The Wildhearts' Ginger Wildheart preaches positivity ahead of their Takedown Festival slot at Portsmouth Guildhall

Just days after we speak it is announced on social media that Ginger Wildheart, frontman of The Wildhearts, has mantle cell lymphoma – “a rare but aggressive strain of cancer”.

The statement goes on to clarify that he is feeling in “fine fettle,” will be continuing to work with the band and on solo material, and all live shows “WILL GO AHEAD” (their capitals).

A day later he follows this up on his personal social media with: “I won’t go through treatment. I’ve lived the life of ten men and I’ll die with dignity… No misery please. Positivity all the way.”

The reason we were speaking in the first place was an interview to preview the band’s upcoming show at Portsmouth Guildhall as part of this year’s Takedown Festival – the annual event dedicated to hard-rock and heavy metal.

The Wildhearts have been going since the early 1990s – beloved by their fans, but never quite breaking through to the level their supporters believe they deserved.

A combination of bad luck, record label politics, rocky inter-band relationships and an ability to self-destruct whenever things appear to be going well, has made their career a rollercoaster ride.

For last year’s album The Satanic Rites of The Wildhearts, Ginger – the sole constant – put together a new line-up, and things appeared to be going well.

During the conversation Ginger is on fine, chatty form. But it’s hard not to listen back to the conversation now through the lens of the bombshell announcement was about to come.

When we talk, Irish-trio and former touring partners Therapy? have recently been added to the bill, sadly because of the death of former Mötörhead guitarist, Phil Campbell, who was due to headline with his own band, The Bastard Sons.

“They're old friends of ours, so I’m very excited by that”, Ginger enthuses. “I was sober on that tour we did (in 2004), so I look forward to having a drink with them this time!”

When it’s mentioned that it’s already a year since Satanic Rites was released, he reveals: “Yes, I was hoping to get the new album out this March, but it's been put back to September, which is obviously a bit disappointing because we recorded it last April/May.

“Part of the pain of being of a creative person is that when you're working with a big company like our label, it's big wheels and they move slower. But creatively speaking a year between albums just means that you write the next album before the one that you’re waiting to come out actually gets released!”

When he’s on a roll, Ginger is hugely prolific. The Wildhearts have 11 studio albums and numerous compilations, plus there’s another 11 solo albums, and a truckload of projects taking in country-rock (The Sinners), Hey! Hello! (punk-pop), Mutation (industrial metal), Silver Ginger 5 (glam-rock) among others, as well as many more one-off releases and guest appearances.

If you want to be a completist and get everything he’s ever done, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

"When I get into a band and I find out they've got tons of music available, I just consider that to be Christmas!” he says. “So anyone who does want to be a completist for my stuff, I'm grateful for them, but for completists it’s also heaven.

“Man, I'm a completist myself. I get it, I mean, part of the reason that we do still do well is because I'm a fan of music myself, so I know what a fan wants. I never make any secret of that – I'm just a fanboy of music myself.”

Putting together Satanic Rites came out of a difficult time. A reunion of the band’s ‘classic’ line-up had imploded (again) in 2022, after two well-received, fan-pleasing albums – Renaissance Men and 21st Century Love Songs. Sadly, time had not healed all wounds.

It left Ginger in an unusual position.

“When I recorded Satanic Rites, it was the most terrifying thing I could think of doing – to try and go it alone. The rest of the band didn't want to continue, I did. Obviously it was their choice not to do it, but it's not their choice for me not to do it.

"I've put quite a lot of work into this (The Wildhearts), quite a lot of years of my life. I've got no intention of quitting.

“But we did the album and I honestly didn't know what the reaction was going to be – pretty much like the first album we ever recorded where I just didn't know what people are going to say.

“There was no expectation whatsoever. And when it came, those few months were some of the best months of my life, mainly because a lot of the critics – pretty much all of the critics who went in to listening to the album to pan it, begrudgingly accepted that it was actually a great album.

"That was such a satisfying feeling, to know that I could go it alone and even my biggest critics were suddenly on my side. It was a massive game-changer.”

He brought in guitarist Ben Marsden and keyboard player Carol Hodge, plus returning bassist Jon Poole. Drummer Charles Evans didn’t play on the album, but is now part of the band.

“It just feels like the family's complete now and it really is a family vibe – and it's the first time I've been surrounded by such positivity.”

Previous line-ups have been notorious for their fractious relationships.

“It makes all the difference in the world – it's literally night and day.”

"Everyone's bringing something really unique to the table. It's a big glib to say it's a family vibe, but I can't think of a better way of putting it.

"It's people that actually care about each other. We we stay in constant contact when we're not playing.

"But the vibe is just great, everyone's really close, obviously I've known Jon for a very long time. He's just the best person in the world to be in a band with."

Jon has had three previous stints with the band, and was also in cult rock act Cardiacs – who Ginger is a huge fan of – there’s a song named for their late frontman Tim Smith on the 2009 Wildhearts album ¡Chutzpah!

We talk briefly about Cardiacs, as I tell him I saw them for the first time recently when they played at The Wedgewood Rooms here in Portsmouth. Ginger eagerly asks how it was, before adding: “When I got into the Cardiacs, I used to go to see them in places about the size of the Wedgewood Rooms, and it was something much more intense about seeing them in a smaller place.

"I think that's what kept all the long-term fans – how religious an experience it was – just playing that music. I imagine was was fairly religious for the people there.”

I tell him how at the end a picture of Tim Smith was brought on stage – he died of a heart attack in 2020 – and there were people in the crowd crying.

"They say a man dies twice,” Ginger muses, “once when their body dies, and the second time when people stop saying their name. I think it's safe to assume that Tim Smith will never die.”

Ginger is currently living in the Yorkshire Dales – away from the urban areas he’s spent much of his life in.

"It changed my life,” he says of moving into relative rural isolation. “It literally changed everything. I needed to go away and start again because my life was not going very well.

“I started from scratch. I came here, I turned into a ghost for a year. I started building myself up literally from the roots.

“Being around nature taught me everything that I needed to know – and I've never lived by myself. One of my greatest fears was being by myself.

"The biggest danger of being by yourself is it gets to feel really good and you don't want to change it.

”So now the hardest thing for me is not being by myself and getting stuck into social work, but it's it's very addictive to be in nature because it gives you everything you need.

“It's taught me a lot about life, about mortality. It's taught me a lot about death – death was a fear of mine, death and other people dying.

“Nature is just life and death, you know? It’s circular. It really put things into perspective and it allowed me time to focus on why I fear in that department.

“And now it's a lovely thing, all of the things that I used to fear have gone and I'm definitely the best and most positive I've ever been – but that doesn't say much because I used to be in a bit of a mess.

"I have been for quite a while as well, as Wildhearts fans can testify, as it usually goes up on social media.”

Ginger has routinely been an open book on social media with regards to his battles with depression – battles that have seen him be sectioned and contemplating suicide.

“It was controversial,” he says of being so open on Twitter, “and I got a lot of flak for being so open, but I don't believe that you can tackle things like depression without being open.

"We've seen the results of people keeping it to themselves and that's something that I want to try and eradicate, at least from The Wildhearts community.

"I hope to talk to more people about mental health, especially in music, because there's so little known about it.

“One of the reasons I came out here was to learn what depression is and how to deal with it, because the system not only failed me but the system fails everyone. There's a false hope that the system is going to come and save you, but you're screwed, basically.

“I've learned that to be by yourself and to find out who you are, spending time in your own head, that's how you start combatting depression. It never goes away, you just learn to live with it really well and it doesn't seem like a threat to you to your life anymore.”

One of the constant positive threads in his life for the past decade has been his companion, Maggie the dog. She goes everywhere possible possible with Ginger – and has even been known to join him on stage.

"If we play Europe she can't come, but if we're doing anything in Britain, she's great in studios, she's great on tour buses. She's really good with people, her confidence is amazing, and she’s just treated as one of the team.

”I was thinking about dogs in rock'n'roll, and I don't know if there's any more famous. There's definitely not a more loved one.”

She is certainly well-loved among his fans. He’s even got a paw print stamp made up so she can do ‘signatures’ too

"Everywhere we go, the venue has got treats in for her, some venues like KK's in the Midlands give her her own dressing room with treats and toys. It doesn't surprise me that more people want to meet Maggie than they do me!”

What is Takedown Festival?

​A celebration of heavy music, Takedown Festival takes over Portsmouth Guildhall, running across three stages on Friday April 3, from 4pm, and Saturday, April 4, from 1pm.

Therapy? headline Friday, with support from The Wildhearts, Gnome and more.

President headline Saturday, with Wargasm, The Hara and others.

Tickets are £51.97 for Friday, £69.30 for Saturday and £109.72 for the two days.

Go to takedownfestival.com.

They will be joined by the charity Tonic: Music for Mental Health, who will have a space set up backstage to talk with musicians, and a stall out front for attendees. For more information about them and their work, go to tonicmusic.co.uk.

If you need someone to talk to, call Samaritans on 116 123, or chat with them online here.