and with the Solid Senders, but over the stretch it rakes some tolerance.
Wilko covers “Can You Please Crawl Through Your Bathroom Window,” “Long Tall Texan” and “I Put a Spell on You.” He doesn’t bring much of interest to the party for the first two songs and the latter is a live version where he at last emotes the craziness the song demands.
There is perhaps a reason why Ice on the Motorway is not available on Apple Music, and it might be the demo-level quality of the album. I listened to it for the first time on YouTube Music, in the week after Wilko’s death, and was mildly disappointed. I suppose it’s a must have for Wilko completists but it’s tough to listen to all at once.
Barbed Wire Blues (1995) is quite similar to Ice on the Motorway, with better production and with a more considered pace, yet also with Wilko voice that starts to grate about half way through the record. One longs for another voice to mitigate the tedium of the continuous bleat. The songs don’t seem to be classics but they’re okay and Wilko’s riffs are as compelling as ever.
With Going Back Home (2014), Wilko teamed up with Roger Daltrey to provide the gruff vocals while Wilko provides the trade mark riffs, and the performances provide a fair resemblance to Dr Feelgood, with 11 songs covering Wilko’s career, both with Dr Feelgood and as solo artist.
Amongst other tunes, they perform “Ice on the Motorway” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Bathroom Window”. The production values on Going Back Home is far, far better than that of Ice on the Motorway, and Johnson’s guitar sound is not tinny but tough and powerful, as with peak Feelgoods, and Wilko’s playing is not with the frenetic nervousness evident on the earlier record, and one can hear what these songs should’ve sounded like in 1981.
My only quibble with teh album is that Wilko doesn’t sing at all, not even on songs, like “Sneakin’ Suspicion” or “Everybody’s Carrying a Gun” that I associate with him. As I’ve said, the Johnson voice and vocal style over the length of an album takes some tolerance but it’s quite nice if he sings two or three of his own tunes to provide a contrast to the main vocalist.
I quite like the album though Daltrey, as good as he is, is not a match for Brilleaux on the songs associated with Dr Feelgood, because the song selection is excellent and the band does them justice with the mixture of toughness and looseness that characterises R & B done well.
Okay, I began listening to the earlier albums after I refreshed my memory with Solid Senders and Going Back Home, first Ice on the Motorway on YouTube and then Barbed Wire Blues on Apple music, which doesn’t carry the entire Wilko Johnson solo catalogue, and halfway through Barbed Wire Blues, I realised that I couldn’t bear to listen to more solo Wilko. His voice ruins the experience.
So, I abandoned this project. Wilko released a bunch of records over his lifetime, and there might be more stuff in vaults that will now see the light of day, but just as Dr Feelgood never improved on their first four albums, Wilko never did either. He ought’ve recruited a good vocalist, not quite a Lee Brilleaux imitator but at least someone who could share vocal duties to mitigate the Wilko yelp.
Wilko Johnson has bequeathed us his highly characteristic, quickly identifiable guitar style and some masterful songs in the idiom of modern R & B and blues, and the latter should live on, both as performed by him with Dr Feelgood and on his own, and perhaps as covered by new generations of young guns who rediscover the blues and its UK offshoots.
