Georgina Fairbanks and Johnson Willis in Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll. Picture: Nick Haeffner
JONATHAN Maitland’s biographical play with live music, Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll, celebrates the extraordinary life of Dr Feelgood co-founder and punk-movement godfather Wilko Johnson, on tour at York Theatre Royal from tomorrow to Saturday.
Iconic yet iconoclastic guitarist Wilko – born John Andrew Wilkinson on Canvey Island, Essex on July 12 1947 – faced a terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis in January 2013 with the expectation of only nine or ten months left to live.
Initially declining chemotherapy, Wilko chose to dedicate his remaining time to a meaningful farewell tour of the people and places that defined his life, only for an unexpected miracle to change the narrative entirely.
Here are the facts. In 2014, doctors decided the tumour was a less aggressive neuroendocrine type, whereupon Wilko underwent radical, life-saving surgery to remove a large tumour, together with his pancreas and spleen. Later he was declared cancer-free and went on to live until November 21 2022, dying at his home at Westcliff-on-Sea at the age of 75.
Playwright and former BBC journalist Jonathan Maitland already had written such plays as Dead Sheep (2015), An Audience With Jimmy Saville (2015), Deny, Deny, Deny (2016) and The Last Temptation Of Boris Johnson ( 2019) when John’s remarkable renaissance story inspired Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll.
“Wilko’s is one of the greatest rock‘n’roll stories ever told and his songs are some of the greatest rock‘n’roll ever recorded,” says Jonathan. “Even so, when I first read the play to him at his home in Southend five years ago, none of us could have imagined how much his story would go on to connect with audiences. My only regret is that he’s not around to see this tour happen but I know, for sure, that he would have been absolutely thrilled.”
Maitland’s play traces Wilko’s career as a guitarist with a trademark robotic, machine-gun playing style that spanned co-founding Dr Feelgood on Canvey Island in 1971, leaving the band in 1977, serving in Ian Dury and The Blockheads from 1980 to 1982, forming the Solid Senders with Blockheads’ bassist Norman Watt-Roy and recording Going Back Home with The Who lead vocalist Roger Daltrey, entering the charts at number three in March 2014.
All this was complemented by occasional acting gigs, most notably playing mute executioner Ser Ilyn Payne in four episodes of Game Of Thrones in 2011 and 2012.
Integrating live music and storytelling with Wilko’s own words, Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll’s “masterclass in living life to the fullest” was sent to Coventry to begin its 12-week tour on Monday. York Theatre Royal will be destination number two.
“The show is in its fourth iteration,” says Jonathan. “It broke box-office records at the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, who wanted to put it on because it’s an Essex story about an Essex band; then the Southwark Playhouse in spring last year and a five-week West End run at Leicester Square Theatre – and now the tour.
Jon House’s Lee Brilleaux, Dr Feelgood’s frontman, in Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll. Picture: Nick Haeffner
“Wilko’s story is just incredible because he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer when his music career had hit a low point. He was playing what he called ‘s**t holes’ and had told his band he was thinking of giving up. He’d appeared in Game Of Thrones by then so the New York Times wrote ‘Game Of Thrones actor has cancer’.”
Jonathan continues: “They say the best thing you can do in rock’n’roll is die, and his transformation [post-diagnosis] became a real-life A Christmas Carol story, but in rock’n’roll where Wilko became a nicer person, like Scrooge.
“How it turned out there’d been a mix-up in his diagnosis seems incredible to me, but that’s why it’s such an amazing story with amazing music, making it a play that could have written itself.”
Wilko was given a 15 per cent chance of survival when he went through his 11-hour operation at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on April 30 2014. “His surgeon said to him, ‘we’re going to need a lunch break’!” says Jonathan.
“The doctor who saved his life is just fantastic. He’s called Charlie Chan, a cancer doctor who was a big fan of Wilko. He’d taken a photo of Wilko at his last ever Farewell Tour gig at Camden, and when he looked at the photo, he said, ‘for someone who’s supposed to be dying, you don’t look too bad’.”
As he will discuss in tomorrow’s post-show Q&A alongside Jonathan Maitland, Charlie’s subsequent second opinion on Wilko’s terminal diagnosis led to surgeon Emmanuel Huguet and his specialist medical team carrying out the operation.
“I’d been wanting to write a play about a guy in rock’n’roll who fakes his own death, and then Wilko did his own version of a ‘death’ story and so I thought I had to do a play about him,” says Jonathan. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘it’s a play, plays tell stories, you can make it up. He changed only one thing , saying he was on speed, not coke!”
Jonathan recalls first hearing Wilko Johnson’s guitar on Dr Feelgood’s 1975 version of Leiber & Stoller’s Riot In Cell Block 9 off their Malpractice album. “I remember thinking, ‘oh my god, it’s very primal’. It felt like 10,000 volts going through you. What’s incredible is that 50 years later, I’m still listening to it,” he says.
“They changed the course of popular music. Their live album Stupidity going to number one making them the most popular band in Britain for about ten minutes in 1976. What gets you with Dr Feelgood was this incredible music but also this amazing double act of Lee Brilleaux as leader with Wilko as his accomplice, who would just gun you down with his guitar.
“It was like the Sex Pistols a year later, where it was exciting, intense but quite funny – it looked like Wilko was going to kill you – and it burnt through us all those years ago.”
Wilko Johnson was punk pioneer, poet, philosopher and astronomer rolled into one. “He was a man of letters and a poet who did English Literature at Newcastle University. He could recite reams of Milton’s Paradise Lost and could have been a professor of English – and he was a massive enthusiast of astrology,” says Jonathan.
“He was funny, but he could be difficult and he was depressive and depressing, so he was the perfect subject for a play.”
Wilko said “OK” to the idea of a play in 2021, during Covid. “Then I went to read the script to him, doing all the voices myself, including his, and he said, ‘so the man from Del Monte, he he says ‘yes’,” recalls Jonathan.
Wilko went on to record a message: “If I’m not there on the opening night, it’s probably because I’m ‘brown bread’ [Cockney slang for ‘dead’], so there’s not a lot I can do about it.”
“We played it on the first night [February 1 2024] and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” says Jonathan. “By the time it got to London, it just took off, selling out every night, with people like Paul Weller and Richard Curtis coming to see it, and people coming up afterwards, crying and saying how it reminded them of their own experiences.
“You don’t need to be a fan of Dr Feelgood or Wilko to see it because it’s a about a man facing death with all his foibles and faults. Green, from Scritti Politti, said afterwards that it reminded him of why he got into music in the first place because it’s just so joyful.”
Summing up Wilko’s character, Jonathan says: “He was appalling in some ways but wonderful in others. He had this self-knowledge about him. Whereas someone who’s highly irredeemable doesn’t acknowledge his own faults, Wilko did. There was nobody like him.”
Wilko will forever be associated with his machine-gun guitar antics and bulging eyes when wielding his black Fender Telecaster. “I made up its origin for the play as he couldn’t remember how is started. He just did it because he was quite theatrical. In the play, he has an argument with Lee and guns him down with his guitar. Lee says ‘why don’t you do that on stage?’.”
As the poster states, Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll is a “play with music”, not a jukebox musical, as Johnson Willis’s Wilko tells Lee Brilleaux in the play. “I can’t write a musical as I don’t understand the lexicon of people singing at each other,” says Jonathan.
Jetty Productions in association with Canvey Rock and Cahoots Theatre Company present Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ‘N’ Roll, York Theatre Royal, tomorrow, 7.30pm with post-show Q&A discussion with writer Jonathan Maitland and Charlie Chan, the doctor who saved Wilko’s life; Friday, 7.30pm; Saturday, 2.30pm & 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. Age guidance: 11 plus.
The poster for Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n’Roll
Jonathan Maitland: back story
PLAYWRIGHT and former journalist, who worked for the BBC across Radio 4, BBC News and presenting and producing shows for BBC One.
Debut stage play Dead Sheep (2015), produced at Park Theatre, became the most successful production in the theatre’s history. This record was broken by his second play, also staged at Park Theatre, An Audience With Jimmy Saville (2015), which transferred to Edinburgh Fringe.
Further works at Park Theatre include Deny Deny Deny (2016) and the box office record- breaking The Last Temptation Of Boris Johnson (2019), which then completed an eight-week national tour in 2020.
Maitland presented the premiere of The Interview at Park Theatre and his BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Wasps In A Jam Jar in 2023.
Johnson Willis: back story
MUSICIAN and actor who has spent many years in the music industry playing and recording with bands. His credits include Return To The Forbidden Planet in 1999, the West End premiere of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe (Gillian Lynne Theatre, 2022), Amelie The Musical (National Tour, The Other Palace and W.E Criterion), as well as productions with Theatre Clwyd Cymru, Royal Shakespeare Company, Newbury Watermill Theatre and New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich.
Johnson Willis: Playing Wilko Johnson in Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ‘N’ Roll
Wilko Johnson’s guitar technique
WILKO played with a high-energy, percussive style that created the illusion of a rhythm and lead guitar being played at the exact same time, producing his choppy, staccato sound by using his left hand to mute or dampen the strings immediately after striking them, lifting his fingers on and off the fretboard. He did not use a guitar plectrum, instead playing entirely fingerstyle with his bare fingers and thumb.