What a feeling! In 1976 our live album Stupidity went straight to number one. The audience had great big banners saying “Dr Feelgood”. We made our first album, Down by the Jetty, in 1974. I had it all!īy then I’d changed my name from John Wilkinson to Wilko Johnson. I was doing well and had a lovely wife and little boy back home. Within a few months we were getting famous and Matthew was born the same year. We got some gigs up in London on the pub circuit. One of the best times of my life was 1973. "When you have no future, all you can do is live in the minute you’re in." I got a letter from my girlfriend Irene saying, “Can we get married?” Even as a child, I thought that Irene was the one thing in the universe I was sure of. I ran the poetry magazine instead and got very interested in medieval literature and old Icelandic sagas. I couldn’t find a band so I stopped playing. I went to university in Newcastle to study English. My scheme was to save my dinner money and pay off a bit each week, but my future wife Irene paid for most of it. The local music shop had a Telecaster in the window, but £100 was a fortune. The lead guitarist Mick Green played a Fender Telecaster and had this way of playing-picking and strumming at the same time. I remember hearing I’ll Never Get Over You by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. I’m left-handed but taught myself to play right-handed. The Rolling Stones put me on to music and I fancied myself with a guitar. My dad was uneducated and violent and I hated him. She devoted herself to looking after us, but there wasn’t much affection in our home. She was an intelligent woman-a teacher in the later part of her life. I got the sense from my mum that there was something shameful about coming from Canvey. It was all fields and wild open spaces then. He’s defied cancer, made a hit album with Roger Daltrey and starred in Julien Temple’s The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson. I had a long break from that when I was ill, I couldn't climb the stepladder onto the roof.Wilko Johnson co-founded Dr Feelgood and played with Ian Dury and The Blockheads. Even if it's raining, with the rain beating down, it's great. This was the sight that told Galileo that everything didn't revolve around the earth, and changed our understanding of the universe, and it's so beautiful.Įventually I started buying proper telescopes, and now I've got a dome on top of my flat roof at home, and a great big telescope. After a few days, I walked off stage and out of the gig, and there was the moon, upside down! I got into the habit of looking through my binoculars, and at Jupiter, you can see it's a disc, it's so exciting, and you can see the moons. I get to NZ, and there was no moon, each night. So I started looking at the moon, and seeing the way round we see it, using binoculars. I was stood on my head trying to work it out. The thing that engaged my interest wasn't the constellations, it was: is the moon upside down in New Zealand? It's tricky. That was my first interest in it.Īnyway, a few years later I was going to go to New Zealand for a tour on my own, and I thought I'd like to repeat this experiment but I'll get a bit of knowledge first. I realised I didn't know anything about the stars at home, or there. Wow, there were more than I remembered seeing at home, and they were coloured, and moving about! Then I realised I was looking at fireflies attracted by the pool lights. It was nighttime in Melbourne, and we got to the hotel, and I went wow! The southern sky! I'm going to look at these stars! I went up to the roof and there was a swimming pool - I got one of those lilo things, lay down, and saw these stars. We had a long flight and were very jetlagged. I first got consciously in astronomy when, in 1979 or something, Ian Dury and the Blockheads went to Australia for a tour.
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