And it was up to Wilko to come up with the original material. Depending on whose version of events you listen to he either quit (the other three) or was asked to leave. Whichever way it was, the old Dr Feelgood was no more.
Johnson went on to The Solid Senders, who released an album on Virgin, and the Wilko Johnson Band before accepting an invitation to join Ian Dury & The Blockheads in 1980. The Blockheads also provided an introduction to bass player Norman Watt-Roy, who filled that role in the reformed Wilko Johnson Band that gigged on through the eighties and nineties, recording and releasing albums on a regular basis. It wasn't, however, an exercise that involved a high profile.
There was something of a Wilko/Dr Feelgood revival around 2009, with the release of the Julien Temple-directed movie documentary Oil City Confidential and the Dr Feelgood retrospective box set All Through the City (with Wilko 1974-1977) in 2012. In between those two the Wilko footage in the Temple doco apparently landed him the role of mute executioner Ilyn Payne, in the first and second series of the HBO series Game of Thrones. The Wilko Wikipedia entry has this rather wonderful of the Johnson persona as perceived by the world at large: They said they wanted somebody really sinister who went around looking daggers at people before killing them. That made it easy. Looking daggers at people is what I do all the time, it's like second nature to me.
There's also an autobiography, Looking Back on Me, co-authored with Zoe Howe from 2012 that probably gets behind the mask (I don't have it yet, but it's on the shopping list).
And, in early 2013, the announcement that he had terminal, inoperable pancreatic cancer, the sort of thing that tends to pull people up rather sharply, but after the inevitable farewell tour and final album (recorded with The Who's Roger Daltrey) Wilko found himself in the enviable position of having outlived the initial diagnosis. After a number of unannounced live sets around his home there's a further farewell tour pencilled in for the spring of 2014, a good six months after he was supposed to have left us.
Links:
Wilko Johnson: ‘I can’t get my head around the idea that I’ve got a future’