Lee Brilleaux

by Zoe Howe

  ‘It was all boyhood stuff,’ remembers Geoff Shaw. ‘Climbing up things, being horrible. Chris and Lee were special. Most of the kids at school were just regular guys, everybody wanted to be like everybody else, but Chris was sparkly, confident and bright. Lee was probably even brighter. As a personality, Lee was really powerful.’ Lee and Chris would keep the other boys entertained with constant mimicry and role playing. ‘They were both really good at accents,’ adds Geoff. ‘I don’t remember them ever speaking in a normal way for more than ten minutes.’

  Lee would attend Rayleigh Sweyne grammar school on the mainland, and here he instantly connected with another kindred spirit: Phil ‘Harry’ Ashcroft. So began an epoch of deep, sometimes surreal conversations, swapped books, long walks and, it must be said, a bit of a reign of terror over the younger or duller students. ‘We weren’t always very nice,’ admits Ashcroft. Even at this age Lee was testy, nervy; he’d pace and expound, sometimes plotting, sometimes ranting, sometimes just using his authoritative persona to keep the people around him on their toes. (In later years at Sweyne, he’d steal a prefect’s badge and stride about intimidating younger pupils – he wasn’t a prefect at all but he had the swagger and the confidence, and they believed it.)3 There was a sense of Lee, even at this age, being fully formed.

  ‘Third year, Rayleigh Sweyne, September 1965,’ remembers Phil Ashcroft. ‘We were in the same class, 3b. We just happened to be sitting next to each other.’ Like Phil, Lee was a ‘thinking kind of person. The other kids were hitting each other with rulers4 and talking about football. Lee had this laser-like consciousness that used to take things in.

  ‘He was precocious when it came to his understanding of personality,’ continues Phil. ‘We’d have endless conversations during private study about meaning, death, history, art, the characters of Canvey Island…’ Lee’s tales of Canvey were, to be fair, as much of an education as anything else. Sex, alcohol, violence: Oil City delivered it all. The fact that the community lived with the threat of devastating floods, fires and the possibility of gas explosions from the nearby refineries seemed to engender something of a seize-the-day attitude.

  Canvey Island was like ‘another world over the water’, Phil observes, remembering Lee getting on a bus that looked more like a cattle truck to take him and the other Canvey kids back through the mists and marshes to that strange place below sea level, in the shadow of Coryton’s blazing tower, fascinating and frightening in equal measure.

  ‘There’d always be weird stuff happening over there,’ says Phil, who lived in Hadleigh, where little seemed to happen in comparison. ‘There were still strange old people living with chickens on bits of scrubland and people with odd religious beliefs. It was a Deep South feeling. There’d be lots of people who were just kind of … odd.’ Come Monday morning, Lee would be back at school, tantalising his friends with wild but believable stories of ‘gangster activity, so-and-so getting his legs broken … he had a vivid imagination’.

  Another vital and enduring element of Lee’s magnetic character was that he was older in his way and his look than his contemporaries. At fourteen, many boys are monosyllabic, awkward and hormonally conflicted, but Lee was articulate, capable and apparently confident, and this unlocked a door into other worlds – specifically, at this stage, the world of girls. His friends were, like him, surrounded by girls every day – Sweyne being a mixed school – but talking to them was another matter. Lee was ‘at least two or three years ahead of the rest of us’, said Phil, and his tales of conquests on Canvey (admittedly not necessarily all his own) were thrillingly lurid, possibly embellished and always involving activities ‘of an unmentionable nature. I would blush to repeat them. Things happening in the park. He did a lot of reporting. It was fairly animal at times on Canvey.’ Lee was an avid storyteller, and in the drab, pylon-studded plains of Rayleigh, having him around certainly made school life more colourful for the people in his orbit – teachers included, not that they necessarily appreciated it in the same way.

  Lee viewed school, teachers in particular, through narrowed eyes of mistrust. He was mature enough to realise this was not all there was, that school wasn’t to be taken entirely seriously, that impressing teachers was not a satisfactory ambition, and that said teachers were rarely the admirable figures they purported to be. Lee took an autonomous stance to learning; a dedicated self-educator, he inhaled adventure stories and biographies, and he would also absorb classics such as The Grapes of Wrath, Robinson Crusoe, Great Expectations and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the last becoming ‘like a bible for us, a template’. Lee was Yossarian, naturally, and he and Phil would liken various people they knew to the characters in the book, immersing themselves in the satire.

  Surrealism was an important survival mechanism for Lee, Phil and their friends (including the marvellously named John ‘Crusher’ Wardropper), often providing the mental escape they required in order to avoid becoming beaten down by the system or the futility of school rules. No one could say they weren’t productive; together they put exercise books to good use by filling them with bizarre and brilliant sketches, witty couplets and doom-mongering stories, riddles and maybe a bit of free association. The books that contained these very art-school doodlings would be titled ‘Crollie Art Books’. (Phil Ashcroft has retained a number of them.) Think Lewis Carroll, Spike Milligan and John Lennon in A Spaniard in the Works mode.

  ‘Lee had started vandalising desks by doing pseudo-abstract art in biro, big eyeballs and jagged bits, like a Punch version of modern art,’ says Phil. ‘Then he started pinching exercise books. Lee did this thing with little stick figures and called it “The Pillock’s Progress”, long stories about “beasties”. I was enthralled. It was like performance art.

  ‘Then we drew a Map of the World, with Canvey Island right in the middle, and I just enjoyed that so much, taking reality and mixing it all up.’ (As for Canvey’s very symbolic position bang in the centre, ‘we all knew that it wasn’t, but we liked to think that it was,’ said Lee. ‘Bit like the British Empire.’)

  Another way to escape would be to skive off, something Lee and Phil did quite a lot. They’d use their time to wander and talk about books (‘We decided James Joyce was cool’), drifting for miles over the fields of Hullbridge and Rawreth, and at one point attempting to walk from Chelmsford to Colchester, armed with Knorr packet soup, after hitching a ride to the county town. It was a blazingly hot day, but Lee was determined to continue wearing the deerstalker hat he’d come out with. With the combination of heat, fatigue and car fumes, ‘we were half demented by the time we got there’.

  If the weather wasn’t conducive to exploring, another favourite activity during periods of truancy would be to visit an unlovely destination Lee and Phil dubbed the ‘Armpit Café’ at nearby Rayleigh Station. ‘A horrible little place with windows that would steam up,’ remembers Phil. ‘Lee would smoke Player’s Number 6 and we’d drink rancid tea and eat Penguin or Blue Riband biscuits. The place would be full of sweat and smoke and all these down-at-heel characters. It was a place to hang out. We were trying to create a colourful life for ourselves.’

  Lee was a leader, the kind of commanding character who would automatically be viewed as a mentor by the kids around him, his presence sparking or nurturing an open enthusiasm for literature, music, even architecture. But apart from his wise, witty parents, who was Lee’s mentor? And did he even need one? Not necessarily, but a character was about to come into the frame who would, inadvertently, shove him in the direction he was already starting to move towards, give him something to aspire to, and, ultimately, be a figure that would be associated with him, whether he liked it or not, for the rest of his life. Enter the force of nature that is Wilko Johnson, then a nineteen-year-old going by his given name of John Wilkinson, and his brother Malcolm. They were both accomplished, off-the-wall guitarists, artists, blues obsessives. For once, Lee himself would be in awe.

  One of their chief diversions on the tough Canvey Island (con
sidering they weren’t particularly into drinking or fighting) was busking with the jug band they’d formed, which went by the name of ‘The Northside Jug Band’. ‘I used to play violin and harmonica,’ recalls Wilko, ‘and my brother used to play banjo and guitar. There was another guy with a tea-chest bass, and we used to play on the seafront.’

  ‘We did a performance at the Casino Ballroom,’ adds Malcolm. ‘The thing I remember is these younger kids coming up and asking about the music.’ These ‘younger kids’ were Chris White, John B Sparkes and Lee Collinson. ‘The one who turned out to be Lee seemed to ask the most questions.’ The vaudevillian aspect of these hip beatnik-type characters, bashing out ancient country blues stompers, was irresistible to Lee. He wanted a piece of it.

  Wilko continues. ‘Lee, even then, seemed so self-possessed and intense, and obviously clever. There was something about him. He was asking about this skiffle group of ours, and we were talking about blues music. Now, these boys were about fourteen – big age gap at that point – they were like kids. The one I remembered was Lee. I remember walking home with my brother, and we were like, “Fucking hell, that kid’s a bit sharp, isn’t he?” He radiated.’

  For Lee’s part, ‘something clicked’ when he saw The Northside Jug Band. ‘I thought, this is better than The Rolling Stones. Not better played, just meaner. I was really knocked out by it.’

  Neither party could have known yet quite what this meeting had set in motion, although Wilko was struck by Lee’s vivid personality and Lee was duly inspired to plunge further into his nascent fascination with the blues. Wilko would subsequently go up to Newcastle to read English at university, but he never forgot the eager, charismatic young boy he had met back home, and they would encounter each other from time to time when Wilko and Malcolm came back from their respective studies during the holidays. On one of these occasions, Malcolm found that Lee had been doing some studying of his own. ‘[He] seemed to have developed a much wider range of knowledge about obscure blues singers than either of us. It took some careful conversational skills to cover up my relative ignorance.’

  From the ‘Crollie Art Books’ of Lee’s schooldays at Rayleigh Sweyne. The famous ‘Map of the World’, as seen in Julien Temple’s film Oil City Confidential, was created with Phil ‘Harry’ Ashcroft, and naturally has Canvey Island right at the centre. Access to these precious books was kindly provided by Phil Ashcroft.

  Wilko might not have realised it fully at the time, but Lee was just as intrigued by him as he was by Lee – more so, in fact. Because of Wilko’s relative life experience, Lee looked up to him as a figurehead, even doing a school project on the Icelandic sagas after learning about them from Wilko, who had been studying them at university. Lee and Wilko’s relationship might have broken down irrevocably just a decade later (‘the old feet of clay,’ muses Wilko), but at this stage Lee was in Wilko’s thrall.

  ‘I remember getting reports of this John Wilkinson,’ said Phil. ‘This guy really impressed Lee. He read literary books and knew about politics and Karl Marx … he was in the background as this revered figure who was seen as cool and amazing. We’d get reports about Wilko having taken LSD and having out-of-body experiences above Canvey Island, stuff like that. “John Wilkinson did this, John Wilkinson did that.”’

  When it came to R&B, what grabbed Lee and appealed to his inner detective was the ‘wealth of untapped talent’ that was out there to discover, glimpsed thanks to bands such as The Stones, The Animals and The Who. There was a plethora of black American artists who just should have been better known – the likes of Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and, of course, Howlin’ Wolf. Known to his mother as Chester Burnett, this outwardly intimidating purveyor of Chicago blues possessed the kind of voice – rich, emotive and charged with overwhelming life force – that could pull the shutters down on daylight, raise the dead and shake the foundations of your weather-boarded Canvey shack. ‘I do everything the old way,’ the singer once said. It’s a quote that could easily have come from the lips of Lee Brilleaux.

  Once the fuse had been lit, Lee’s father’s prized jazz collection provided another route to the blues for Lee, who was tracing the music back to its roots via every group, combo and artist he could find. ‘I was listening to a real hotchpotch. Some people specialise in Chicago, or Mississippi, the Delta … I liked all of it.’ Catholic tastes within the blues remit, maybe, but while many of his contemporaries were avidly paying attention to the pop currently bothering the hit parade or whimpering its way out of the wireless speaker, Lee’s taste was becoming all the more focused (with occasional deviations, often in the name of surrealism – the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, featuring fellow Southend native Vivian Stanshall, were a favourite).

  This wiry, blue-eyed white kid wanted to understand the music, the lifestyle and the people at the heart of the blues on an intellectual as well as a visceral level. He wanted to collect the records, subscribe to magazines such as Blues Unlimited (he had a bit of money to spend on such things as he did odd gardening jobs on Canvey), and immerse himself in the biographies of bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy, allowing the louche, evocative stories to conjure images of the Deep South in his mind. Lee would later look back and wonder whether he bored his friends with this fevered obsession, but it seems this was not the case. (Although as far as his mother was concerned, the constant record playing ‘nearly drove me mad. It never let up.’)

  ‘Lee played me records the like of which I’d never heard before,’ remembers Geoff Shaw. ‘Jesse Fuller, Leadbelly, spirituals … stuff I had no other way of hearing. The local record shop would have nothing in it other than what was in the charts. He turned me on to music. He opened up a world to me that was completely new.’

  But ultimately, Lee Collinson didn’t want to just read about bluesmen or even listen to them. He wanted to be one. Whether he was musically gifted or not was almost neither here nor there (a brief attempt at learning to play the violin bore no fruit – ‘was never very good at it, hated it,’ he grumbled). Rather it was about attitude and passion, wanting to do it from the very depths of your soul. And acknowledging what you want – even if you’re not sure how to go about it yet – is when the stars begin to align.

  Picking up a banjo and twanging out a bit of skiffle was a good place to start; it was easy to learn a few chords, and starting a jug band of his own with a flexible line-up of friends, or at least the ones he’d infected with his enthusiasm for blues, seemed simple enough. All they needed was that DIY skiffle mentality, some songs to cover and a bunch of instruments, some of which would be customised household items. Joan supplied the thimbles for the washboard, and Crusher specialised in playing the garden shears. ‘He’d loosen the bolt in them so they made a really good noise,’ says Sparko.

  ‘It was completely Lee,’ adds Geoff. ‘We just followed. Lee had a handle on the music so he taught us how to use the instruments. Lew Lewis was there, he was very talented, Phil Ashcroft, Rico Burt – crazy guy who would dress up as a Red Indian and run around the woods with spears – and Lee, who could do everything. He’d come round my house and basically he was in charge. “Right, here’s what we’re going to do.” He’d get on the kitchen table and do crazy dances, Mick Jagger-style, we were there strumming away on out-of-tune guitars.’

  Lee would sing as well as play banjo, the dexterous John Sparkes played 12-string guitar, and ‘Chris Fenwick was playing jug, but very wisely took up managerial duties,’ remembered Lee. ‘Various other people drifted in and out. We used to play at the Canvey Club, busk outside the Monico, the Haystack, the Oysterfleet [which would later play host to the ‘Dr Feelgood Music Bar’], and we won a talent competition at our local holiday camp. It was real good fun.’

  The immediacy of being able to just turn up and play was appealing, as was the fact that they could make a few quid if they played the right songs outside the pub at closing time. It wasn’t surprising that, when Wilko and Malcolm came home one summer and hung out in the High
Street during Canvey Carnival, they saw that kid (‘that kid’) – the one who had impressed Wilko so much when they’d met at the Casino Ballroom – deftly strumming his banjo and looking moody in a jug band of his own. As moody as one could look on a carnival float anyway.

  Chris was ‘doing a kind of medicine show,’ remembers Phil. ‘He had bottles of coloured water and he was shouting away, Lee was playing his three chords.’ They would be awarded an impromptu fourth prize for their efforts – the unusual sight and sound of this spirited gang of kids bashing away like a bunch of good ol’ boys had obviously delighted people.

  ‘When I saw them playing in the carnival,’ says Wilko, ‘I thought, wow, there’s that guy! They’ve followed the jug band thing. And so it went on.’

  Joan Collinson

  Canvey Island was uniquely scruffy. There was no planning permission – you could put up anything you like. The roads didn’t go anywhere. Even now on Canvey you can go down a road and it comes to a dead end for no reason.

  Lee’s jug band rocked Canvey Carnival and various talent shows to boot. In true rock’n’roll style, they are the only ones not smiling in the bottom picture. One should always stay cool, even when surrounded by grinning grown-ups in party hats and (shudder) a black-and-white minstrel.

  A postcard from Canvey, and Joan and Arthur Collinson, Lee’s parents.

  2.THE ODYSSEY (TO NORTH KENT) – AND A BIG BAD WOLF

  There’s nothing white that I draw off at all. Everything’s black. The things that inspire me to do what I do are black things. There isn’t any white rock ’n’ roll singer, with the exception, perhaps, of Jerry Lee Lewis, that I can take 100% seriously.