Dr Feelgood guitarist whose high energy presaged punk

Wilko Johnson had a raw and uncompromising style, and he found further fame as Ser Ilyn Payne in 'Game of Thrones'

- TERENCE MCARDLE

Wilko Johnson, the British guitarist who founded the incendiary 1970s blues-rock band Dr Feelgood, recorded with singer Roger Daltrey of the Who and played the mute executioner Ilyn Payne in the HBO series Game of Thrones, has died aged 75.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2013 and later underwent experimental surgery.

Off stage, Johnson seemed a most unlikely rock star: a former English teacher with a specialised background in medieval literature and the Icelandic sagas, a knowledge that probably served him well when he was cast in Game of Thrones.

In the HBO swordplay and fantasy series, Johnson portrayed Ser Ilyn Payne, a royal executioner rendered mute after his tongue was removed on the order of the Mad King. Although Johnson had never acted before, he said he found the work to be easy.

"They said they wanted somebody really sinister who went around looking daggers at people before killing them," he told a reporter. "Looking daggers at people is what I do all the time; it's like second nature to me."

Indeed, his quartet, Dr Feelgood, mastered a raw and uncompromising style. Its music - an amped-up, high-energy version of Chicago blues and early rock'n'roll fuelled by Johnson's hyperaggressive guitar work - anticipated the intensity of such British punk bands as The Clash and the Sex Pistols.

"The words came at you like a blowtorched Chuck Berry," the music writer Nick Coleman once quipped.

On stage, Johnson cultivated an eccentric appearance, pacing back and forth in time to the music with a robot-like precision. He wore ratty black Nehru jackets and always sported an unkempt pudding-bowl haircut.