Wilko Johnson, British guitarist of Dr. Feelgood, dies

Wilko Johnson, the British guitarist who founded the incendiary 1970s blues-rock band Dr. Feelgood, recorded with singer Roger Daltrey of the Who and played the mute executioner Ilyn Payne in the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” died Nov. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, in southeastern England. He was 75.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2013 and later underwent experimental surgery. His death was announced on his social media sites.

Offstage, Mr. Johnson seemed a most unlikely rock star – a former English teacher with a specialized background in medieval literature and the Icelandic sagas, a knowledge that probably served him well when he was cast in “Game of Thrones.”

In the HBO swordplay and fantasy series, Mr. Johnson portrayed Ser Ilyn Payne, a royal executioner rendered mute after his tongue was removed on the order of the Mad King. Although Mr. Johnson had never acted before, he said he found the work to be easy.

“They said they wanted somebody really sinister who went around looking daggers at people before killing them,” he told a British reporter. “Looking daggers at people is what I do all the time, it’s like second nature to me.”

Indeed, his quartet, Dr. Feelgood, mastered a raw and uncompromising style. Its music – an amped-up, high-energy version of Chicago blues and early rock-and-roll fueled by Mr. Johnson’s hyperaggressive guitar work – anticipated the intensity of such British punk bands as the Clash and the Sex Pistols.

“The words came at you like a blowtorched Chuck Berry,” the music writer Nick Coleman once quipped.

Onstage, Mr. Johnson cultivated an eccentric appearance, pacing back and forth in time to the music with a robot-like precision. He wore ratty black Nehru jackets and always sported an unkempt pudding-bowl haircut.

His guitar technique was striking – literally. He slashed at the guitar in an up-and-down motion without picks, his right hand – the strumming hand – positioned like the claw of a crab. Early in his career, the fingers on that hand would bleed from naked flesh hitting the strings. A red pickguard hid the blood.

(Decades later, when his guitarist son Simon mimicked the style and achieved the same bloodied hand after playing, Mr. Johnson told a reporter, “I was proud to see him bleeding in the name of rock ‘n’ roll.”)