Wilko Johnson - thoughts of death and that Worthing date that didn't happen

After all, the world might just have been forgiven for thinking that Wilko was just a little bit indestructible. He had, it seems, cheated a diagnosis of terminal cancer. However, his death was announced this morning at the age of 75.

When I interviewed him, just before the pandemic shut everything down, he was full of all the good things that were happening for him.

The year of his terminal diagnosis was the year, inevitably, when he was convinced he was going to die, but also the year that some genuinely fantastic things happened – and continued to happen. I interviewed him last in March 2020. He was just about to head to Worthing with special guest “Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure” John Otway – with Wilko well and truly back from the brink of the great beyond, he told me (in the end, he finally made it to Worthing this April)

“I had gone to the doctors and he told me I had pancreatic cancer,” Wilko recalled. “He said ‘You have got less than a year to live. There is nothing I can do.’ I had a great big lump growing on my stomach, and I thought all I had to do was to wait for it to kill me. And I thought that I had a year. And it was one of the greatest years of my life. I made that album with Roger Daltrey. Roger got in touch and said ‘Let’s make an album together’, and I said ‘We had better do it quickly then!’ I was at the end of my ten months. I said ‘Let’s get on with it’, and we did. I think it took seven days. Roger wasn’t familiar with most of the songs which were my songs. He had to learn the songs and get the whole thing done in a week.

“Everybody was working really hard, and it was just really, really enjoyable. And then when it was released, it just started selling and selling, and I think it ended up as the second-best selling album that year.

“But when we made it, I never thought I was going to see it released. I am lying in hospital, full of morphine, zonked out. They pulled half my innards out, and people were telling me that the album was doing really great.”

It was the surgery that saved him.

“I had that year with the fixed idea that I was going to die.”

And then when he met the surgeon, against all expectations, the surgeon told him he could operate, having pointed out that with the tumour Wilko had, he really ought to be been dead by then… hence the hope.

“I thought my death was absolutely certain. And then I was thinking ‘Is this man really telling me he can save my life?’ But during that time, I had to adopt a whole different way of life. I said to myself ‘I am going to die. The doctors have already told me. But I am not going to sit there wishing I wasn’t going to die.’ That didn’t matter. I decided I wasn’t going to go and seek a second opinion or write to witches or warlocks at Stonehenge. I had money in the bank. I decided I was going to spend it. I decided that in the time I had left I was going to have a good time. I started flying first class to see friends…”

And then he was on the road again – and loving it.

“In the olden days, I used to play clubs and we would be playing three times a week at that time. Now we are doing tours and there are gaps… great big gaps in between. And I don’t like the gaps. I don’t like most things, but the one thing I really do like is being on stage and playing music. That’s what music is there for. It’s for entertaining people.

“I got involved in the music business seriously in 1974, but I started to learn to play back in the mid-60s, 1965 or so, and something like the Rolling Stones, that was what all the schoolboys would get excited about. The Stones really shaped what I was wanting to do. Because of the Stones, I started listening to American music. They were really exciting. They made great records, but also it was the look of them. They looked really wild. You would see them on Ready Steady Go and it was just so exciting.”