This disconnection from what previously came so easily was also felt by Johnson, who went longer than he had since his twenties without gigging, and wondered if he still could, and by Davies, who doubted he’d play live again. The film shows him inspecting his studio, struggling to remember what it, and he, did. I’m struggling to come to terms with who I am.” That struggle became musical when Collins decided to play again. In the 2014 documentary The Possibilities Are Endless, which shows his personality and language submerged and scattered, Collins recalls: “It’s scary stuff, what’s happening to me. And it was layered with memories of the past, and catching glimpses of the future.” His later song “Rippin’ Up Time” was inspired by those moments.Įdwyn Collins fell even deeper into such desperate, altered states, when two major strokes sent him into a coma, aged 44, on 20 February 2005. And it seemed like we’d done all the rehearsals, and now we were in the actual film. It was like they were in a movie, and I was a camera, looking through a lens. “I didn’t lose consciousness,” he remembers. The Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies had his brush with mortality when, aged 57, he got into the lift after a radio interview in Broadcasting House on June 30 2004, and was felled by a massive stroke. His farewell gigs at London’s Koko that March were among rock’n’roll’s great moments, his guitar-playing more vividly personal than ever, as love poured from a tearfully happy crowd. But his public explanations of how this death sentence had made him shrug off his constitutional melancholy and embrace the ecstasy of being alive made him loved as he’d never been before.
It’s been a strange year.” The former Dr Feelgood guitarist had been a remarkable musician and eccentrically unique person long before he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in January 2013. “Spring 2014,” Wilko Johnson muses at the start of Temple’s documentary. As other musicians including The Kinks’ Dave Davies, and Edwyn Collins, have found, facing your end then somehow surviving it can force you to confront what your life and music is for.
But, as Julien Temple’s new film The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson shows, coming back from near-death can be a weirder and more fascinating path. The flame that burns out before it can disappoint always has an allure. Pop adores its pretty young corpses, from Jimi Hendrix to Amy Winehouse.
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