Cult Musician Dying: Wilko Johnson Has Terminal Cancer, Feels “So Alive”

Wilko Johnson, a founding member of the British punk movement of the 1970s, is dying of pancreatic cancer.

Johnson, 65, rose to fame as lead guitarist in the pub rock band Dr Feelgood, and gained a reputation for his eccentricity, his “distinctly geeky pudding-bowl haircut and a manic stare,” says Reuters’ Jeremy Gaunt. Johnson later “stole the limelight” in a 2009 documentary about Dr Feelgood, Oil City Confidential.

More recently, he played Ser Ilyn Payne in Game of Thrones, an executioner who had his tongue ripped out. “Basically, all I had to do was go around giving people menacing looks,” Johnson told Reuters. “I can do that.”

Now, Johnson likely has less than a year to live, but as he told Reuters, dying has given him a fresh outlook on life.

“It makes you feel so alive,” he said. “Just walking down the street, man, everything looks really intense…I’m a miserable so-and-so. I suffer from depression and everything…But all that stuff whatever it was I used to worry about -- it doesn’t matter. What’s gone, what is and what will be, do not matter.”

Johnson refused chemotherapy treatment, reports the Associated Press, and “has responded to his diagnosis with surge of creativity, playing gigs in Japan and planning a goodbye tour of Britain,” says the AP’s Jill Lawless. “He’s even going back into the studio to record a new album.”

Here’s a video of a 1975 Dr Feelgood performance of “Riot in Cell Block No. 9":