But when Chan saw his hero in the flesh, he felt sure the diagnosis was wrong. He made contact with him and put him on a road that eventually ended with him announcing last week that he was free of cancer.

Chan, from Cheltenham, tells the Gloucestershire Echo he got in touch with Wilko and the pair met in July last year and talked about many things, including his health.

He adds: "Lo and behold, last October Wilko was playing at the KoKo club in Camden and he was looking much better than he had done in July and he'd released an album with Roger Daltrey and I thought, 'What's going on'. I thought that he couldn't have what he thought he did."

Chan had a hunch that Wilko's diagnosis of the common form of pancreatic cancer, adenocarcinoma, might be wrong and that he might have a sarcoma or a neuroendocrine tumour.