Going Back Home dates back to a chance encounter at the 2010 awards ceremony where Johnson and Daltrey found themselves seated next to each other and bonding over a mutual admiration for Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. A collaboration was apparently mooted at the time, but seems to have been one of those things that would be tackled at some point in the future. The cancer diagnosis delivered a sense of urgency. With Johnson well enough to press ahead with the project when The Who finished a world tour the album was recorded in a week in November 2013 at Yellow Fish studio at Uckfield in East Sussex, near Daltrey's home.
Behind the guitar and vocals, Johnson's touring band of Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy and drummer Dylan Howe were aided and abetted by Mick Talbot on piano and Hammond organ and Steve Weston's harmonica
The selection of material was a pretty straightforward exercise, with Daltrey happy to have a go at singing whatever Johnson threw at him, and Wilko obliging with a selection of ten Johnson originals covering the Feelgood era and his subsequent solo career as well as a cover of Bob Dylan's Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
From the start of Going Back Home, the song Johnson co-wrote with Pirates' guitarist Mick Green for the Feelgoods' Malpractice it's familiar ground with Johnson's trademark choppy riffs intersecting with the Daltrey growl in a meat and potatoes exercise in prime British R&B. Ice on the Motorway and I Keep It to Myself follow before a glorious reading of Dylan's Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? Subtle it ain't but, boy does it rock!
Turned 21 drops things back a notch, but things gradually kick back up through Keep On Loving You, Some Kind of Hero, Sneaking Suspicion, Keep It Out of Sight and Everybody's Carrying a Gun before things wind up in an entirely appropriate manner with Johnson's ode to the Canvey Island oil refinery (All Through the City).
With eleven tracks on an album that nudges the scales at just under thirty-four and a half minutes there might be some inclined to quibble about length, but for mine it's just about right. You really don't want this stuff delivered in massive doses, keep it short and sharp, a series of short arm jabs rather than a lengthy pummelling.
You might, if you're inclined to be picky, take issue with the recording too. It's a crystal-clear rendering of Johnson's stabbed chords. Muddy might have been better, but this is a high-definition portrait, entirely appropriate when you're talking what amounts to an epitaph.
It's also entirely appropriate that the album appears on Chess, the former home of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. One suspects the only thing that could have enhanced a magnificently worthy collaboration would have been to record it in Chicago. On the other hand, while 2120 South Michigan is still there and, apparently, still operational, you can't beat the convenience of operating close to home in an environment where you're not working with the ghosts of blues men past looking over your shoulder. In the end, given the circumstances, it's all about convenience, and the only thing that matters, in the end, is what is delivered.
On that basis Going Back Home is a fitting way to wind up a remarkable career, a project that underlines the remarkable and often forgotten legacy of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates who were, after all, the inspiration behind The Who, Dr. Feelgood and so many others.