It is dedicated to perceiving and valuing the physical presence of exhibition/curating. Maybe.Museumhead is a non-profit exhibition space, which opened in December 2020, in Seoul. Sorry for any disappointment, folks, but everything is coming out of Wilko Johnson's diary and nothing will be going in for quite a while. All shows and appearances will sadly have to be cancelled. The road to recovery will be long and hard. Much of his insides will be gone, he will become diabetic overnight and it will be weeks before he can even think of going home. He is talking to me now because, while optimism is high, in truth nobody knows how the surgery will go, and how he will feel in the aftermath. "But I'm pretty tough - when I consider the kind of abuse that I have subjected my body to over the years. And although laughter is how he confronts much of his fate, there is no disguising that he is facing surgery of epic proportions. "Unless they have their salami sandwiches there," laughs Wilko, this man who is scheduled to lose a major part of his insides. Now he faces an operation so major that at some point the surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, anaesthetists and nurses will all have to leave him on the operating table while they go for lunch. But Wilko Johnson does not cry for himself. It's when he speaks of his loved ones, living and dead, that the tears come, and the voice breaks, and he struggles for control. "I came home one day and saw her - and she was digging the garden.digging the garden." You see someone you love being taken away by this monster." "She said - we've got to be strong." He shakes his head, turns his face away, the wound still raw a decade later. The only time he is overwhelmed by emotion is when he speaks of others: the mother who died of cancer when he was young, the grandson he did not think he would see grow up and above all, his beloved wife Irene, whom he lost to cancer ten years ago. He is a warm, funny human being, prone to laughter, happy to give you a hug, polite even to nerds who want a plastic bag full of Game of Thrones memorabilia signed for eBay. That stare is something that he puts on for showbiz. The ice-cold glare, the copyrighted thousand-yard stare that landed him his only acting role as Ilyn Payne, the mute executioner in HBO's Game of Thrones (they didn't audition anyone else), is not the real Wilko. That is not the same as saying that there is no emotion in him. And as the tumour gets bigger, it made my guitar stick out more and more." And it makes it difficult to play guitar because my guitar rocks on it. "The tumour got bigger," he said, patting his stomach like a man who just had a good meal. The first time I saw Wilko Johnson - juddering across the stage with Dr Feelgood in 1977, holding his Fender like a machine gun, white face, black suit, chopping out riffs that felt like an electric shock - he seemed more alive than anyone I had ever seen.Īnd the last time I saw Wilko Johnson - late Sunday afternoon, that incredible ageless face creased with laughter as he patted the massive tumour in his stomach as if it was a basketball - he also seemed more alive than anyone I have ever seen. And to live in the moment is something that's very difficult to do. I watched the snow fall in Kyoto and the sun was coming through the snow and turning it to gold and. The future is yet to come and the past is irrevocable. I was living with idea that there was no future for me, that all I've got is the present time. (Wilko Johnson) "There was a shift of consciousness. To live in the moment is something that's very difficult to do. I didn't want to ruin my last few months of life. By the time I got home I was high - to the extent that I wondered if it was some kind of shock reaction, that in a couple of hours I was going to come crashing down. It was so intense!" "Walking along in a reverie - I can't remember such joy in existing since my time of youth. And when I walked home - it was January, a beautiful winter's day - I remember looking up at the trees against the sky and feeling this rush - I'm alive. Not a flutter.Īnd he gave me a few more details and I sat there nodding. The doctor was sitting there drawing on his diagram - yes, you have this mass and unfortunately we can't operate on it. My reaction to the diagnosis of terminal cancer was euphoria.
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