“Two years…. Because of my various medical situations, when lockdown started I was shielding so I wasn’t allowed to step out of my door and that’s when my troubles began. It went on for two years, living in my room until I can emerge now but it has been rather strange.”

I would have thought that any Covid germs in the area would have seen whose house it was and thought, “We’re not going anywhere near him.” As Charles Shaar Murray said – Wilko Johnson stared death on the face, and death backed down.

“Something like that. My life is now bounded by various restrictions. I get up in the morning and spend the first half hour trying to remember almost a dozen different pills I have to take, an injection, things like that, and then I do things like watch YouTube all day.

“I’ve been reading rather a lot. My guitar has been gathering dust in the corner. I’ve been reading Shakespeare, Moby Dick as well, that’s a great book. Everyone should read it. Shakespeare was a very successful man, he wasn’t like Marlowe or Ben Jonson, the ones who were in trouble with the law, so we don’t know very much about him. He just put down the best stuff ever written. It’s impossible to go through a day without quoting Shakespeare. So much of what he wrote has entered the language.”

Looking back it was tempting fate. In 2018 you brought out Blow Your Mind, your first album for thirty years. In 2019 we had a global pandemic.

“There you go. I don’t know if it was thirty years, it was said at the time but there’s been odds and sods out, released in Japan and things like that.”

It must have been frustrating to have so much work wasted since 2020, all the rehearsals and planning for your tours.

“The bad thing really was that my whole thing is music and performing and that absolutely stopped for two years. We did a couple of festivals last year but performing is what I do, recording is incidental. When it all started we’d just got back from Finland and had gigs booked up into the future then suddenly everything stopped. It was put back three months, which was okay, then it was three more months then another three. I look on myself as a musician, you’re always a musician, walking down the street doing nothing and you’re a musician, and you’ve got a reason for your existence. Then after I think the third time things got put back I was finding that I can’t think of myself as a musician because I’m not playing. I was thinking What am I?, I’m an old geezer stuck in a room and that’s what it’s been for the past two years.”

“I was getting so that I couldn’t imagine playing again because when the time came they’d have been put back again. And now finally we’re getting out and playing. It’s been a two year wait and when actual gigs as we knew and loved them will flourish again is anybody’s guess. There are all sorts of things, the beautiful days we used to love, who can say when that going to return.”

You think of places like the 100 Club, or some of the smaller venues around the country and you can imagine that with the best will in the world they’ll still be danger spots for some time to come.

“Everybody’s consciousness has changed and whatever attitude you have about this pestilence, you can’t see a return to the way things were. It’s going to take a while to get up and running. Whether it will ever return to what it was we don’t know.”

But, we have to be positive. In the short-term you’ve got these gigs with John Otway and if lockdown’s been hard for us, then for Otway, the most fidgety man on earth, it must have been a lot worse.

“It’s great working with him again, because he’s as mad as ever and we’re both starting to remember what it was like. It’s been a bit weird. When we did the first gig, doing the soundcheck we were standing in the dressing room looking at each other and it’s like waking up from a long dream. Here we are, I’d forgot all this, one two, one two and the rest.”

A lot of artists said they were writing or recording during lockdown. Did you do anything like that?

“No. When you write songs they’re happening because they happen but I just haven’t been playing. How can I write a bloody song when I’m trapped in this room? You said it’s a long time since I’d done an album but what makes me do them is mostly circumstances. If you make an album you’ve got to think about selling it and whatever, it’s just that when things drive you. When it all started with Dr Feelgood you’re bound to attract a lot of attention so you write and you make an album. I kind of drifted out of that situation and for one reason or another, a few years ago I started working in Japan. I was being asked for albums so you make another one and then I’m dying of cancer and Roger Daltrey said ‘Let’s make an album.’ I said we’d better do it quick and I was doing it in the expectation of never seeing it released. It was the most successful record I’ve ever been involved with.”

You just drop “Roger Daltrey said let’s make an album” like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Earlier today I was looking you up on Google and one of the questions was ‘Is Wilko Johnson a good guitarist?’ Put those two together and that’s not a bad epitaph.

“I do sometimes wonder about that, but there you go. You make some kind of a splash in this world.”