Wilko: Love and Death and Rock'n'Roll, Southwark Playhouse review - charismatic reincarnation of a rock legend

Resurrecting the origins of old rock stars is becoming quite the thing, After cinema’s Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan and upcoming Bruce Springsteen films, theatreland has staged Tina, A Night with Janis Joplin and MJ, and the Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon is touring again soon.

Wilko comes with a script full of Wilko zingers by Jonathan Maitland and a star turn from the actor/musician Jonathan Willis as the man who started life as John Wilkinson and found himself, in his first band, alongside two other musicians called John. So each one created a stage name, and thereafter his was indelibly Wilko. 

The joy of this piece is not so much the live music (earplugs are provided on request as it goes above 10 decibels), solidly played by the multitasking cast, which includes Georgina Field as Sparko on bass and David John as drummer Big Figure. What provides its motor is the persona of Wilko himself, a genuine original. A proud Canvey-man, who grew up on the Essex island looking out at the now demolished Shell Haven oil refinery, he was determined to forge a local version of the American roots music he loved. Why idolise Route 66, he argued, when you’ve got the A13? Or Delta blues music when the mighty Thames Estuary is right there, the starting point of the journey to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?That’s just one of the many literary references Wilko throws in, typically greeted with, a sarky “Went to college, did you?” from his Dr Feelgood co-founder, lead singer Lee Brilleaux (Jon House, pictured above with Georgina Field). Yes, he did, Newcastle University, where he “took Lit-er-a-chewer and drugs”, mostly speed. He longed to be a poet and retained a lifelong passion for learning, but despite his brilliance as a guitarist he couldn’t read music and found this problematic when he played with Ian Dury’s Blockheads. “They kept talking about crotchets and asking, 'What pedal do you use?’ I said, ‘I dunno, I’m not a driving instructor’.” It’s Wilko who brings up Wilko’s genre early on: it’s not a jukebox musical, he insists, it’s a play with music.

The chummy rapport Willis sets up with the audience turns the piece into a gig with an omniscient narrator. He tells us directly about the love of his life, Canvey-woman Irene (Georgina Fairbanks, pictured below with Johnson Willis), whom he married young. She went to see his jug band when they played the Monaco club (or rather, busked outside it) and stumped up the £129 for his first proper electric guitar, a Telecaster. His old one was like “playing a deckchair”, he tells the salesman. She was his confidante, to whom he faithfully divulged all, including his infidelity, leaving her furious. She was also his enforcer, going round to lob a brick through the window of a man who owed the band money. When she wasted away with cancer, he was clearly devastated. The mood of the piece, though, is consistently upbeat. Even after his own diagnosis of terminal cancer in 2012, Wilko is his usual robust self, seeing this death sentence as a simplifier that has made him feel more alive than he has ever done. It was also a “great career move”, he realises, especially when he survived the prognosis and went on to become cancer-free for almost a decade. A joint album with Roger Daltrey and a role as a mute psycho assassin in Game of Thrones before he died in 2022.

Is this a career worth a tribute? For reminding us of Wilko's artistry, definitely. Wilko is in no doubt: he wasn’t somebody who “ushered in" punk rock, he invented it. True to rock’n’roll type, he and Lee were often at odds and continued on separate paths after they had a row and Wilko left Dr Feelgood. Which did nothing to dent the band’s popularity, the ghost of Lee returns to tell Wilko, in the only slightly tacky part of the show, but he raises a laugh when he points out to Walk how many Dr Feelgood tribute acts there were in Spain alone – 27 at the time. 

Wilko fans will lap this production up, even though it feels too episodic at times and the live playing feels grafted on. They will probably learn nothing new but they will have the chance to sing along to their old favourites and bop in their seats when the script ends and the band goes on playing. 

Willis is a charismatic performer with a good line in playing the gaping-mouthed eccentric onstage, machine-gunning the audience with his trusty Telecaster, though he can’t rival Wilko’s virtuoso technique or his manic behaviour. It’s enjoyable, though, that he can conjure up Wilko’s unique persona, his love of looking at the world’s treasures, from the stars to the golden snow of a Japanese winter in sunlight, and stopping to marvel.

• Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ’n’ Roll at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 19 April
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