This book – rough, ready, distinctive, touching – surely helped.ĭon’t You Leave Me Here is published by Little, Brown (£18.99). ‘Not funny anymore’ say a clear majority (76) of poll respondents. The final sections show a man not sure how to move on, but trying his best to find out. American superstar Magic Johnson (Former Lakers star), 62, recently became the latest internet celebrity death hoax victim when news about his death circulated on social networking sites.
Take his reaction to being asked to present a lifetime achievement award to Elton John, who gave the award straight back to Johnson: “Well, these final months have certainly been packed with incident,” he quips. Sadness lifts from him during his illness, a time when Johnson felt “intensely alive”, and his humour also bubbles through, which is often wonderful. Here, he throws his hands up, showing all of his flaws. The section where Irene dies, however, is full of raw, affecting sentiment, especially when Johnson watches his sons “sat together under the trees… I wondered what they were feeling”. Johnson and Lemmy had “trouble over a woman” in the mid-1970s, he says, in a fine section full of punk’s great and good, including John Lydon, but there’s no sign of any marital guilt. She’s the glue that holds this story together – the title an obvious nod to his grief – and she sounds a remarkable person, tolerating as she did her husband’s myriad indiscretions. There’s a woman at the heart of this tale too: Johnson’s wife, Irene, who died in 2004. The euphoria with which Wilko was meeting his end captured magically in Julien Temple’s. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson elected to eschew chemotherapy and head out on the road. In spring last year, he was delivered of the three-kilogram tumour he thought would claim his life, and now he is dealing with a cosmic anticlimax: declaring in public that he was going to die, and then not doing so. Wilko Johnson: a man who cheated death (Image credit: Kevin Nixon/TeamRock) Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in January 2013, former Dr. “I wanted to present Dr Feelgood straight, simple and as it really was,” he writes of his group’s 1976 No 1 live album, Stupidity, at one point. Wilko Johnson opens up about his asbestos throat, meeting Lemmy and coming to terms with staying alive.
When he describes the devastating Canvey Island floods of 1953 (“our house was in the sea”), his post-university jaunt to Kathmandu (“I had £60 stuffed down my Y-fronts”), and his post-Feelgood career as one of Ian Dury’s Blockheads (“somewhere along the way we picked up this character called Spartacus”), he does so without any descent into myth-making – a rare, attractive trait in rock’n’roll memoirs.
Offering up a cracker of a tale, before going off on a tangent, he adds enough “anyways” and “sos” to make the more dramatic revelations relatable. Johnson writes like the Mythical Bloke in the Pub speaks.
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