Singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, whose death at 56 was announced yesterday, was grouchy and touchy but also funny and insightful, writes Tony Clayton-Lea

There's no point trying to deny it: we're all going to die some day. It's a depressing thought, but one that, with similar notions, must for the past year have been whizzing around the mind of Warren Zevon, whose death at the age of 56 was announced yesterday. In August last year he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare type of lung cancer. He was given three months to live - and, true to form, the cantankerous, satiric singer-songwriter lasted far longer than that.

So how did Zevon, a long-time smoker, prepare himself? Did he curl up and regress? Did he remove himself from the outside world, afraid or embarrassed that people would see his greying countenance and avoid him? Did he embark on a course of self-pity and regret?

"Regrets are so far from reality," he said in a recent interview. "Would I like to tell someone, look, if you don't want to die at 55 you might not want to smoke for 30 years? Sure. I'm a living example of that. But this is my life and these were my choices. I lucked out big time because I got to be the most f***ed-up rock star on the block - at least on my block - and then I got to be a sober dad for 18 years. I've had two very full lives."

Zevon, who died on Sunday at his Los Angeles home, faced death with characteristic humour. "Really, the thing I want is to last through the winter, so I don't miss the new James Bond movie," he said when his illness was diagnosed. He also started smoking again.

When this writer interviewed Zevon more than three years ago there was no hint of illness, yet the bleak views of the man overshadowed everything he said. The interview was a dismissive discourse on the inexorable dwindling of happiness. Grouchy, touchy, funny, insightful - all human life was there. Over the crackling telephone line I asked if he could hear me. "As well as I can hear anything for a man of my age," came the reply. I asked about his status as a survivor. "I suppose that's true," he said. "Anybody who has been drunk around the clock for 30 years and who makes it for another 15 deserves to be called a survivor. Mind you, it doesn't have quite the same resonance as, perhaps, the word genius. Why would I want to be drunk for so long? I was thirsty." After a spell in rehab, he told me, his driving got much better.

And so it went on. Towards the close of the interview I asked if his desultory outlook on life was exaggerated. "Absolutely not," was the immediate, almost affronted answer. "I think I'm pretty optimistic, to be honest with you. However, like the painter Francis Bacon I'm optimistic about nothing."

It's a truism that when artists catch glimpses of their limited time on this earth their creative impulses become so focused that they start to express what they truly, deeply know. Bob Dylan's line about imminent death - "it's not dark yet, but it's getting there" - suggests that when artists face up to their sagging skin and receding hairlines they become far more relevant to themselves and to their audiences. Perhaps Zevon knew something others didn't, for he was writing about what he knew from the beginning.

Born in Chicago on January 24th, 1947, the son of a Russian immigrant called Livotovsky - his grandfather changed the family name to Zevon - he had an upbringing that was made erratic by his father's career as a professional gambler.

Immersed in music from an early age, Zevon initially studied classical piano, but as domestic tensions escalated during his teenage years he rebelled, trading in Bach and Stravinsky for Dylan and the Los Angeles singer-songwriter set. Success came slowly despite his talent, and although he helped the bickering Everly Brothers for a couple of years he felt let down more by age - he was on his way to 30 - than by lack of confidence.

Taking a sabbatical in and around the Spanish town of Sitges in the mid-1970s, playing piano and guitar in small clubs and pubs, seemed to straighten him out. Then Jackson Browne, the singer-songwriter and a close friend, called, urging him to return to a record deal he had set up for him with Asylum Records. It sealed his fate: a self-titled album released in 1976 was ecstatically received.

Zevon's subsequent recording career proved to be of the up-and-down variety: songs of self-mocking (Poor Poor Pitiful Me), eerie humour (Werewolves Of London), devastatingly accurate observations of love (Accidentally Like A Martyr) and anti-romance (Play It All Night Long) lay side by side with years of creative decline and poor record sales.

Neither the ups nor the downs seemed to concern him. He once claimed the wryness, satire, complexity and humour in his work stemmed from not taking himself seriously. Hence the titles of his albums and songs, which include I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, If You Won't Leave Me I'll Find Someone Who Will and Life'll Kill Ya. And hence, also, Zevon's new and now final, posthumous album, The Wind.

The two most serious events in the world and in one's life are surely birth and death. We can hardly remember the former, but the latter can stare us cold in the face if we're unlucky enough not to die quickly and painlessly.

Zevon's swansong, as bitter-sweet as anything else he did, was recorded while death was taking his measurements for a funeral suit. It has some fine moments: "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me," he sings in the opening track, Dirty Life & Times; on a version of Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door you can hear him shouting: "Open up! Open up!"; and there are utterly beguiling, poignant moments, such as She's Too Good For Me and the closing track, Keep Me In Your Heart.

Zevon emerged at a time when pop music's avoidance of certain subjects was at a high; it seems he has left us as a crack corps of po-faced singer-songwriter types are taking over the asylum.

Stubbornly, he didn't want to be considered a cynic or viewed as somebody with little sense of social responsibility or political commitment (he supported Al Gore's run for the US presidency in 2000, for example).

"Certain people seem to see me as a comedian or some kind of an extreme satirist," he once said. "But I'm very much not a cynic. Actually I'm quite idealistic. I think caring is, perhaps, the most positive force in life.

"I've always felt there is something redeeming about every experience, something affirmative, and it's that quality I hope people would see in my work. Not that I'm an expert satirist or cultural dissector, but someone who looks at life good naturedly and has the ability to see the human side of things."

The Wind is due to be released on September 19th through Rykodisc/RMG