![]() ![]() Here, he throws his hands up, showing all of his flaws. The section where Irene dies, however, is full of raw, affecting sentiment, especially when Johnson watches his sons “sat together under the trees… I wondered what they were feeling”. Johnson and Lemmy had “trouble over a woman” in the mid-1970s, he says, in a fine section full of punk’s great and good, including John Lydon, but there’s no sign of any marital guilt. She’s the glue that holds this story together – the title an obvious nod to his grief – and she sounds a remarkable person, tolerating as she did her husband’s myriad indiscretions. There’s a woman at the heart of this tale too: Johnson’s wife, Irene, who died in 2004. “I wanted to present Dr Feelgood straight, simple and as it really was,” he writes of his group’s 1976 No 1 live album, Stupidity, at one point. ![]() When he describes the devastating Canvey Island floods of 1953 (“our house was in the sea”), his post-university jaunt to Kathmandu (“I had £60 stuffed down my Y-fronts”), and his post-Feelgood career as one of Ian Dury’s Blockheads (“somewhere along the way we picked up this character called Spartacus”), he does so without any descent into myth-making – a rare, attractive trait in rock’n’roll memoirs. ![]() Offering up a cracker of a tale, before going off on a tangent, he adds enough “anyways” and “sos” to make the more dramatic revelations relatable. Johnson writes like the Mythical Bloke in the Pub speaks. ![]()
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