‘I hope you enjoy the show. I hope I’m not dead’: how Feelgood star Wilko never saw the play about his life

Jonathan Maitland

Feb. 23, 2025, 6 a.m.

The musician lived a wild story of many acts: Jonathan Maitland turned it into a play and read it to him just a year before he died. This is how their encounter went …

It’s summer 2021 and I am sitting in the front room of a terraced house in Southend owned by my favourite rock star of all time. Someone who is, according to the Guardian, “a 100-1 shot to be our Greatest Living Englishman”.

I am about to read Wilko Johnson my play about his life, but I am extremely nervous as a) it’s very much a warts-and-all job, b) Wilko is, as usual, looking very scary indeed and c) I am playing all the parts myself and, perhaps unwisely, am going full Wilko, accent-wise: a vowel-stretching Essex-cum-Cockney drawl.