GBlog

Kurz zum Hintergrund: 2012 hat Wilko Johnson die Diagnose bekommen: unheilbarer Schilddrüsenkrebs: Chemo? Nee, hat Wilko gesagt, dann mach ich lieber eine große letzte Tournee. Er spielt immer noch.
[- Solch eine Möglichkeit wünschte ich mir, wenn ich sie bräuchte (- aber als Drummer wird mich keiner mehr haben wollen ...). Dann aber wenigstens das Motto: 'Too busy living life to think about fucking dying!' Mal sehen ...]

A film directed by Julien Temple that confronts our worst nightmares of impending death, confounding expectations and turning them upside down. It tells the extraordinary, yet universal story of legendary musician Wilko Johnson, who diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and given a few months to live, managed to accept his fate with uplifting positivity and defy the death sentence handed down to him.

“Bloody hell, man, I’m supposed to be dead!” Following the recent London premiere of Julien Temple’s latest kaleidoscopic documentary, Wilko Johnson played a sweat-streaked gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, strutting up and down the small stage like a berserker, swapping gleeful looks with the great Blockheads bassist, Norman Watt-Roy, machine-gunning the audience with the staccato strumming of his black Telecaster. It was an extraordinary show, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Johnson wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Indeed, Temple’s unexpectedly celebratory film began life as a chronicle of a death foretold, doctors having given Wilko less than a year to live following a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Yet here he was – larger than life, stranger than fiction, and cooler than Canvey Island on a rainswept afternoon... (Mark Kermode, theguardian)



Vgl. unbedingt Wilko Johnson & Roger Daltrey: It's meat-and-potatoes British R&B, done with love and joie de vivre
... und wenn Sie interessiert sind, die besondere Bedeutung Johnsons als Gitarrist würdigen zu können, sehen Sie sich dies an. Anlässlich einer Buchvorstellung 2012 Wilko Johnson demonstrates his guitar technique:


Und hier zeigt er's nochmal: Wilko Johnson - Going Back Home (Jools Annual Hootenanny 2015)