Wilko Johnson featured significantly in Julien Temple’s documentary Oil City Confidential, and it’s a treat to spend more time with him via this tribute to one of the great diamond geezers of British rock music.
The guitarist from Dr Feelgood and other beat combos (and occasional Game of Thrones executioner), Wilko is irrepressibly energetic, holding forth on life, love, the universe and above all the prospect of death.
Diagnosed with a seemingly inoperable pancreatic cancer, he opts to live out his remaining days playing music (he records an album with old mate Roger Daltrey in eight days) and appreciating beauty where he finds it. “I’ve had a splendid life,” he says without self-pity, and it’s hard not to agree. (In a remarkable turn of events, he has since been given the all-clear.)
Keeping to form, Temple scissors into the interview shots snippets culled from stock footage and archive material and films such as A Matter of Life and Death and The Seventh Seal. Stylistically, t’s a bit of a retread for Temple but it’s impossible to begrudge him his affection for his subject.
