Between Takes: What the Sessions Nobody Heard Tell Us About Wilko Johnson's Creative Mind

There's a version of Wilko Johnson that the general public knows pretty well by now. The staring eyes, the machine-gun Telecaster, the coiled-spring physicality on stage — a man who seemed to play entirely on instinct, as if the music arrived fully formed from some electrical storm in his chest and went straight out through his fingers. Raw. Immediate. Unrepeatable.

But spend any time looking at what happened between the records — the studio outtakes, the soundcheck recordings that occasionally surface on bootlegs, the sessions that were quietly shelved — and a more complicated picture starts to emerge. Wilko Johnson was not simply a conduit for spontaneous energy. He was a thinker. A tinkerer. A man who could, and did, walk away from entire creative directions because they didn't feel right, even when they might have made commercial sense.

The unfinished canvas he left behind is, in its own way, just as revealing as the finished work.

The Tension at the Heart of the Recording Studio

Wilko always had an uneasy relationship with the studio. He's talked about it openly in interviews over the years — the sense that something essential got lost the moment you tried to bottle what Dr. Feelgood did live. The Canvey Island sound was built on friction and electricity and the specific chemistry of four blokes in a room playing at each other. Stick microphones around that and ask everyone to do it again, and you were already fighting against the grain.

What the outtakes from the early Feelgood sessions suggest, though, is that Wilko's response to that tension wasn't simply to bash through and hope for the best. There are takes where you can hear him pulling back, searching for something — a different entry point into a riff, a chord voicing that sits differently in the mix. The instinctive player was, in the studio at least, also a deliberate one.

Some of the most interesting fragments come from sessions around the Stupidity era and the recordings that bracketed his departure from the band. There are moments where you catch Wilko mid-experiment — trying a cleaner tone than he'd usually reach for, or sitting further back in the rhythm in a way that sounds almost restrained. These weren't directions he ultimately followed, but the fact that he explored them at all complicates the myth of the man who only knew one gear.

Songs That Almost Were

Perhaps the most tantalising aspect of the unreleased material is the collection of song fragments that never made it to a finished recording. Wilko was, by his own admission, not always the most prolific or systematic songwriter — the songs tended to arrive when they arrived, and sometimes they arrived half-dressed and never quite got sorted out.

There are a handful of these half-finished pieces that have circulated among serious collectors over the years. A couple of them bear the hallmarks of the classic Feelgood attack — choppy rhythm figures, that signature locked-in groove — but with lyrical ideas that feel more abstract, less rooted in the Thames Estuary grittiness that defined the band's public image. It's as though Wilko was occasionally reaching toward something slightly stranger, slightly more oblique, and then thought better of it.

Whether he thought better of it because the ideas genuinely weren't working, or because he sensed they'd be a harder sell to a band and a record label with specific expectations, is harder to say. Probably both, at different times. The pressures of commercial recording — the need to deliver something that fit the established Feelgood template — clearly shaped what got finished and what got left in the drawer.

The Soundcheck as Laboratory

One of the more underappreciated windows into Wilko's creative process is the soundcheck recording. These are looser, less self-conscious moments — the band warming up, trying things out, occasionally stumbling into something interesting before the paying punters come through the door.

A number of soundcheck recordings have surfaced from various points in Wilko's career, both with Feelgood and during his solo years, and they're genuinely illuminating. You hear him playing with tempo in ways he wouldn't necessarily commit to on a record — stretching a groove out, letting a riff breathe slightly differently. You hear him trying chord substitutions that don't quite fit the established version of a song, as if he's quietly questioning his own choices.

There's one circulating bootleg fragment, from somewhere in the early eighties during his solo period, where Wilko spends a good few minutes working through a progression that sounds like nothing else in his catalogue — almost modal, slower, more atmospheric. It goes nowhere in particular and presumably was never intended to. But it's a reminder that the man who looked like pure fire on stage was, in quieter moments, genuinely curious about where the music could go.

What Abandonment Tells You

Maybe the most revealing thing about any artist's unreleased work is not what they tried, but what they chose to walk away from. And Wilko walked away from quite a lot.

The cleaner, more polished production directions that appear in certain session outtakes were presumably abandoned because they felt dishonest — too smooth, too accommodating. The more experimental harmonic ideas likely got shelved because they didn't serve the song, or because Wilko's gut told him they were interesting rather than right. There's a difference, and he seemed to understand it.

What you're left with, surveying the fragments, is a portrait of a musician with strong aesthetic convictions who used the recording process — including its failures and dead ends — as a way of clarifying what he actually believed. The rawness of the finished records wasn't the result of not caring about craft. It was the result of caring about it enough to reject everything that felt like compromise.

The Unfinished Canvas

Wilko Johnson never made a concept album. He never released a sprawling double LP of experiments. He kept his public-facing work tight, direct, and purposeful. But the material that didn't make it to release tells you something important: the discipline was chosen, not accidental.

The outtakes, the abandoned sessions, the soundcheck fragments — they don't reveal a different Wilko Johnson so much as they reveal the process by which the Wilko Johnson we know was constructed. The instinct was real. The electricity was real. But so was the discernment, the willingness to try and discard, the stubborn insistence on getting it right even when right meant something most other musicians wouldn't have recognised.

For anyone serious about understanding what made him such an extraordinary guitarist and such a singular creative force, the unfinished canvas is essential viewing. Not because it shows you what he could have been, but because it shows you exactly how he became what he was.