![]() Miraculously, the death sentence was unexpectedly lifted. But like every good story, Wilko’s has twist in its tail. ![]() The film tells the universal story of a man confronting his own mortality how being told he was going to die made him feel so alive, allowing him to live as the clock ticked within each coruscating moment. Wilko’s dignified and inspirational response to terminal cancer went on to capture the imagination of the world, giving many sufferers and their families-who knew nothing of his music-renewed courage to face their own personal struggles against incurable illness. Two years later, he was still playing and confounding the odds against him. Adamant that the illness would not dictate the quality of his life during the few months left to him, Wilko set out on a goodbye tour for his fans around the world. Freed from tedious unanswered emails, unpaid taxes, and unsettled scores, Wilko flourished in the present, inhabiting his own personal ecstasy in the manner of the Medieval saints, reveling in the world made new around him. Prone to depressive moods in the past, he now experienced an immediate and extended euphoria, which lasted over a period of many months. Instead of responding with fear and trepidation to this news, Wilko managed to embrace it as a positive and even liberating experience, and somehow made sense of his life. A few months before the film begins, he has received the death sentence of terminal pancreatic cancer and has been given around 10 months to live. In our new film he is simply a man, sitting like Humpty Dumpty on the sea wall, confronting, as we all will, the universal reality of his own death. I strongly disagree with anyone who believes you need to know all of this to enjoy a new film of mine called The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, featuring the guitarist from that unjustly unsung band. It was good to be there, and maybe a film I made called Oil City Confidential can transport you back to ’70s Canvey Island and that sawdust-covered floor. The crucial precursors of punk, who lit the touch paper in both London and New York before being swept away by the deluge that followed. John the Baptist to Johnny Rotten’s Antichrist. The guitarist with the saucer-shaped psychotic stare is Wilko Johnson. Behind them the big dark drummer looks like he’s beating a confession out of his kit and a small, fat bass player in a powder blue suit stomps manically backwards and forwards like he’s pacing his cell, walking off an overdose. Zigzagging around him like a deranged, black-suited amphetamine moth fluttering around a fatal flame, the guitarist fires off random staccato bursts of machine-gun guitar at the startled victims in the audience. In a filthy white suit, smeared with chicken grease and engine oil, he barks out words like psychotic orders to the band and strung-out zombie crowd. The singer stands riveted to the center of the stage, holed up in this room with a cop siege outside. Music’s been sped up, pumped up, and sandpapered back to its R&B roots. They gotta be here to hold up the pub and jack the takings rather than play the gig. Rolling out of moving cars in tight-cut suits, skinny black ties, and sawed-off haircuts. But a gale-force sonic wind is about to blow through the place, rattling its cut-glass windows, sending the dandruff flying in the ultraviolet light and rinsing things clean. Wet, uncured afghan coats, dandruff, halitosis, mangy beards. The distinct scent of putrefaction in the air.
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