‘From a death sentence to international media celebrity, my story in all the newspapers . . . After years without a record deal to have made an album with Roger Daltrey, and that album to have become a huge bestseller; from saying ‘goodnight and goodbye’ at my final farewell gig to playing the Royal Albert Hall still alive and well; from awards ceremonies where I would be greeted warmly by a music business that I thought had long forgotten me, to Elton John, Tokyo and Breakfast TV; to being treated like a star again. None of it expected, all of it seen through the perspective of imminent death.”
There are some people who prefer to tell bad news only to their close friends and family, but, in January 2013, UK blues/rock guitarist Wilko Johnson – who had just been diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer and who had chosen not to undergo treatment by chemotherapy – informed the BBC that he had less than 12 months to live.
Within hours, the world knew. Being the rock’n’roll trouper, living up to the loose philosophy that the show must go on, Johnson set about arranging a farewell tour and a farewell album.
Looking at what he presumed was impending death in the face, destiny decreed otherwise. Following a chance encounter with a music fan who was also a cancer specialist, a second diagnosis in early 2014 revealed that Johnson actually had a less virulent and more treatable form of the disease. Within a few months, he was cancer-free, having undergone major invasive surgery to remove not only a tumour weighing 3kg, but also his pancreas, spleen, small and large intestines, and part of his stomach, as well as the removal and reconstruction of blood vessels connecting his liver.
Johnson is correct when he writes that the change in his circumstances (“this unlooked-for last-minute rescue was really too improbable for any soap opera”) was almost laughable, yet understandable when one takes into consideration that the author is a card-carrying atheist. Not even he, in all his profoundly held views of disbelief, can explain what happened, or why.
Don't You Leave Me Here: My Life is, then, the memoir that shouldn't really have been written. It is, effectively, the swift follow-up to his 2012 autobiography, Looking Back at Me (co-written with Zoë Howe), which ended some months before his initial misdiagnosis – yet his backstory is so good that it bears another spin. It also helps that in the retelling of it, Johnson delivers a crisp narrative in a more enlightened frame of mind.
Born in 1947 and raised on Canvey Island (a tract of land in the Thames Estuary that was made habitable from reclaimed marshland built by Dutch engineers in the 17th century), Johnson went through the hippie years (backpacking it to Afghanistan and India through swirls of pungent dope smoke), only to cut his musical teeth back home in the early 1970s in the proto-punk R&B act Dr Feelgood.
That band's thuggish demeanour and nonconformist wearing of thrift-shop drainpipe suits was heightened by Johnson's bug-eyed stare and gun-machine guitar work, and within a short amount of time – bolstered by Johnson's songs, such as Roxette, She Does it Right, Back in the Night and Sneakin' Suspicion – they were an international success. From the late 1970s onwards, however, Johnson's profile dipped and international success morphed into cult appeal.
It is the book’s second half that holds, perhaps, the most interest for the knowledgeable fan. At least two decades are swiftly scanned over, with Johnson lingering only on the death (in 2004) of his beloved wife, Irene, who seems to have had a significant stabilising effect on him. With his wife no longer around to temper his less healthy lifestyle habits, there’s a sense that he might not have come down to earth had not the cancer diagnosis arrived.
When bad news starts to filter through, however, Johnson pulls himself together. So begin the “days of scans and X-rays and fear” in Southend General Hospital. As a doctor reassuringly holds his hand, he remembers his hippie days on Afghanistan plains and performing, sweating, in front of crowds of thousands. “Now I lay like a frightened child squeezing a motherly hand for comfort.”
The outcome for Johnson, as we now know, is a happy one, yet a melancholic streak is rarely far from the surface.
His love for his departed wife is palpable with each frequent mention of her, and he admits the only thing that now seems to keep him on an even keel is performing and playing gigs. “If only Irene could be with me by my side,” he concludes, a much-loved yet solitary man, clearly still struggling with life’s rhythms and his own unshakable blues.
Tony Clayton-Lea writes on pop culture and arts for The Irish Times
