In the same year, Wilko and biographer Zoë Howe released the book ‘ Wilko Johnson: Looking Back At Me’, a coffee-table book of Wilko’s favourite memories and images. His career took another twist in 2010, when he was offered an acting part in the hit series Game of Thrones, playing the role of mute executioner Ilyn Payne. But it was when Julien Temple’s award winning Oil City Confidential came out in 2009, with Wilko emerging as the film’s star, that the world once again sat up and paid attention to his extraordinary talent. His influence was felt in bands up and down the country, and later in the emergent punk revolution (Joe Strummer of the Clash bought a Tele after seeing Wilko play).įeelgood had four successful albums in Wilko’s time, then followed a busy creative period playing in an early incarnation of the Wilko Johnson Band, the Solid Senders, before he joined Ian Dury’s band The Blockheads, in 1980.Īll through the ’80s, ’90s and into the new millennium he continued to gig in the UK, Europe and Japan. With this economic sound, coupled with that black-suited, scowling look, and the yards he covered across the stage pausing only to twist the guitar lead out from under his feet, Wilko became one of the guitar heroes of the era. This allows for chords and lead to be played at the same time, giving a fluency and a distinctive sound very unlike the cleaner swat of a pick. Heavily influenced by legendary guitarist Mick Green from ’60s rockers Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Wilko employs a finger-style, chop-chord strumming action (the ‘stab’, as he describes it). Throughout the mid-70s, Wilko duck-walked his way across countless stages and venues in the UK with Dr Feelgood in the vanguard of the pub rock movement, performing the gutsy down-to-earth rock and roll that was a welcome antidote to prog-rock. But no, Wilko was lured into music by the dark magic spun by his first Telecaster, bought from a music store in Southend, Essex, soon after becoming the strutting, grimacing, six-string rhythmic powerhouse behind Lee Brilleaux in Dr Feelgood. The man from Canvey Island, who studied English at Newcastle University before doing a bit of travelling, could have been a retired teacher by now, sucking on a pipe and whittling away at his pension. “Man, there’s nothing like being told you’re dying to make you feel alive.” In 2013, Wilko announced that, thanks to a second opinion and subsequent life-saving surgery, he was cancer-free. But despite the doctors’ worst predictions he continued to perform and present himself with vigour and a new zest for life. in 1979 with the glammy garage-rocker “Milk and Alcohol.‘I’m supposed to be dead!’ So said Wilko in a recent interview, having been diagnosed in late 2012 with terminal pancreatic cancer. After contracting several minor ailments, according to The Telegraph, the group’s frontman Lee Brilleaux told him – in way that reflects a far less politically correct time – “You’ve always got the gyp.” Mayo played on six of the band’s album, and his tenure in the group included a Top 10 single in the U.K. It was in that group that he got his nickname. Feelgood, with whom he played for the next four years. He eventually joined the blues group White Mule in 1969. Mayo was first inspired to pick up his instrument after hearing “Apache” by the Shadows, according to The Bath Chronicle, a newspaper local to where he lived. Where Do the Yardbirds Rank on Our Greatest Artists List? Johnson, who was planning a farewell tour earlier this year, announced Mayo’s death today on his Facebook page. Later, he served a stint with the Yardbirds from 1996 to 2004. No cause of death has been announced.īorn John Phillip Cawthra, Mayo came to prominence in the late Seventies, when he replaced Wilko Johnson in Dr. Feelgood and a member of a latter-day Yardbirds lineup, died this morning. Gypie Mayo, the former guitarist for British pub rockers Dr.
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