You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Wilko Johnson - Blow Your Mind

1. Beauty
2. Blow Your Mind
3. Marijuana
4. Tell Me One More Thing
5. That's The Way I Love You
6. Low Down
7. Take It Easy
8. I Love The Way You Do
9. It Don't' Have To Give You The Blues
10. Lament
11. Say Goodbye
12. Slamming

Buy from Amazon

When Wilko Johnson wrote the songs that comprise Blow Your Mind, he didn’t believe he would ever get the chance to enter a studio and record them. Following his astonishing recovery from supposedly terminal pancreatic cancer, however, it’s more than appropriate that he has done so.

This is classic Wilko – songs like It Don’t Have To Give You The Blues could have been recorded at any time in the last half-century. His style is as abrasive as ever, at once straight-ahead and splashing and chopping all over the shop, with shades of everyone from Chris Montez to Beefheart.

But this is no pub-rock clatter – these songs are underpinned by the smoothly oiled, high-functioning rhythm section of Norman Watt-Roy (bass) and Dylan Howe (drums).

Most remarkable are songs like Marijuana, written when Wilko believed he was going to die. Yet even then he was upbeat: ‘Feels so good/Deep down in my misery.’

This album is a monument to an eccentric, indefatigable, indestructible spirit who refused

David Stubbs is a music, film, TV and football journalist. He has written for The Guardian, NME, The Wire and Uncut, and has written books on Jimi Hendrix, Eminem, Electronic Music and the footballer Charlie Nicholas.