The prospect of death unexpectedly revived his creative energies. By the middle of the decade, the band was rolling in Britain but had failed to make a mark with record buyers in the United States.In 2012, Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was told it was terminal. Johnson changed his name and joined with the other three musicians to form Dr. “So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.Īfter a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.” “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”īy the time his father died, when Mr. “But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.” So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.” Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. The older I get the more I look like him. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.” “My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry. While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.” The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s. Johnson and his bandmates - the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin - helped make Dr. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow. His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” - and removed it in an 11-hour operation. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor - Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live. His death was announced on his social media channels. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr.
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