Living life on the edge

As his new album is released, the guitarist speaks candidly about surviving cancer

Wilko Johnson, 70, faced certain death when he made his last album Going Back Home, 2014’s hit collaboration with The Who’s Roger Daltrey.

Dr Feelgood guitar legend Wilko inspired a nation with his positive attitude to enjoying what life he had left. But his terminal cancer diagnosis was reversed and a major operation removed the massive tumour on his pancreas.

“The way it all happened was crazy. If you read it in a book you wouldn’t believe it,” Wilko recalls.

The year after the op was very tough. “They’d taken out a load of my giblets. Pancreas, spleen, taken half of my stomach away.

“That’s all trying to heal inside there, you know? And it hurts.”

Last time I was in Wilko’s Southend home, he put my hand on his growing tumour. Today, his stomach is trim and the tumour’s replaced with a massive scar. “I look back on it and it’s hard to imagine... terrible pain. It’s like ‘Oh, I’m in so much pain despite the morphine’.”

Thankfully, Wilko recovered to release the album that surpasses anything from his magnificent career, the righteously titled Blow Your Mind.

It draws on recent life experience and features the greatest and longest-serving band he’s ever had.

Anthem-in-waiting Marijuana has nothing to do with supposed medical uses of the drug for cancer.

“I don’t know about the actual medical effects of it,” he says.

“But I know that certainly the hallucinogenic effects of dope are something you sometimes need at 3am in the morning. It’s really a song about waiting for death to come and I would certainly stick as much cannabis in as I could.”

Later, Wilko takes me on a walk along Canvey Island’s magnificent waterfront.

“One of the most beautiful places on Earth,” he says as we look at the mist-shrouded estuary. He points out the jetty where, at 13, he was pulled from the water on the brink of drowning.

And when he thought he was dying of cancer he was philosophical. “I thought, well I’ve had a pretty good life.”

Although a bug-eyed, mindblowing, manic machine-gunning guitar god on stage, Wilko admits since the end’s been delayed he’s sunk back into his naturally depressive mindset.

“I should be sitting here going, ‘I’m a lucky man. I’ve got reason to be glad’. I’m alive, for one thing. But I do mope about a lot. But on stage, it’s of the moment.

“To be on stage playing rock ’n’ roll, knowing you’re going to die, man, is such a kick. You just really know there’s nothing else. There’s no future. Just being there on that stage, doing that thing.”

Gavin Martin and Wilko Johnson’s Conversations On Canvey can be found online. Blow Your Mind is out now