“I am very sad to announce that Wilko has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas. Last week, Wilko broke the devastating news to his fans, stating that he had been told by doctors that his cancer of the pancreas was terminal. “The four UK dates represent an opportunity for Wilko to express his sincere thanks to his fans for all the support he has had over his long career,” said Wilko’s manager Robert Hoy. The 65-year-old musician has decided to treat his fans to some final performances after deciding not to undergo chemotherapy to fight the disease. Feelgood star Wilko Johnson has announced that he will go on a short farewell tour following his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Happy.Wilko Johnson Announces UK Farewell Tour Following Cancer Diagnosisĭr. Well, you don’t listen to your dad, do you? I can do that,” he said.īut it is the music for which Johnson will be remembered with his passion passed on to his son, Simon, who plays guitar in a band called Eight Rounds Rapid. “Basically, all I had to do was go around giving people menacing looks. Sometime after – and as a result of his manic performance in “Oil City”, he believes – he was cast in television’s “Game of Thrones”, playing executioner Ser Ilyn Payne who had his tongue ripped out. It turned out not to be his only foray into film. His eccentricity pretty much stole the limelight in “Oil City Confidential”, a documentary about Dr Feelgood and the petrochemical hub that is Canvey Island. Johnson, who is almost always just called Wilko (his name at birth was John Wilkinson), moved on from Dr Feelgood to spend some time with the Ian Drury & The Blockheads and form the Wilko Johnson Band which released its last album in 2005. “It is done with choppy chords and chopping off chords short and in doing so you can make percussive patterns with it.” He solved the problem by switching to right-hand guitar and learning all over again. Everybody at school played better than me,” he said. “When I was a schoolboy and I started learning to play, I learnt left-handed. A left-hander who plays right-handed, he employs an unusual picking and strumming style that allows him to master a staccato lead and rhythm at the same time. Johnson’s guitar style added to the aura. With a distinctly geeky pudding-bowl haircut and a manic stare, Johnson became renowned for strutting like a musical automaton in front of lead singer Lee Brilleaux, who died in 1994, also of cancer. It was a precursor of the punk music that would soon sweep across Britain’s music scene. Johnson’s initial heyday was in the early 1970s when Dr Feelgood was bashing out driving R&B rock in pubs and clubs while others such as Pink Floyd and David Bowie grabbed the headlines with prog and glitter. They’d have to push fast,” said Johnson, whose stage presence is frenetic. I’m not going to have someone pushing me around in a wheelchair. The concerts lined up for February and March depend on his health.
What he fears is not death but getting sick. What’s gone, what is and what will be, do not matter.” I suffer from depression and everything … but all that stuff whatever it was I used to worry about – it doesn’t matter. Any little thing you look at, it almost gives you a kind of childlike consciousness. “Just walking down the street, man, everything looks really intense. Johnson, 65, will happily tell you that learning last month that the end of his life is probably less than a year away has not all been negative, with an almost “euphoric” feeling keeping some of his darker traits seem totally in check. It is the kind of joke, accompanied by a devilish laugh, that makes death far easier to talk about than expected. “Why didn’t we think of this 20 years ago?” Johnson told Reuters, at home a few miles from his Canvey Island birthplace, near where the Thames estuary opens into the English Channel. One British newspaper has even affectionately dubbed him the country’s latest “national treasure”. The musician, songwriter and sometime actor has watched with amazement as a planned tour of farewell concerts sold out and interest has surged in almost anything he has touched, including the 2009 award-winning documentary “Oil City Confidential.” (Reuters) – Wilko Johnson, cult guitarist from 1970s beat band Dr Feelgood and herald of English punk rock, is on a high – even though he is dying of pancreatic cancer.