I’m alive!” It makes for humbling, ethereal, strangely uplifting viewing. “The very paving stones seemed to be shivering. The film opens with Johnson on the estuary of his beloved Canvey Island hometown on the Thames Estuary, declaring, “My life is coming to an end.” However, far from being downhearted, he describes walking away from the cancer diagnosis feeling “vividly alive”, looking at his surroundings with a new elation. Johnson is a confirmed atheist, but Temple recognises a “spiritual aspect” in his journey towards oblivion and back. Photograph: Suppliedįilmed mostly while Johnson still thought he was dying, The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson differs from Temple’s music films in that it is about a man confronting his mortality, which taps into something profound, even transcendental. Wilko Johnson on the farewell tour he really thought would be his last. After a while, I approached him to see if he wanted to talk about what he was going through, and he did.” ![]() “So, like everyone else who knew him, I was devastated that we were going to lose him. The director explains that – when making Oil City Confidential – he was “entranced” by Johnson as a human being, rather than a musician. ![]() Four years after his masterly 2009 documentary Oil City Confidential brought Dr Feelgood to a new generation’s attention, The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson premieres at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, on Friday. This extraordinary sequence of events has been captured in a remarkable film by Julien Temple, the renowned director behind the Sex Pistols films The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth And The Fury. Thus, over two years after his apparent death sentence, the 67-year-old guitar man is very much alive – and well enough to begin another British tour next week. A doctor discovered that his form of pancreatic cancer might be treatable after all, and the musician underwent radical surgery, which removed a tumor the size of a watermelon and weighing 3kg. However, just as each gig seemed more likely to be his last, there was an extraordinary twist.
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