After Wilko Johnson was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago, his calm, philosophical acceptance of imminent death made him even more beloved and admired. And then the strangest thing happened: he didn’t die. So now what?

There’s no doubt that, in person, Wilko Johnson gives what you might politely call a disconcerting initial impression. The man who answers the door of his Southend home is shaven-headed, dressed entirely in black, and blessed with a face that the casting team behind Game of Thrones understandably thought might conceivably belong to a mute, psychopathic executioner. He’d cut a deeply menacing figure if it wasn’t for the fact that, the minute he opens his mouth, he reveals himself to be very good company: warm and friendly, funny and disarmingly frank.

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Still, good company or not, he doesn’t look much like a candidate for national treasurehood, or “a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman”, the latter bestowed on him by a Guardian critic a few years ago. But that’s precisely what Johnson seems to have become, thanks to what he calls “the twists and turns of the last two or three years”. He was already a cult figure in the rock world: a founder member of Canvey Island’s celebrated punk precursors Dr Feelgood, whose unwavering devotion to old-fashioned rhythm and blues and taut, explosive guitar playing had inspired everyone from Paul Weller to Joe Strummer of the Clash. Then, in early 2013, he announced that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. Promoting a farewell tour, he gave a series of interviews that provoked not an outpouring of public sympathy, but something approaching a weird envy: we should all be so lucky to face imminent death with the kind of calm, philosophical acceptance that Johnson displayed.

“I didn’t plan to feel that way about death,” he says. “That’s the way it got me. One of the ways I dealt with it was to absolutely accept it, and think: ‘Right, they’ve told me this thing is inoperable – if I’ve got 10 months to live, I just want to do it, I don’t want to spend 10 months running around after second opinions or false hopes.’ In a way, it was a kind of comfort zone, accepting that I was going to die and all the questions of mortality had been sorted out for me. I dunno, if that communicated something positive for people, that’s marvellous, but I didn’t intend to.”

Sometimes the insights and ecstasies and whatever were so intense, I’d think, ‘Man, this is almost worth it!’

The farewell tour passed off in a blur of emotionally charged gigs, tearful fans literally waving goodbye as he played Chuck Berry’s Bye Bye Johnny. “Actually, I wasn’t sad,” he shrugs. “I was thinking, ‘This is great showbusiness.’ I mean, the emotion was so powerful, and I thought: ‘What a great show.’”

And then the strangest thing happened: Wilko Johnson didn’t die. Apparently living on borrowed time, he recorded a new album, with the Who’s Roger Daltrey, convinced he wouldn’t live to see it released: Going Back Home went gold, Johnson’s biggest success since 1976, when Dr Feelgood’s live album Stupidity topped an album chart otherwise dominated by Demis Roussos. Then a fan, who happened to be a doctor, saw Johnson playing the Cornbury festival: wondering why he wasn’t “either dead or very, very ill”, he referred him to Emmanuel Huguet, an oncologist at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. Huguet announced that Johnson’s cancer was operable, albeit with only a 15% chance of his surviving the operation. After nine hours in theatre, the removal of a tumour “the size of a baby”, as well as of his pancreas, spleen, part of his stomach and intenstines, a succession of “very painful” secondary infections and a period of convalescence, Johnson was told he was cancer-free last October, just over a year and half after he’d been told he was going to die imminently.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When I was making the album with Roger, I really thought I was at the end’ … Wilko Johnson and Roger Daltrey live in London in February 2014. Photograph: Brian Rasic/Rex

Perhaps understandably, the only thing that seems to be wrong with Johnson today is an advanced case of bemusement. As anyone who has seen Julien Temple’s 2009 Dr Feelgood documentary, Oil City Confidential, knows, Johnson has quite a speaking voice, veering between a measured drawl and breathless tumble. But today, his speech comes peppered with long silences, during which he stares into the middle distance, as if trying to collect his thoughts, to work out exactly how he feels.

He is bemused by the public’s reaction to his illness and recovery: “People coming up to me in the streets and shaking my hand, like they really cared about me. It was great, pretty touching. People have told me they’ve taken inspiration or comfort from things that I’ve said, but I really I haven’t got any secrets about how to deal with death, any more than anyone else has.”

I feel like I’m parachuting back into the land of the living and looking around thinking, 'Oh well'

He is a little bemused about the film he’s supposed to be promoting, too: another Temple documentary called The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, which was intended to document his final months, but turned into a rather different film midway through. In fact, when I meet him, he hasn’t actually seen it, due to a longstanding aversion to “looking at films of myself”. “I don’t know why I agreed to it,” he shrugs. “Julien said he wanted to do it, so I said yeah, you know? He usually comes up with something pretty good, so I just let him get on with it.” It’s very good, I say. Johnson laughs. “No spoilers, but does he get better in the end?”

But most of all, he’s clearly bemused by the fact that he’s alive. “I’ve found myself back in the land of the living, and it’s kind of difficult to adjust my consciousness back from the idea that death is a terrible thing in the imminent future.” Long pause. “The idea of death, now, to me, is just as dreadful as it was before. Really! Obviously, I have to go for regular check-ups and things. Everything’s all clear so far, but it sometimes crosses my mind: ‘What if they said it’s back and there’s nothing we can do?’ I mean, it gives me the horrors. I can’t think: ‘Oh, that’s all right, I’ve done that before, I can handle it.’”

When he received his initial diagnosis, he says, he felt a kind of transcendence: “Such insights and feelings, a kind of intensity of just being that I’ve never felt since youth. Sometimes the insights and ecstasies and whatever were so intense, I’d think, ‘Man, this is almost worth it!’ Not quite, but almost.”

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But nothing similar happened when he was given the all-clear. He remembers applauding the doctor when he was told they’d got all the cancer, but nothing approaching the Blakean revelations about seeing the world in a grain of sand that he’d felt when he was told he was dying. “The thing is, getting the diagnosis, you’re sitting there and the doctor says: ‘You’ve got cancer.’ What does that take? One second to say something like that? And bang, the universe changes, nothing will ever be the same. You’re so far from everything. But there’s no corresponding thing on the other end, because on the other end, it’s a long, long road to recovery, and you’re not feeling on top of the world. The reason for all those ideas I had was that I was faced with my imminent dissolution, and you can’t fake that. You’re either really, really faced with death or you’re not. And now I’m not, I’m looking on all that like a dream, and thinking, ‘Yes, I remember that intensity.’ I hoped I’d brought something with me, but … ” Another long pause. “I feel like I’m parachuting back into the land of the living and looking around thinking, ‘Oh well.’”

He laughs again. “When I was making the album with Roger, I really thought I was at the end. I’d think, ‘Man, I can’t complain, I’ve lived to be fairly old, I’ve had a really good life and I’m making an album with Roger Daltrey! What a fantastic ending!’ It built up to this fantastic climax, and then suddenly the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet by a brilliant surgeon! It is a bit of an anticlimax in a way.”

He keeps chuckling while he says things like that, but the more he talks, the more clear it becomes how complicated his response to being cured is: he’s obviously incredibly grateful, but it isn’t as straightforward as “waving my arms in the air, going ‘I’m alive!’” After a lifelong struggle with depression, he found the illness evaporated when he thought he had 10 months to live. Now it’s back. “For instance, since coming out and recovering, oh man, I’ve started grieving for my wife, Irene, again. It’s 10 years, nearly 11 since she died, and I never, ever got over her. I just … ” He lets out a huge sigh. “I’m still in love with her. And it hurts now, to think of her. During all that year, I dunno, if you’ve got no future, you do think, ‘Well, I don’t have to sit here and think about how I’ve got to go on for years without her.’ So perhaps it receded a bit, just thinking about her every quarter of an hour instead of every minute. Now I’m recovered, I do find myself sometimes … ” His voice tails off, and there’s another mammoth sigh. “Oh man, it hurts.”

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He’s wary, too, of his illness overshadowing the rest of his life, of being more famous as “the Cancer Bloke rather than a guitar player or whatever”: after a while, during his illness, he started to turn down interviews for precisely that reason. Still, he deadpans, “the cancer business was a pretty cool career move”. By Johnson’s own admission, his solo career since leaving Dr Feelgood had always been “chaotic”: he never had a manager, “stumbled from one wrong decision to another” and recorded a scant handful of albums in 30 years, due to “a fairly lackadaisical attitude”. But his album with Daltrey went to No 2, and on his comeback tour, earlier this year, he headlined the Royal Albert Hall. “Now we’re out on the road again, we’re playing twice-as-big gigs as we ever did before. Oh yeah, it was a fabulous career move. I mean, in your old age, to suddenly regenerate your audience like that, it was great.”

In truth, Johnson’s star was already on the rise before his diagnosis, thanks to Oil City Confidential. Prior to the film’s release, Dr Feelgood had been one of the great you–had-to-be-there bands. Listening to their records, you could just about work out how striking their stark, belligerent take on rhythm and blues must have seemed in 1974 or 75 – as if some of the desperation and nihilism of the era of pub bombings and stagflation had seeped into the bones of old songs like Rollin’ and Tumblin’ or Riot in Cell Block No 9. But it was hard to really grasp the apparently life-changing effect of seeing the band on stage, to which everyone from Weller and Strummer to Bob Geldof and the KLF’s Bill Drummond has attested, until you saw the old live footage that Temple assembled.

They looked like three villains from The Sweeney who’d been forced to keep an eye on someone’s awkward nephew – Johnson, who, while the other members glowered, would fling himself around the stage, occasionally colliding with his bandmates, raising his guitar to his shoulder like a gun, his mouth perpetually open, his eyes bulging with the effects of amphetamines beneath a pudding-basin haircut: “Me and Lemmy always used to have this saying that the third day you’re up on speed is the best, because it feels like your skull is full of Rice Krispies and someone’s just poured milk into your thought processes – it’s great.”

Moreover, the latterday Johnson emerged as the film’s star turn. Far from the borderline psychopath he appeared to be on stage, or the petulant nightmare he was reputed to be off it (“at times Mr Johnson could a bit of a ballerina,” noted the late Ian Dury, after Wilko’s brief post-Feelgood tenure in the Blockheads), Johnson was revealed as a hugely engaging, entirely unaffected English eccentric: an astronomy fanatic who’d built an observatory on the roof of his otherwise unassuming terraced house, a Shakespeare- and Milton-quoting medieval scholar, fluent in, of all things, Old Icelandic, who referred to his on-stage movements as “skittering”, a word he noted also appeared in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wilko Johnson and Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood on stage in 1975. Photograph: Mick Gold/Redferns

It was in Oil City Confidental that the makers of Game of Thrones spotted him. He says he might return to the series now he’s better, but he doesn’t have any plans, musical or otherwise. “I can’t get my head around the idea that I’ve got a future. All of that was turned off back at the beginning, whenever it was. People talk about what we’re doing later this year – we’re touring supporting Status Quo, actually. But that’s all too far in the future for me to look on as something that’s really going to come. I’ve come through this adventure, I’m nearly 68. I can’t learn a new job. Just keep on playing, that’s as far as my planning goes.”

In the meantime, he is focused on trying to maintain a resolution he made while recovering from his operation. He was in pain and protesting that he wanted to go home, when he had a revelation: “I suddenly realised there were all these people, that I never even saw, looking down microscopes and all that, doing all this for me. And I kind of gave myself a good talking to.” He resolved never to complain about anything ever again: to be, as he puts it, “less of a twat”.

The thing is, he says, it’s not that easy: if there’s one thing he’s learned since he recovered, it’s that human nature isn’t as straightforward as you might hope. “I got in an awful ruck at Glastonbury,” he nods sadly. “We got there to play the gig, and the fucking security, some muppet in a yellow jacket, started searching all our bags. Like he had powers beyond the law! A policeman can’t do that!” He’s shouting now. “That made me very fucking angry, actually. I mean, Jesus Christ! I’m suddenly surrendering my civil liberties to a fucking idiot! Can you imagine what that feels like? Bleedin’ nerve! Yeah, that really, really pissed me off.” And then, as if catching sight of himself, he lowers his voice. “But I do think, actually, since my illness, I have become a lot more tolerant and easygoing,” he says. “I mean, I suffer most fools gladly.”

The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson is in cinemas from 17 July