Review of Oil City Confidential (2009) by Mike M — 25 Jan 2010

Once again, you're struck by Temple's tremendous flair as a collagist: the film's imagery extends from home videos and archive performance footage (revealing the band's charismatic bassist Wilko Johnson as a ringer for "Peep Show"'s Super Hans) to clips from spiv movies, Alexei Sayle doing "'Ullo John, Got A New Motor?", unlikely but true newspaper headlines ("Canvey Island: Scenario for a Holocaust"), Tom Brown's Schooldays, and an LSD-inspired vision of a cat made from a loaf of bread.

Punk may be dead, but its DIY, magpie-like scrapbook ethos lives on in Temple's filmmaking. The cumulative weight of this imagery doesn't quite approach that of his Glastonbury or Strummer docs; the film rocks long and loud, but never especially deep, and perhaps that's as it should be.

No-one - save the most diehard Feelgood fan - is claiming this as a crucial chapter in rock history: indeed, the group's one lasting hit, 1979's "Milk and Alcohol", arrived almost as an afterthought once Johnson - ironically, the Feelgoods' chief songwriter, and their main attraction live - had quit.

Nonetheless, it's an affectionate and suitably energetic tribute to a gang of outlaws who came out of nowhere, put on a hell of a show, and then receded into the fog lingering over the Thames Estuary.