Timothy Leary.” The dry wit, the storied life, the literary elegance and the expressive embrace of existence are all evident in a single sentence.
ECSTACY OF WILKO JOHNSON FULL
“Look at Blake,” he says at one point, “he was seeing trees full of angels in Peckham long before Dr. Fortunately, Johnson himself is more than enough compensation. On other occasions they are too on-the-nose or, in some instances, seem to run counter-intuitive to what is being said. Sometimes, the chosen visuals perfectly capture, or even enhance, the beauty of his musing.
ECSTACY OF WILKO JOHNSON ARCHIVE
This is the case throughout the film which overlays various snippets of archive footage, or film sequences, on top of Johnson’s soliloquy. On it’s most basic level the allegory makes sense, but interrogated a little further – in the context of Johnson’s outlook and his wider beliefs – it doesn’t quite fit as well.
The chess game in being played against Temple clad in a long black robe – although a few inserts suggest that Johnson is playing himself – in an obvious reference to Bergman’s Seventh Seal (1957). Which in part highlights one of the slightly jarring aspects of Temple’s film. There are darker melancholic days, he confides to Temple who sits across a chessboard from him on the Canvey Island beachfront.īut on the whole, his positivity is wondrous to behold – he seems to have been freed from the anxiety of mortality looming like a shadow, rather than consumed by it. And yet, he did not let that weigh him down. The profundity of life seemed to reveal itself to Johnson at the precise moment that the death knell sounded. He poetically describes the walk down the high street from the doctor’s surgery – it was like the very paving stones were shimmering. When he learned in 2012 that he only had ten months to live, the kinds of things running through his head transformed instantaneously. Quotes from the likes of Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare pass his lips with no hint of pretension, merely a recollection of the best way he has at his disposal to express his thoughts. His lived-in Essex drawl and intense gaze might seem more apt for the manic jerky energy of his on-stage persona, but off it he is an erudite and deeply contemplative man. Ecstasy indeed.And boy, can Wilko Johnson speak. You also get extras amounting to 90-plus minutes.
ECSTACY OF WILKO JOHNSON MOVIE
You may have seen this film on BBC TV and you’ll doubtless want to revisit it if you were interested enough to watch it: there’s no music movie like it. Death made Wilko somehow more alive, and his eventual reprieve seemed mystifying when it was announced, though it is more a miracle of medicine and logic than divine intervention. Wilko does sound suitably baffled by what’s happening to him, as well he might, and turns to literature to reach for at least some understanding. Temple portrays this with some skill you never lose sympathy for its subject, who somehow sounds down to earth (or mud he is from Canvey) even when he’s musing on cosmic issues. There are the biographical details and the feelings of loyalty and nostalgia he evokes, but much of this slow, cerebral film is Wilko coming to terms with his finite place in an infinite universe: I kid you not. What we didn’t know back then was that Wilko is a man with a literary bent and that comes through loud and clear in Julien Temple’s portrait of a man on the brink of oblivion somehow escaping death’s sickle.
But there is a faint connection with the old pub heroes: Wilko would have been aware of Johnny Kidd’s version of Ben E King’s Ecstasy.
Anyone who saw The Feelgoods in the mid-70s would not have bet the council house on a movie being made about their bug-eyed gaping guitarist with a title like this.
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