This is an extract from an interview that took place at Metal, Chalkwell Hall. Simon Poulter talks to Wilco Johnson, among other things, about Oil City Confidential film.
“I never meant to do this…I wanted to be a painter I think”, says Wilko. We are sitting on the top floor of Chalkwell Hall looking out over the Thames Estuary in Southend and I am immediately struck by Wilko’s sense of humour and candour. “Dr Feelgood was really a local band…we started the band to play that kind of music cos we liked it and nobody had any idea of doing it professionally or anything like that.” By October 1976 the four Canvey Islanders had reached number one in the UK charts with their live album ‘Stupidity’.

With the release of Julien Temple’s film ‘Oil City Confidential’ there has been a renewed interest in Dr Feelgood and particularly Wilko. Of Temple’s Seventies rockumentary trilogy, this is by far the most interesting work, as it portrays the way in which the band literally grafted their way to the top through a combination of stripped down songs and amazing stage presence. Dr Feelgood rehearsed their menacing stagecraft in pubs and clubs around the Thames Estuary and as Wilko says: “Violence is the wrong word..but there was a certain violence about it…people liked it and it attracted their attention and of course you do it more.”

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW ON METAL’S WEBSITE HERE.

The screening of Oil City Confidential has finally come to Southend.

To find out more about the film – see the previous posts on IDEA13 or the film’s WEBSITE.

Update on the Oil City Confidential: Finally we know about a screening of the film closer to home. Oil City Confidential will be screened at the CINEPLEX MOVIE STARR cinema on Canvey Island – from 2-4 February.

Chris Fenwick (the Dr Feelgood manager since the early Seventies) told the Echo newspaper: ‘Anyone who has got any association with Canvey or Dr Feelgood is going to love it.’

OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL website

CINEPLEX MOVIE STARR CINEMA website

Update on the Oil City Confidential:
The film is still being screened at film festivals and not on general release, but in case you find yourself in Brighton, Amsterdam or Stockholm in the coming months, here is the screening schedule:

21, 22 and 28 Nov- Stockholm Film Festival – www.stockholmfilmfestival.se
21, 26 and 28 Nov – IDFA Amsterdam – www.idfa.nl
22 Nov – Soundtrack Cardiff – www.soundtrackfilmfestival.com
4 Dec – Cine City Brighton – www.cine-city.co.uk

Or, while you wait for Oil City Confidential to come to Southend, listen to the original Dr Feelgood recording:

Oil City Confidential, a feature documentary film about the pub-rock band Dr Feelgood directed by Julian Temple, was premiered at London Film Festival last week.

Canvey Island, a gloomy industrial place below the sea levels and stricken by the 1953 flood, played an important role in the making of Lee Brilleaux, Wilko Johnson, the Big Figure and Sparko – ‘four men in cheap suits who crashed out of Canvey Island in the early ’70s. They sandpapered the face of rock ‘n’ roll, leaving all that came before a burnt-out ruin – four estuarine John-the-Baptists to Johnny Rotten’s anti-Christ.’ Their third album’s No 1 UK chart success took them to Europe and America where the punk movement was waking up in the late 1970’s. But unfortunately, it was on this tour, in 1977, when they broke up.

The style that Dr Feelgood offered was a welcomed break from the mainstream classic rock and they inspired many other musicians including young punks such as the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and the Clash’s Joe Strummer. Together with Blondie, the surviving members of Dr Feelgood, Jools Holland and Alison Moyet, they appear in the Oil City Confidential telling a story about ‘Canvey, 70’s England and the greatest local band in the world’.

“Pub rock is often derided as a movement that was in the thrall of rhythm and blues traditions and ‘proper’ musicianship, at best an unfashionable precursor to punk, devoid of the DIY attitude and the year-zero rhetoric. Yet both movements shared contempt for the mainstream, were reacting against the prog-rock sounds that dominated the era, and a number of punk’s prime movers were inspired by or graduated from the pub rock scene,” says Michael Hayden.

The next screening of the film is at the Leeds Film Festival on 8 November, but keep an eye for the dates of the general release!
OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL website