DAN WOODS, the guitarist in my band Barnstormer for over 20 years and one of the most gentle, intelligent and talented people I have ever met, died during the night of January 6-7 aged 61 after four years battling cancer. We are all absolutely gutted. His funeral is tomorrow, Wednesday February 22.

Dan loved playing music and painting, was stupendously good at both and, as you can see from the photo atop the page taken by his great friend Mel Owen, was a very good-looking bloke.

Normally such things lead to massive fame and fortune. He was having none of that.

He could have become a male model, a rock god or an exquisitely tortured artist in a sparsely-furnished upmarket Paris studio. The world of superstar travel, luxury hotels and minions fawning on his every whim was there, arms outstretched.

Instead, he decided to spend the latter part of his life as the guitarist in uniquely drunk and utterly legendary Brighton music hall/punk crossover band The Fish Brothers and, after I’d decided to form a band in 1994 and recruited the Fish en masse to join me, in my band Barnstormer.

So he ended up travelling around Europe in dodgy, smelly vans full of empty cider cans, sleeping in places which didn’t have walls or ceilings, populated by incontinent cats and featuring plumbing curated by people who misheard anarchist punk band Crass’s most famous slogan: “Smash the System” as “Smash the Cistern” and behaved accordingly.

OK, that’s exaggerating a bit — although it did happen more often that we’d have preferred. But, joking aside, most of the 500 or so gigs we did together, mainly in the underground German left-wing punk scene, were absolutely fantastic and Dan was the heart and soul of it all.

Everyone loved him. Gentle, laid back, supremely adaptable and a source of wisdom, he was a dynamite guitarist on stage. I wasn’t just the leader of the band but tour manager, translator and occasionally driver. Sometimes it threatened to get too much — and I can be a bit volatile. “Calm down, John,” he’d say. It always worked.

Dan played with countless others over the years, of course. He saw the relatively high life as guitarist with the legendary Captain Sensible and, to select one hilarious story from many, he was feted by RCA in Germany as the singer with 1980s cult band Cleaners from Venus.

Except that he wasn’t. He’d taken the gig as a favour to Cleaners singer-songwriter Martin Newell because the latter hated touring and he was pretending to be Martin. It took the band’s record company half a tour to realise. You couldn’t make it up.

Dan was also a wonderful visual artist. He illustrated Undaunted, my most recent poetry book, and one of my album sleeves. Two of his paintings hang on our living-room wall.

After he became too ill to play guitar any more, he carried on painting and drawing, and finished this illustration of Abiezer Coppe, leader of the Ranters of 1649, a couple of weeks before he died. It is now a T-shirt in his honour.

Farewell to Dan, you lovely man.