"There is a small chance of dying," Wilko Johnson told me in advance of the major operation he had this Wednesday. "But that's nothing. Because for over a year I have been living with a 100 per cent chance of dying."
Wilko Johnson was expecting to be dead and buried by now. But just before he went into the operating theatre of Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, he spoke to me about the surgery that might save his life. "I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of 2012," recalls the former Dr Feelgood guitarist, 66. "Inoperable. I had ten months to live. Chemotherapy could perhaps stretch it to another couple of months." He laughs so hard that he almost spills his double espresso. "It was not difficult to decide I didn't want this chemotherapy..."
Wilko Johnson had resigned himself to death. But now, in an extraordinary twist of fate, he has had an operation that removed his football-size tumour, as well as his entire pancreas, his spleen, part of his stomach, parts of both his small and large intestines, and involved the removal and reconstruction of blood vessels relating to the liver.
It is an operation so complex that it does not even have a name.
'deadline', then it is you."But October had come and gone," he grins (he laughs an awful lot when the subject is his cancer), "and a friend of mine - who is both a photographer and a cancer doctor - became curious as to why I wasn't dead. And why I wasn't even sick."
What was discovered in the last few weeks is that Wilko's pancreatic cancer is a neuroendocrine tumour - a rare kind of malignancy, one that is less aggressive than the usual kind of pancreatic cancer. Without intervention it still kills you, just not as quickly. Now, in this extraordinary development, Wilko has undergone an unprecedented operation that is nothing less than a reprieve of a death sentence. "It's unreal to me," he told me in a quiet corner of the Langham Hotel in London, opposite BBC Broadcasting House. "I'm going to have to readjust my mind as well as my body.
My reaction to the diagnosis of terminal cancer was euphoria. The doctor was sitting there drawing on his diagram - yes, you have this mass and unfortunately we can't operate on it. You've got cancer. You're going to die. I was absolutely calm. Not a flutter.
And he gave me a few more details and I sat there nodding. And when I walked home - it was January, a beautiful winter's day - I remember looking up at the trees against the sky and feeling this rush - I'm alive. It was so intense!" "Walking along in a reverie - I can't remember such joy in existing since my time of youth. By the time I got home I was high - to the extent that I wondered if it was some kind of shock reaction, that in a couple of hours I was going to come crashing down. And I didn't. It just carried on like that. I never Googled pancreatic cancer. I didn't want to struggle against it. I didn't want to fight it. I never clung to false hopes. I didn't want to ruin my last few months of life. I just felt - I'm alive, I'm alive. Death, where is thy sting?"
It is fair to say that nobody ever had a farewell tour quite like Wilko Johnson. There has been much great music - all that uncut Essex delta blues that he does so brilliantly. There have been raucous gigs at home and abroad (five trips to his beloved Japan). There was a big hit album, Going Back Home, banged out with The Who's Roger Daltrey in just eight days in what Wilko calls, "extra time" (the days and months after the doctor's told him he would be dead). A 70-year-old man and a guy dying of cancer, and nobody in the charts is making music that sounds more alive.
And above and beyond it all, there was the way that Wilko Johnson faced the (he believed) total certainty of his own death.
Wilko confronted death with a joyous love of life, and with a rhapsodic appreciation of every living moment.
From Canvey Island, Essex, to Kyoto, Japan, Wilko lived that final blissed-out year of his life the way that we should all live every day.
The first time I saw Wilko Johnson - juddering across the stage with Dr Feelgood in 1977, holding his Fender like a machine gun, white face, black suit, chopping out riffs that felt like an electric shock - he seemed more alive than anyone I had ever seen.
And the last time I saw Wilko Johnson - late Sunday afternoon, that incredible ageless face creased with laughter as he patted the massive tumour in his stomach as if it was a basketball - he also seemed more alive than anyone I have ever seen. "The tumour got bigger," he said, patting his stomach like a man who just had a good meal. "It went from a walnut to a beer gut. And it makes it difficult to play guitar because my guitar rocks on it. And as the tumour gets bigger, it made my guitar stick out more and more..."
There are generations of us who love Wilko because he has been an inspiration - from the way he made music, to the way he lived his life, and to the way he faced his death. There is no self-pity in the man. He is a self-pity free zone.
That is not the same as saying that there is no emotion in him. The ice-cold glare, the copyrighted thousand-yard stare that landed him his only acting role as Ilyn Payne, the mute executioner in HBO's Game of Thrones (they didn't audition anyone else), is not the real Wilko. That stare is something that he puts on for showbiz. He is a warm, funny human being, prone to laughter, happy to give you a hug, polite even to nerds who want a plastic bag full of Game of Thrones memorabilia signed for eBay.
The only time he is overwhelmed by emotion is when he speaks of others: the mother who died of cancer when he was young, the grandson he did not think he would see grow up and above all, his beloved wife Irene, whom he lost to cancer ten years ago. "She said - we've got to be strong." He shakes his head, turns his face away, the wound still raw a decade later. "And I'm not strong, man. She was the strong one. She became so thin. You see someone you love being taken away by this monster..."
He shakes his head, swallows hard. "I came home one day and saw her - and she was digging the garden...digging the garden."
It's when he speaks of his loved ones, living and dead, that the tears come, and the voice breaks, and he struggles for control. But Wilko Johnson does not cry for himself.
Now he faces an operation so major that at some point the surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, anaesthetists and nurses will all have to leave him on the operating table while they go for lunch. "Unless they have their salami sandwiches there," laughs Wilko, this man who is scheduled to lose a major part of his insides. And although laughter is how he confronts much of his fate, there is no disguising that he is facing surgery of epic proportions. "Of course I'm apprehensive," he says. "But I'm pretty tough - when I consider the kind of abuse that I have subjected my body to over the years. And I'm still here."
He is talking to me now because, while optimism is high, in truth nobody knows how the surgery will go, and how he will feel in the aftermath. Much of his insides will be gone, he will become diabetic overnight and it will be weeks before he can even think of going home.
The road to recovery will be long and hard. All shows and appearances will sadly have to be cancelled. Sorry for any disappointment, folks, but everything is coming out of Wilko Johnson's diary and nothing will be going in for quite a while. "I've given up on goodbyes," he smiles. "See you. Maybe."
And he laughs.
