The Big Interview: Wilko Johnson

Don't want to make Wilko's story a kind of gimmick for the Blog and facebook page but I've always thought rock and mod music taught us the way to age gracefully. Maybe he's the first one to teach us to die... Just a thought.

By Chris Bond
Published on Monday 4 March 2013 00:00

I’M feeling fine apart from this bloody cancer,” Wilko Johnson says by way of an ice breaker.

In January, the former Dr Feelgood guitarist issued a statement on his Facebook page informing fans that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told by doctors that he had less than a year to live. He then announced he was going to do a farewell tour this month consisting of four dates with gigs in London, Glasgow, Bilston, near Birmingham, and Holmfirth.

It’s been a tough few months for the 65-year-old musician. “I felt this lump in my stomach and did what most blokes would do and ignored it,” he says, speaking from his home in Essex. “I hoped it would just go away but then my son visited me before Christmas, he’d come over with his son from Manila, and he dragged me to the hospital.”

He underwent a series of tests and scans. “Just before Christmas I went back in. My first question was, ‘Is it cancer?’ And they said they didn’t know.”

But when he went back, his doctor broke the grim news. “Me and my family had been theorising what it might me, we thought it would probably be a cyst. I didn’t think it would be cancer so I wasn’t expecting them to say that,” he says. TBC Here.