It started three or four years ago when I was at some awards ceremony. “I was in the eleventh month after initial diagnosis – a month past the deadline (he laughs out loud at the word), so to speak, when we did it. “It was just another one of those crazy things,” Wilko explains. Wilko Johnson who is set for Sage Gateshead (Image: Leif Laaksonen)īefore that news, however, there was the making of an album, Going Back Home, with The Who frontman, Roger Daltrey, which went on to be certified gold (for over100,000 sales) and entered the UK album chart at number three in the first week. “Wow! All your normal thought processes alter when you hear the word cancer, so when I walked out of there I was shaking my head and laughing.” That 1% still made me doubt – I didn’t want any false hopes – but they did more scans and he said he was certain it could be done. Mr Huguet looked at my scans and felt 99% certain that surgery would work. “Initially, I had been told, at Southend General Hospital, it was inoperable and that I had about 10 months to live. “He came to my house to see me and said he wanted me to go to see his friend, Emmanuel Huguet, at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, so I did. Instead of which I was walking around, with a big lump in my stomach, doing gigs. “Anyway, he had been thinking about me and he thought there was something strange (about my condition) because I should have been dead or certainly very, very ill. “There was this photographer called Charlie Chan and I was talking to him – I can’t remember what it was about – and it turned out that he was actually a (breast) cancer surgeon! Van Morrison was topping the bill and I hadn’t seen him for a while, said hello to him and that was nice and it was just a great day. “Well, you can’t help but go down well (laughs) and it was a pretty nice feeling. Anyway, one of the festivals was at Cornbury (in the Cotswolds) and it was quite extraordinary really because everybody there knew about my cancer and that I was dying. “I was still well and we (the band and me) thought we could book onto some festivals because I could do them at the last minute – normally, dates are booked months in advance. I didn’t want to go on stage sick or anything like that. “What happened was this, I’d done my `farewell tour’ and at that point I was just happy that my health had held up for me to finish the tour. “I never, never went in for any kind of false hope – that maybe there’s a miracle cure etc – I accepted I was going to die and just wanted to get on with it. Wilko takes up the tale: “I accepted at the beginning that I was going to die and I just wanted to make the most of the rest of my life. The subsequent diagnosis was extremely cruel – pancreatic cancer – and he was given just 10 months to live. The story started after Wilko was forced to cancel a show through illness in November 2012, shortly after I had interviewed him ahead of an appearance at the O2 Academy Newcastle. He was effusive, philosophical and candid in a long conversation peppered with his irrepressible, often self-deprecating wit as he recounted a decidedly challenging but ultimately uplifting couple of years. I spoke with Wilko recently to get the skinny on this modern-day parable. The quite remarkable and inspiring tale would have been outlandish even by soap-opera standards (or Game Of Thrones, in which he appeared) and it is no spoiler to report that his appearance at Newcastle O2 Academy on April 15 with his band reveals a positive outcome. A short while ago, the extraordinary story of Essex-born singer/guitarist (and Newcastle university graduate) Wilko Johnson occupied acres of newsprint and extended media coverage.
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