The animosity we felt for each other was something else. I mean, if we walked into the same room, one of us would walk out – it got that bad. "I think it was Lee and me, we just didn't get on in the end. Wilko left in 1977 when things turned bitter. I can feel everything bursting through me." Everything? "Yeah, you know. It's a beautiful thing that makes me tingle. He says this with a smile, casting a glance at his garden. I'm embracing the present." It's easy to believe him, too. The things that used to matter – bills, worrying about the future, thinking I could change the past – don't matter to me any more. "It's one of the most intense years I've had. Seems, because last year he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He seems well and in a good mood, relaxed. Now 66, Johnson grew up a mere stone's throw away, on Canvey Island in the Thames estuary: a flat, densely populated land mass surrounded by creeks and marshland, famously dominated by a colossal oil refinery, a rich source of inspiration for songs he wrote while guitarist in Canvey's cult heroes Dr Feelgood. TV stardom or a life of rock'n'roll seems far away as he sits cross-legged on his sofa at home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. To a generation born long after punk, Wilko might be better remembered as the executioner in the TV series Game of Thrones. His idiosyncratic choppy playing style is credited with influencing a legion of punk guitarists. Wilko Johnson is one of the world's most famous guitarists you've never heard of.
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