Johnson had experienced twists and turns before. It started with a death sentence and ended with a gold disc…” “It was an extraordinary year: so many twists and turns. “A year had gone by and I was not dead… Something strange was going on here.” The album, meanwhile, was a hit. Radical surgery – the removal of a tumour that weighed more than three kilograms, along with a considerable percentage of Johnson’s internal organs – succeeded in leaving him cancer-free. “It was as if he was telling me something I’d known all my life.” And he held out no hope whatsoever: “If there’s only so much time left, I’m not going to waste any of that time trying to find a miracle cure.” Instead, he went on a farewell tour and recorded what he assumed would be a final album. When his doctor told him in 2013 that he had terminal pancreatic cancer, he felt a deep sense of resignation. Both of these towering figures are now deceased but Johnson himself, to his own great surprise, lives on. A wiry, mercurial presence with a florid turn of phrase, Johnson spoke intensely of his hatred for his father (“Stupid, ignorant, uneducated, violent…”) and of his deep love for his childhood sweetheart and wife of forty years, Irene (“She really was an exceptional person – speak to anyone who knew her”). Emotional extremes characterised a chat between famed musician Wilko Johnson and DJ Vic Galloway – and that was before they even got to the devastating cancer diagnosis that forms the main subject of his memoir, Don’t You Leave Me Here.
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