![]() ![]() ![]() But looking at it all, I’ve had a pretty good life, and to end up making an album with Roger Daltrey, a hero to me when I was a teenager, it was like, ‘Well, you can’t complain!’ I remember working in the studio and sometimes I’d step out into the darkness and walk around and you kind of think, ‘I’m gonna die’, and you can’t believe it. But I had a year that made me think a lot. “Well, of course! That whole thing … I’d been given 10 months to live when I was diagnosed with cancer, and in fact we did the Roger album in the 11 th month! I was thinking, ‘This is it – this is the last thing I ever do.’ I didn’t expect to see the album released even. But for all the adulation of Wilko’s stagecraft and songwriting over the years, wasn’t his inner teenager a little over-awed, recording with the lead singer of The Who? The Dr Feelgood founder member, born John Wilkinson and rightly renowned for that distinctive chop-guitar style, last wowed us on record in 2014 alongside legendary front-man Roger Daltrey on Going Back Home, including various inspired reworkings of R’n’B numbers, many his own (he did after all write 20 of the songs on the Feelgoods’ first three studio albums). A second medical opinion led to pioneering life-saving surgery on a supposedly ‘inoperable’ tumour, Wilko eventually declared cancer-free, and losing none of his lust for life, stage presence or studio flair under the knife. In fact, Canvey Island’s six-string master is celebrating the release of his first LP of new material in three decades, Blow Your Mind, ‘the album I never thought I’d get to write,’ with his latest short UK tour, even though – as he put it – ‘I’m supposed to be dead!’ Five years after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, R’n’B guitar legend Wilko Johnson is still very much with us, in the form of his life, and more than happy to talk about the power of rock’n’roll and survival against all odds. ![]()
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