After nearly dying Dr Feelgood can now really feel good: Marcus Berkmann reviews Wilko Johnson's memoir

MEMOIR 

DON'T YOU LEAVE ME HERE 

by Wilko Johnson

(Little, Brown £18.99)

There are no second acts in American lives,' F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, in a particularly bad mood. It's just as well, then, that Wilko Johnson wasn't American.

His second act has been extraordinary, after what can only be described as an unusually long interval. It's a story well worth telling, and he tells it wonderfully here.

Born in 1947, Johnson grew up on Canvey Island, in the shadow of the giant oil refinery there. It was, if not a deprived childhood, a rather bleak one: his father was harsh and unloving and died in his 50s, having had his health destroyed by the great Canvey flood of 1953.

Creative force: Wilko on stage at The Music Machine in London on June 9 1979

The young John Wilkinson, as he was born, was nonetheless bright, resilient and imaginative. Lucky, too, for he was of the post-war generation of working-class children for whom grammar schools and further education provided a means of escape.

We know him as the original guitarist and creative force of Canvey's own Dr Feelgood, but as a young man Wilko narrowly failed to get into Cambridge.

In the end he read English at Newcastle University and was taught by poet Tony Harrison. He wanted to be a poet himself, or maybe a painter, until the rival attraction of rhythm and blues got in the way.

Dr Feelgood were one of those bands whose influence and reputation far exceeded their sales. In the Seventies, when prog rock and glam rock ruled - and loon pants and stack heels made it almost impossible for anyone to walk - the band's rock-hard, blues-based songs, without an inch of fat on them, were more than a breath of fresh air.

They were among the defining influences on punk and all that came after.

Wilko wrote the songs, defined the sound and refused to let producers overdub extra instruments in the studio. He was a self-confessed control freak. The band grew sick of him and he was given the boot after three albums.

Usually it's musical differences that pull bands apart, but in this case it was also drug differences. The other three in the band drank. Wilco was a teetotaller who took too many amphetamines. The incompatibility ran deep.

Wilko's early life, up until his departure from the band, takes up the first half of this shortish book. His writing (the book is not ghostwritten) is as energetic and stripped back as his music.

The next 30 years he skips over in a couple of chapters. He continued to play music, tour the world in a modest way, and live quietly in Southend with Irene, his wife of 40 years.

The book, happily, reflects the man

But she died in 2004 of cancer, and then in 2012 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. If he was lucky, they said, he had ten months.

How do we react when we are told we are mortally ill?

David Bowie, as we now know, told no one, and his death came as a terrible shock to everyone but his family and a handful of friends.

Wilko, by contrast, told the world and, what's more, revealed that the diagnosis had given him a peace he had never known before.

'My existence was irrevocably coming to an end but here and now I was alive in the sunlight. Everything around me looked sharp and vibrant. I felt free. Free from the future and the past, free from everything but this moment I was in.'

Wilko is not a religious man: there is no afterlife as far as he is concerned. Before the diagnosis he described himself as 'a miserable bugger'. But with death imminent he discovered what it really is to live in the moment. 

There were dark nights of the soul, which he describes here in all their sweat and loneliness and bleakness. But at other times he felt truly alive, even - dare one say it - happy.

Pancreatic cancer is a quick killer, unforgiving, rarely curable. As the months went by the tumour grew, but Wilko's health did not deteriorate.

It emerged that he had a rare, slow-growing variety of the disease, and radical surgery might be able to dispose of it.

In a complex operation he lost his spleen, his pancreas, a large chunk of stomach and miles of small intestine.

His surgeon told him that recovery would be slow, as the human body was not designed to cope with this. Such a wound, he explained, would only normally be seen on a battlefield.

Wilko's early life, up until his departure from the band, takes up the first half of this shortish book. His writing (the book is not ghostwritten) is as energetic and stripped back as his music. Pictured: Wilko performing in London in 2013

The book, happily, reflects the man - and there can be no higher compliment than that 

But Wilko did recover, and the cancer was gone.

If you are a music fan, and even if you are not, it would be hard to recommend this book too highly.

Wilko's defining quality throughout his life has been authenticity. When he was young it cost him proper stardom, but enabled him to make a handful of great records whose merits endure to this day.

His long-delayed second act, which includes a role as the mute knight Ser Ilyn Payne in Game Of Thrones, has made him a different type of star, admired and even loved simply for being who he is.

The book, happily, reflects the man - and there can be no higher compliment than that.