“Obviously you go up and down sometimes it’s a lovely day and it’s such a buzz to be alive, and then of course you find yourself at 3 o’clock in the morning sometimes going, ‘Oh, help me!’ Your moods change. “I can’t arrange things too far in the future ’cause I don’t know whether that future will exist, so we have to do things kind of step by step,” Johnson notes. Meanwhile he’s continuing to lead his own band through as many shows as his health will allow, including a recent run opening for Status Quo. 26 at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and Johnson says they’re talking about trying to do more. Johnson and Daltrey - who’s donating his proceeds from “Going Back Home” to the British Teenage Cancer Trust he co-founded - played one show together on Feb.

“Then last year, when Roger heard that I’ve got cancer, he came bouncing back and said, ‘We’ll do that album!’ I said, ‘Well, we better do it quick!’ And we did do it quick it took us about eight days.” And the two rock veterans decided to focus on hard-hitting versions of Johnson songs that reflected their shared passion for Johnny Kidd & the Pirates - including “Going Back Home’s” title track, which Johnson wrote in 1975 with Pirates’ guitarist Mick Green. “Roger suddenly said, ‘Y’know what? We should make an album together, and we did make some attempts to get it together, but it just never happened,” Johnson recalls. Johnson says he considered recording some of the originals with Daltrey, who he befriended at a British awards show about three years ago. But it’s nothing too sophisticated, I promise.” I started writing things before I got this cancer diagnosis, and after that I started realizing quite a lot of these songs were moaning on about time passing and doom - but don’t worry, they’re very simple, nothing philosophical! But I didn’t notice I was tending to think about clocks ticking and stuff like that.

“They’re all typical of what I do,” Johnson says. Slipknot's 'The End, So Far' Crowned on Australia's Chart

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