Only thing is Wilko! l wont be playing the Tele again as l am putting it in a glass case for my two children on Canvey with a card and the book you signed for Phoebe and Oscar (Last played Rough Trade, 2nd June 2016 by the Canvey Island man Wilko Johnson). I would like to say it was a cracking night and thank you to Wilko for his patience and going beyond the call of duty for me and just being a great bloke, Zoe for her beauty and professional entertaining interview. Hello Zoe got back to Scotland with me newly signed Fender Wilko Johnson Telecaster that the man himself borrowed and played on stage at the Rough Trade book signing of Don’t You Leave Me Here. l hope you will reply if not keep playing, by the way the green band along the sea wall and welcome to Canvey Island along with the little yachts was painted by me. My children live in Canvey Island and l have one weekend a month off to see them, my next weekend off is from Thursday 26-05-16 till 31-05-16 then l seen you have a book signing at rough trade on 02-06-16 and l booked holidays to enable me to get to the signing, if you would sign it for me would this be the only chance of getting it signed or take a chance when you are at the Queens theatre Edinburgh, as l will be travelling from Rosyth. l told the guy whom l bought the guitar from that it will be going to Canvey Island, it took a simle north easterner to get a job in Scotland to buy his desired guitar and bring it to Canvey. l am working on HMS Queen Elizabeth ll aircraft carrier in Rosyth Scotland and have been hunting for a Fender Wilco Johnson Telecaster after a lengthy search l eventually found one in Leith, Edinburgh. l have a little story that l would like to share with you. Last time l saw you live was about 1976 Newcastle City Hall at the ripe old age of 16. The Wilko Johnson Band are a hell of an act who didn’t get the response they deserved.Wilco even though you don’t know me l am glad that you are firing on all cylinders and look forward to seeing you and the band perform at The Queens theatre Edinburgh. A crowd owes something to a great band beyond an entry-fee: the response. Grumpy statues winced as less than 10 of us rattled around the middle to the 12-bar blues, stepping on toes and sending flecks of beer over woollen jumpers. The audience was comprised entirely of old farts who observed Wilko Johnson machine-gunning the front row with his headstock with all the energy of observing the menu board at a chippy. It was such a joy to see Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy, a man who looks at his instrument as if the two had been married on a beach the day prior, rolling through the scales beyond Johnson’s rhythm strikes and blending together into an energy I would normally consider undanceable, if the crowd that evening hadn’t put me in my place. All the classic Wilko parts emerged with him the burning death stare, the duck-walk, the Telecaster, that merciless right hand that chopped indiscriminately through rhythm and lead (often simultaneously), as the band ploughed through the decades’ worth of snappy back catalogue Johnson has accumulated. Johnson had collapsed on stage the day before in Cambridge, so for the band to emerge so blistering as well as after so many years set my hair on end. Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze opened on Friday, an accomplished guitarist himself and more than enough to hold his own while solo in the echoey Tramshed hall with a rundown of some of the era’s biggest, but a different side of the 70s British coin than Wilko Johnson’s band. Even more than that, Johnson’s choppy abuse of a Fender Telecaster was treated by every guitarist who came across him with the kind of veneration usually reserved at the time for big heavy metal solo-ers or howlin’ American bluesmen, often by those British punks feeding on the energy for what was about to happen. Feelgood’s rawest rhythm & blues weapon was Wilko Johnson: an unstoppable hammer of a right arm impossibly attached somewhere to a man, turning a pub band into a spartan rock‘n’roll powerhouse that predicted British punk. In their Roxette days in the mid-70s, Dr.
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