Former Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson diagnosed with terminal cancer
Former Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson has revealed that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
His manager Robert Hoy used the Wilko Johnson Facebook page to make the announcement earlier today, confirming that the musician has decided not to seek treatment.
He wrote: "I am very sad to announce that Wilko has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas. He has chosen not to receive any chemotherapy. He is currently in good spirits, is not yet suffering any physical effects and can expect to enjoy at least another few months of reasonable health and activity."
Continuing, the manager confirmed that Johnson plans to maintain an active work schedule. Hoy added: "He has just set off on a trip to Japan; on his return we plan to complete a new CD, make a short tour of France, then give a series of farewell gigs in the UK. There is also a live DVD in the pipeline, filmed on the last UK tour."
Johnson, 65, played lead guitar with Dr Feelgood from the band's formation in 1971 until he left in 1977. During his stint, the band scored a Number One album with their 1976 live LP 'Stupidity'. After departing, Johnson played with The Blockheads for a brief spell in 1980 and released a succession of albums with The Wilko Johnson Band.
More recently he appeared as an actor in the hit HBO show Game Of Thrones. His autobiography Looking Back At Me was published in June 2012.
Former Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson has announced details of four farewell concerts in the UK.
The short run of dates comes following the news that Johnson has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will not be seeking treatment for the illness. It is understood that Johnson decided against chemotherapy so he can continue to play shows for as long as possible.
Discussing the final set of gigs, which will take place in March, Johnson's manager, Robert Hoy, said: "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."
Wilko Johnson will play:
London, Koko (March 6) Bilston Robin 2 (7) Holmfirth Picturedrome (8) Glasgow O2 ABC (9)
Tickets for all dates go on sale from Monday, January 21.
Former Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson has announced details of an extra farewell concert in London due to popular demand.
The new show is set to take place on March 10 at KOKO. The date is in addition to four previously announced, sold out shows, which followed news that Johnson had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will not be seeking treatment for the illness.
Johnson reportedly decided against chemotherapy so he can continue to play shows for as long as possible.
Discussing the final set of gigs, Johnson's manager, Robert Hoy, said that shows "represent an opportunity for Wilko to express his sincere thanks to his fans for all the support he has had over his long career."
Wilko Johnson will play:
London KOKO (March 6) Bilston Robin 2 (7) Holmfirth Picturedrome (8) Glasgow O2 ABC (9) London KOKO (10)
Wilko Johnson: 'Man, it makes you feel alive to be told you’re dying’
Wilko Johnson is dying. There is no escape, and he knows it.
“I asked how long it would be before the cancer really hit me and the doctors said six months or so,” he says. “My six months are up.”
The lump in his stomach is a sign of cancer of the pancreas. There is nothing the doctors can do to save him. He may get very sick any day now. He may not survive the summer.
But Wilko loves life. “Man, it makes you feel alive to be told that you’re going to die. How many years ago did I last feel like that? The ecstasy of youth, the joy of existence. I have felt like that again.”
So in defiance of his sickness, and against the odds, Wilko will come out of retirement to go on stage for at least one more time, at the Cornbury Festival in Oxfordshire a week today.
He’s a poet, a painter, an astronomer and an actor, but Wilko also happens to be one of the great British rock guitarists, acknowledged by his peers as among the most influential.
A founding member of the band Dr Feelgood, he is known for his machine-gun guitar sound and wild-eyed, manic intensity on stage. “I can’t do any more shows in my own right, you know? But it’s OK to make an appearance at a festival, because if I’m not fit to play, the show will still go on,” he says.
Tall and angular, he sits on his sofa like a great big spider. The Bible-black suit and shirt make his long fingers and shaven head all the more startling.
You would not guess he is 65, but he does seem edgy and even a little frail today.
“I’ve had a couple of days of not feeling too clever. It’s all touch and go. I’ve just got to hope that I’m healthy. Each day, I wake up thinking: 'Am I all right?’ ”
This will be a completely unexpected encore. He has already said goodbye once, on a sell-out farewell tour earlier this year. Fans – including the likes of Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin – were left in tears as he finished with the old song Johnny B Goode.
Wilko, whose real name is John Wilkinson, remembers playing it in Japan, a country he loves. “You’re waving goodbye. You look down at all these Japanese people with tears streaming down their faces, singing back at you. 'Bye bye, Johnny.’ ”
But he is no sentimentalist. “It didn’t give me a lump in the throat at all. I thought, 'What a great bit of show-business.’”
I must look a bit shocked, because he laughs. “The thing is, a lot of people were sad, but I was finding out something I hadn’t really known: that people feel a personal affection for me.”
This is a story that goes beyond music. A lot of people who had never heard of Wilko were deeply touched when he went on BBC Breakfast in February to talk about his illness.
Looking like a gangster, he broke through the mediocrity of daytime TV with a burst of pure, undiluted humanity.
Arms wide open and eyes burning, he told how his death sentence had given him a sudden, shocking appreciation of the joys of living.
“When I walked out of the hospital into the sunshine, suddenly I felt this elation. I just felt so alive. Everything was tingling. By the time I got home, I was almost euphoric.”
Did it last? That’s what I want to know, as we sit on huge black leather sofas at his home in Essex, close to the estuary on whose banks he grew up. Wilko smiles.
“Anybody who walked around like that for any great length of time would be gaga,” he says. “I am a miserable so-and-so, I have been all my life, but I felt so high. I thought it was a kind of shock reaction, but it went on for weeks. It was sometimes so good, I almost felt glad it was happening.”
Then it faded? “I’m not walking around with a blissed-out smile on my face. Gradually, you come to accept the situation and return to a normal consciousness. I have never plunged into despair about this. I’ve had a good life and made it to my old age pension, who wants to grasp for more?
“Everybody lives with the fear of their own mortality, but for me that question is answered. It’s not an issue to puzzle over any longer.”
I stumble over a question about his symptoms, but he is frank. “Nausea and a general feeling of malaise. From head to foot, you just feel ill. Very weak. Difficult to sleep,” he says.
“I know I am a complete wimp when it comes to illness. Man flu is as much as I can handle. These feelings are something I am not used to. It’s all unknown territory to me now.”
He has, however, seen it from the other side. His mother died of cancer. So did Lee Brilleaux, the singer and co-founding member of Dr Feelgood. Wilko also lost his wife Irene to cancer, nine years ago.
They had fallen in love as teenagers, walking along the sea wall on Canvey Island and laying down in the long grass together, as he describes in one of his best songs, Paradise.
But the song ends with her gone, and Wilko singing: “In the lonely night time, I call your name. My tears are falling. I ain’t ashamed. I ain’t ashamed.”
The song continues: “I can’t go with you. I just can’t go.”
Now he has no choice. What does he think will happen to him when he dies? “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe that consciousness survives death. I am going back to the state I was in for billions of years after the Big Bang, until suddenly in 1947 [the year of his birth] it was, 'Woah, here we go!’ I’ve had 13 billion years of practice. I think I can hack it.”
So he has no real hope of reunion with Irene? “No, I don’t. We were together for 40 years. She was an extraordinary person.”
There’s a pause, then he says: “It did allow me to see what it is like to see somebody you love with this thing, to watch them go. Heartbreaking. You’re so helpless. You think: 'Stop the clocks!’ So I know what it is like for my family and friends to be looking in on me, with the feeling that there is nothing to be done. It is probably worse for them.”
Wilko and Irene were both born on Canvey Island. He was only five but still has a vivid memory of the great flood of 1953, which claimed the lives of 58 people.
“I can remember looking out of the window of our bungalow. Normally, you could see open fields. Instead of that, it was the sea. Waves coming in towards us. It was dreamlike and surreal.”
Their home was destroyed. “If you’re in the estuary, man, it’s not water, it’s sludge.”
As a teenager he went away to study literature at Newcastle University, where he learnt to read Icelandic sagas in their original language. But Essex – and Irene – pulled him back.
Wilko was going to be a teacher, but after less than a year he abandoned that career to play full-time with Dr Feelgood. As their songwriter, he created a tough glamour out of the oil refineries, wide skies and slow waters of the estuary – or the Thames Delta as he half-jokingly called it.
The Feelgoods were hard, aggressive, the precursors to punk. The Sex Pistols and the Clash loved them. Paul Weller says his generation learned to play by copying Wilko’s choppy style.
They made four albums before Wilko and Lee fell out. Nobody remembers why. The guitarist played on, touring year after year with his own band, nurturing a modest following of his own.
“I resigned myself to that, it was a good way of making a living. Then Julien Temple came along.”
The film director made a documentary film called Oil City Confidential, which led to a resurgence of interest in the band and a re-evaluation of their influence. “He had this feeling that Dr Feelgood had been overlooked. He compensated for that.”
Wilko’s startling screen presence attracted the producers of an American television series, which turned out to be the blockbuster Game of Thrones. They asked him to play an executioner.
“I have this peach of a part. My character’s tongue has been cut out, so I don’t have to learn any lines. All I have to do is stand around giving people dirty looks. Well yeah, I can do that. Been doing it for years…” His eyes bulge. The stare makes me turn away. He shrugs.
He gets fan mail, but Hollywood has not come calling. So Wilko still lives close to Canvey Island, in an ordinary, scruffy Essex street, a bit like the ones I grew up in myself.
I know the cult of toughness, the hostility towards intelligence that must have been part of his childhood, as it was mine. Still, he faced that down, too, to become a man whose home is decorated with Japanese screen prints, his own paintings, a chess set with timers, and books on Magritte, the Renaissance and the cosmos. It’s an ordinary house, apart from the anarchist graffiti in the front garden and the secret dome and telescope in the loft.
“I was talking to my son the other night, telling him a few things about the house, saying: 'Oh man, there’s some damp upstairs, you’ve got to get that seen to.’ Suddenly, I realise he’s sitting there [and he mimes floods of tears on his son’s cheeks]. He’s getting really upset, because I’m talking about when I’m gone.”
He has two sons, one of whom lives in the Philippines. “I was sitting there on Skype the other day with my grandson, Dylan. He’s just learning to talk. He called me Granddad. I never thought I would see that…”
There’s a rim of tears in his own eyes now. His way of coping is to play on. There are other possible festival dates after Cornbury, but nobody knows if he will make them, or this one.
“I always had this idea that when I grew old I would be sitting in an Oxford college room with the sun slanting through the mullioned windows, I would be reading medieval poetry and I would be wise,” he says. “The nearer I got to being old, the more I realised the wisdom wasn’t coming. So I’m just as confused as ever. Now I won’t actually grow either old or wise, so…”
Wilko Johnson pulls a stage grin and plays a chord on his guitar. Long may it ring.
Wilko Johnson: 'I'm supposed to be dead' - music hero defies terminal cancer diagnosis to take Classic Rock award
"I’m supposed to be dead now,” admits Wilko Johnson, the guitarist who was told that he may not survive past October after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
But on Thursday night Johnson was hailed as a musical innovator by an audience of his rock peers as he prepares to record a final album with Roger Daltrey.
Since being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, the former Dr Feelgood guitarist, 66, says he has never felt more “vividly alive”. Johnson refused chemotherapy treatment so that he would have the strength to complete a “farewell tour” in Spring, where he basked in the adoration of fans.
He continues to perform concerts as his health permits. But the Canvey Island musician, who had previously enjoyed cult status, is now gaining widespread recognition for his choppy R&B guitar style which influenced a generation of axe-wielders from punk to the present day.
Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, presented Johnson with the Innovator award at the Classic Rock magazine Roll of Honour held at the London Roundhouse, in front of an audience including Black Sabbath, Ray Davies and Manic Street Preachers.
Johnson told The Independent: “It’s very gratifying to be given an award by Jimmy Page because I’ve always admired him as one of Britain’s great guitarists. I’ve received one or two marks of recognition recently. I suppose people want to get them in while I can.”
The musician said he was currently “feeling fine” and jokes that the farewell tour could get “embarrassing” if it extends into next year. “When I was diagnosed they gave me ten months. But they can’t cure this thing so the illness will take its inexorable toll. I have gone past their deadline but it is ultimately going to kill me. So I want to get as much done now as I can.”
Ironically, since the diagnosis, the Essex-based artist has enjoyed “the most extraordinary year.” He said: “It certainly makes you realise you are alive, it alters your whole perspective. I’m looking outside at the leaves and the sun, thinking ‘this is pretty good’. Let’s see how much I’ve got left of it.”
Johnson, who stands by his decision to decline chemotherapy (“I’d rather make the most of the time I’ve got”), is recording a final album with Daltrey, the Who singer, which is expected to mix R&B classics with originals. He hopes Paul Weller will contribute but doesn’t want to be submerged under well-wishing guest stars.
Scott Rowley, Classic Rock Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, said: “Wilko is now recognised as one of the quintessential English guitar heroes. Dr Feelgood’s confrontational attitude and his blues guitar style, which rejected the indulgence of prog rock, led directly to punk. Wilko was the precursor to Johnny Rotten’s bulging eyeball stare and Paul Weller has acknowledged the debt that the Jam owed to him.”
Rowley added: “It’s inspiring the way that Wilko has dealt with his illness He was told he only had until October but he says that oddly this has been the best year of his life. So much goodwill has come his way.”
The awards are coming thick and fast for Johnson, who also enjoyed an unlikely screen career playing the executioner in the television series Game of Thrones. Last weekend he was honoured with the Lifetime Contribution prize at the 2013 European Blues Awards.
When Sir Elton John was declared a “genius” at the GQ Awards in September he promptly gave his prize away to Johnson, telling him “You're the f****** genius here. He's too busy living life to think about f****** dying.”
Johnson’s “farewell tour” continues with a show in Swindon on Thursday and a guest appearance with saxophonist Gilad Atzmon at the London Jazz Festival next week. “I’ve got some shows booked for December but I can’t plan further ahead,” he says.
Wilko Johnson has pancreatic tumour removed: Dr Feelgood and Game of Thrones star ‘recovering’ after ‘successful’ operation
Wilko Johnson is recovering after undergoing pioneering surgery to remove a pancreatic tumour.
The Dr Feelgood guitarist’s management confirmed that the musician would likely be “out of action” for the foreseeable future following the operation, but confirmed that it had been successful.
"Wilko is recovering following a nine-hour operation on Wednesday in which doctors successfully removed a pancreatic tumour,” a statement from manager Lisa Climie, posted on his official Facebook page today (2 May), read.
"The head of the medical team treating Wilko said that they were happy with his condition.
"Wilko will stay under very close observation for the next few days. Although cautiously optimistic, the team have to stress that it is very early days yet.
"The family thank everyone for their good wishes and ask for some privacy at this time so they can support Wilko with his recovery in peace."
The star, who also played the role of mute executioner Ilyn Payne in Game of Thrones, was given just months to live after he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in January 2013.
Refusing to undergo chemotherapy, he continued to perform and record, scoring a top three album, Going Back Home, and collaborating with The Who’s Roger Daltrey.
However it had become apparent in recent months that the cancer was not as aggressive as first thought. Without intervention, he would still have died.
After seeking further advice, Johnson underwent the complex operation, performed at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.
In an interview with GQ before he went in for the procedure, he said: "There is a small chance of dying, but that's nothing. Because for over a year I have been living with a 100 per cent chance of dying."
He said he was still coming to terms with the fact his life could be saved: "It’s unreal to me. I'm going to have to readjust my mind as well as my body."
We're sure you will be as delighted as we are that after making excellent progress at Addenbrooke's over the last few weeks, Wilko is now convalescing back at his home. Naturally after such an extensive procedure, Wilko is extremely tired, and it will take him some time to recuperate, so he asks that you respect his privacy, but we had to share this incredibly positive news. On behalf of Wilko and his family, another huge thank you for your magnificent support over recent months - it really means a great deal to Wilko - and please join us in thanking the staff at Addenbrooke's for everything they have achieved in some extremely difficult circumstances.
Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot], Google [Bot] and 2 guests
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot post attachments in this forum