“The beginning of last year I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told it was inoperable and told I had 10 months to live,” said Johnson.
“I thought blimey, we’d better organise a farewell tour. Somehow at the end of the tour I was still on my feet and we got to FujiRocks festival in Japan. It was pouring with rain but as we walked out on stage, the clouds opened and the sun came shining down and I remember thinking, this might be the last concert I ever do. And that’s quite a kick I can tell you.”
He continued : “But then came along this doctor, called Charlie Chan, and he was curious why I still wasn’t dead. So I went down to Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, and they ran all the tests again and told me they thought they could operate on it. And they did it, man. It was an 11-hour operation, they took this tumour out of me that weighed three kilos. I was carrying that thing on stage with me every night. But they got the whole thing out of me. They cured me. So I’m hoping to get all my strength back soon and get back on the road. So the moral of this story is, you never know what’s going to happen.”