by Zoe Howe
‘As for the suits,’ says Sparko. ‘That was probably just before we went to London, and it was a thing we discussed, you know, to look professional. There was a book about The Hollies about their younger days; they talked about how it was important to dress up for the occasion. We didn’t want to be “gangstery”, we didn’t idolise the Kray twins – to me it was a bit of a surprise, in a way, that the Oil City film played up the gangster thing – I can see the connection now, but at the time that wasn’t where we were coming from.’
‘I looked to old blues guys that Lee had played me the records of,’ said Figure. ‘I watched these guys wearing mirror shades and being cool and just tried to emulate that. The playing came first for me but Lee kicked my bum a bit and said, “Come on, let’s try and present ourselves in a manner,” and I followed suit as best I could.’
As well as the visual changes that were taking place, the Feelgoods would also play around with stage names, partly because when it came to getting paid for pub gigs, they had to give a name to the landlord to prove they had taken receipt of the funds, and if they gave fake names, they wouldn’t have to declare the cash to the taxman. As a result, ever more ludicrous handles were given every time they were asked to sign the paperwork.
Giving people new and humorous names (again, reflecting characters from St Trinian’s, the short stories of Damon Runyon, PG Wodehouse novels and the pages of the Beano) had long been a favoured pastime of Lee’s, but another reason for these name-changing antics was that it helped avoid confusion – there were three Johns in the band (Lee’s middle name was also John). The inscrutable John Martin had long been known as ‘The Big Figure’ anyway (‘Figure’ for short) on account of his formidable stature, but it also had the requisite air of mystery. John B Sparkes became Sparko, John Wilkinson was referred to as Wilko, which led him to swap his first and second name around, making it Wilko Johnson and Lee took on the surname ‘Brillo’ initially as a bit of a joke. Lee was convinced that, after an especially sweaty show, his hair matted up in the heat to the extent that it looked like the wire wool of a Brillo pad. Wilko remembers: ‘Lee was talking about Brillo pads and then he went [in a cod American accent], “Lee Brill-O.” And we went, “YES!”’
After deciding to adopt the name for good, Lee soon decided it would be better if he ‘frogged it up a bit’, changing the spelling to ‘Brilleaux’. It was still rather droll but the new spelling had a sheen of glamour, putting one in mind of a New Orleans bluesman rather than the kind of thing one might find under the kitchen sink. Malcolm Wilkinson remembers that ‘in a fit of paralytic laughter and free association, Lee posited the idea of Wilkeaux, Sparkeaux as well as Brilleaux’. The name ‘Brilleaux’ was soon etched onto the dashboard of the Feelgood Transit van (alongside ‘Brillo Pads’ – one must always remember one’s roots). It was also changed by deed poll. This new moniker was not just a handy stage name, it was necessary because, thanks to Lee’s work as a legal clerk, ‘once you’re articled to a solicitor and come under the Law Society,’ Joan explains, ‘you’re not allowed to have another job.
‘I typed him out the change-of-name deed in my lunch hour,’ continues Joan, still working as a legal secretary at the time. ‘I got it witnessed and he had it stamped the next time he went to London.’
Will Birch, in the meantime, had been working in an office, playing drums (probably not while in the office), and trying to get a gig on the now thriving London pub rock scene. Pub rock was a Petri dish for a diverse range of acts to build a following at a grass-roots level, and the movement, as it were, served as something of a reaction to the popular stadium bands of the time. Groups such as Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwarz (featuring Nick Lowe), Eggs over Easy, Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band The 101ers, Bees Make Honey and Kilburn and the High Roads all took the opportunity to pack out drinking holes like the Kensington, the Lord Nelson, the Newlands Tavern, the Hope and Anchor and many other Victorian pubs across town. Will knew just the band that would blow the scene wide open.
‘By a complete stroke of luck, I had a friend called Kevin Pursey who worked with Dai Davies, who used to book a couple of the venues. I pestered Dai for months saying, “There’s this band on Canvey, you’ve got to see them, they are made for the pub rock circuit.”’
Lee remembered Will as being ‘very keen on reading about the next big thing in the music business, the latest buzz’, but when he urged them to get up to London, Lee was flattered, if unconvinced. ‘The idea of it was tremendous, but our reaction was that Will was being overenthusiastic,’ he said. ‘But we checked it out, and thought, well, these bands are not a million miles away from what we’re doing. No reason we can’t muscle in here.’
What appealed was the immediacy of the scene – set up, plug in, play – a refreshing contrast to the overblown pomp rock currently ruling the charts. ‘Everyone was expecting twenty-minute guitar solos and indulgence, and an arrogance which went with being a pop star in those days,’ Lee told BBC Suffolk’s Stephen Foster. ‘The fact that it took all this equipment … [so] the pub rock thing wasn’t a type of music, it was an attitude. It was: let’s get back to what it’s all about.’ It would take time for a booking to open up for the Feelgoods, however.
‘The months seemed to go by,’ says Will. ‘I remember standing in the Alex with Wilko one night. We were fantasising about what it was going to be like when we were rock stars, talking about limousines and groupies and cocaine … Then Wilko said, “I’m still waiting to get a gig on the pub circuit, it’s not going to happen,” and I said, “Yeah, it’s going to happen.”’
And it did. Will Birch finally got the call from Dai Davies, offering Dr Feelgood a show at the Tally-Ho. It was a last-minute booking, stepping in for Ducks Deluxe. Friday, 13 July 1973. Half of Southend was in the audience.
‘They weren’t fully formed yet, they were still playing “Johnny B Goode”,’ said Will. ‘But they were probably the only band at that time doing that, and they had something about them. I remember watching Dai and thinking, is he enjoying it? Does he get it? He liked it. Two weeks later he got them a gig at the Lord Nelson and that was it, they were off.’
‘People started hooking onto them,’ adds Geoff Shaw. ‘They always were a bit crazy, but in London they really cranked it up. The persona was, here was a bunch of guys who would not be very nice to go out with for an evening. They might even hurt you. Lee would be throwing bottles, lying on the floor, shagging the bass drum, Wilko was like a zomboid on rails, but quite beautiful in his movements. Sparko was punching all the time. Figure, you never saw his eyes, greased-back hair, he looked like a horrible mafioso. It was killer. I’ve never seen anything before or since as bad as that onstage. It didn’t translate to a big stage – it was still good, but in the pubs it was incredible.’
Lee Brilleaux Talks Blues
Blues songs aren’t really protest songs. I think the word ‘lament’ is better than ‘protest’. They were about basic things – love, money, lack of it, boozing and what have you. They were very down to earth. If I was going to sing it convincingly, I was going to have to be in accord with the sentiment. If white people feel comfortable singing it, let them sing it.
I think most blues singers have their tongue very firmly placed in their cheek, they’re almost saying, ‘Well, all right, this is a lousy deal, but it’ll be all right at the end of the day, and let’s have a good time anyway.’ We’re not supposed to get people crying into their beer, we’re supposed to have been enjoying themselves and having a good time.
A windswept Dr Feelgood pose on Canvey Island. Images from Wilko Johnson’s personal archive.
Postcard to the Feelgoods and a road map from Wilko Johnson’s 1974 diary. Below: Dr Feelgood shake the foundations of yet another Victorian London pub, Brilleaux channelling their old mentor Heinz Burt. Wilko Johnson’s personal archive.
5.THEY LIVED BY NIGHT
You gotta go up there and be a bit of a chauvinist bastard, a wild, violent nutcase, which is som
ething I really enjoy. I do it in supermarkets all the time.
Lee Brilleaux to NME’s Neil Spencer, June 1975
Bookings were rolling in, and it was time to expand the team to get the whole operation working as efficiently as possible. While some of the pub rock acts shambled along, blowing wherever the wind took them, the Feelgoods, with Chris Fenwick at the helm, were organised. Geoff Shaw, then nineteen, would be employed to help with the gear and the live sound, and he would soon bring Fred Barker (‘cool guy, good dresser, good laugh, could fight and didn’t take any shit’) into the mix as a roadie and also to take care of transport. Lee was often at the wheel of the van but he was not the most relaxed driver on the roads.
‘We had to stop him from driving the mini-bus in town in the end because he’d get too stressed,’ explains Sparko. ‘He actually broke the hooter. Once, there was some old geezer driving like an idiot in front of us, and we got to the traffic lights and Lee jumped out to have a go at him, waving a baseball bat at him. He wasn’t going to hit him, he just wanted to show his anger. I must stress he wasn’t a violent person. It would just be people being stupid, in the way, maybe not buying a round …’
And so, deeming it advisable to delegate driving where possible, Chris Fenwick took control. ‘Chris was the main man,’ stipulates Barker. ‘Without Chris, it wouldn’t have been a band. Proper driving force.’ Despite the group being wooed by increasingly prestigious outside influences who were keen to take over the management reins (reportedly including Bob Harris, who would give the group their first radio session on Sounds of the Seventies) the Feelgoods closed ranks and together, the band, Chris Fenwick and roadies Fred and Geoff were ‘the magnificent seven’.
‘We were tearing the pubs apart,’ says Fred. ‘It was just awesome, exhausting. Best years of my life. Lee was a total gentleman. Two sides of him: onstage, street Herbert; offstage, gentleman scholar.
‘At the time there was a lot of long hair, groovy guys, it was all “man”, post-hippy … Even the road crew would be going, “You’re over there, man.” “Don’t call me ‘man’.” It was a different attitude: “We’re not hippies, we’re not groovy, get your fucking shit out of the way, because our stuff’s coming in.” And that’s how it was. Otherwise we were a bunch of idiots from Essex who were going to be lowest on the pecking order. Well, we’re coming up and we’re pushing you out of the way. Maybe we were the first punks, the rebels coming through.’
The savagery of the Feelgood stage show was largely based on make-believe, but if any genuine trouble kicked off in the crowd, Lee had the confidence to take control. He had a natural air of commander-in-chief at the best of times. Put him on a stage and his power, apparently, had no bounds. Thankfully he used that power for good.
‘I remember playing at the Lord Nelson,’ said Wilko. ‘Suddenly this fight has broken out, there are these guys on the floor slugging it out. Then a knife appears. Lee just steps off the stage, takes the knife, and carries on singing. This was serious, one of these guys had his ear nearly cut off and Lee just took the knife off him.’
Fred Barker would be in charge of Lee’s harmonicas – although, as he insisted to me, ‘they’re not harmonicas – they’re gob-irons. You know he had a waistcoat? Kept a gob-iron in there. He used to have a bandana with all of the gob-irons in, in all of the keys. I’d have backups on the side of the stage, but you had to keep them in order, and keep them wet otherwise they’d dry out. He’d have a C, D, E and an F but if he dropped one or it broke, you’d have to have replacements in glasses of water on the side just in case. He had to have one ready to go – there was no stopping the show.
‘I used to love when he played slide guitar. Not technically brilliant, don’t have to be. I used to put his guitar over his shoulder, get him set up. It was down to timing, and there were no rules, it was just: “It’s now!” Everybody had to be completely on the ball.’
Wilko’s brother Malcolm would also accompany the Feelgoods to London as a mate and general helping hand. ‘At first I would walk around the pubs cheering and clapping from different places to drum up support, but after a few weeks that was no longer needed,’ he remembers. ‘They were pretty sensational [and] Lee was the most amazing character. He ended up hanging upside down from this crude lighting frame over the stage at the Kensington. He announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, our last number, ‘Bony Fucking Moronie’.” In front of me this rather posh voice said, “Bony who?”’
During one of the Kensington shows, he also barked out the whole of ‘Route 66’ with a towel over his face, like an eerie mask. ‘He would just do the strangest, most unexpected things,’ said Will Birch. ‘People just could not take their eyes off the guy.’
‘Lee told me that when he was on stage he could work off all his suppressed anger at everything wrong in his life, the world and society in general,’ continues Malcolm. ‘That threatening power was him letting off steam against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Wilko is the same in his way. They both played the part so well because it came to them naturally.’ (Admittedly, the cathartic nature of the live show wouldn’t always be sufficient in purging pent-up frustration. The writer Hugo Williams wandered backstage after a show at the Paddocks on Canvey to find Brilleaux standing next to a blackboard, a stick of chalk in his hand and the word ‘LIAR’ scrawled on the dusty black surface. Lee was ‘pointing an accusing finger at Figure, who was already on the floor’.)
It is amusing to imagine the Feelgoods steaming in to ‘posh’ areas of West London, kicking Canvey sand in everyone’s eyes. Rumours that the future Princess of Wales, Lady Diana Spencer, attended their shows are viewed with scepticism by then NME writer and rock biographer Chris Salewicz, however.
‘She wasn’t old enough!’ he scoffs. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ To be fair, speculation that Lady Di sneaked in and bobbed about awkwardly to the Feelgoods is one of the least interesting things about them at this time. They were startling, they were self-sufficient, and in an era of proto-stoner, prog, folk and space rock, they were clearly on a different drug to everybody else, literally and metaphorically.
Britain in the 1970s could be a dark, uncertain place. Many understandably wanted to escape altogether by entering into communion with shed-loads of psychedelics. Others wanted to stay in touch with a grittier side of life and just charge on through. For the Feelgoods, those Sunday lunchtime shows at the Kensington were fuelled by beer and black bombers. They weren’t escaping; they were engaged, fiercely present – no frills or indulgence, just pure entertainment and hard work, sweat flying off Lee in great arcs, to the extent that he had to take salt tablets after the show lest he suffer agonising muscle cramps.
Hard as it may be to believe, Lee insisted to Sounds’ Jonh Ingham that he’d ‘never been that keen on physical exertion’. Even Wilko, a veritable pub rock Nijinsky, would protest that ‘none of us is particularly athletic. We’re the kids who used to hide in the bogs when there was sports at school.’ But on stage, when it came to communicating a song, that was where Lee expended his energy. ‘I think it’s necessary,’ he said. ‘If you just stood there and sang “Route 66”, I don’t think it’d mean anything. There’ve been times when I’ve been feeling ill and I’ve said, “OK, I’m going to take it easy and not jump about tonight,” but I find I just have to.’ Brilleaux’s shouty blues style was, he would later claim, at least partly down to the fact that during this period of the band’s career, the PA systems were generally ropey and he’d have to yell out the vocals to be heard. ‘I could sing better if I laid back a bit, but I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I like shouting. It’s fun.’
Every show was conducted with one hundred per cent commitment, and there would be no exceptions – even when, during these early years, they were so skint they played two shows a night, like the hard-grafting music hall entertainers who had graced the same stages seventy years before them. ‘We’d say, “Let’s hold back on the first,” but after five minutes you couldn’t. “Fuck it
, I don’t care if I die in the taxi on my way to the next gig, this is where we are. This one.”’
This was an attitude Lee would retain throughout his entire career – even when they weren’t ‘greedy for bread. It’s always make-or-break time, however big you are,’ he’d insist. ‘I don’t think there’s ever a time when you can rest on your laurels.’ It was rare to find a band with such vehement dedication, with not one but two wildly kinetic frontmen. As many have observed, as with Daltrey and Townshend, Jagger and Richards, you didn’t really know who to watch. The press – ‘bored’, as Lee observed, with the current state of play – were paying attention.
‘We were working two or three nights a week in London, I mean, for fifteen pounds a [show], and that was for the whole band, not each,’ Lee Brilleaux told the BBC’s Stephen Foster. ‘All of a sudden one day this fella, who we later found out worked for the NME, I think it was the editor, came up to us and said, “I think you’re wonderful. I want to do a thing in my newspaper.” We said, “Oh yeah?” We’d heard this one before. “What paper do you work for?” and he said, “The New Musical Express.”’
The man in question was Tony Tyler, and before long ever more key writers were transfixed by the earthy allure of the Feelgoods: Chris Salewicz thought they were ‘tremendous. Like nothing I’d ever seen. They were distinctive, and much better than any of the other pub rock groups. They also behaved like grown-ups. There was a certain life experience there, even though they were young. Both Wilko and Brilleaux seemed like old souls.
‘They were intimidating – Brilleaux looked like someone you’d meet in a betting shop, which of course he was. Wilko’s doing his psychedelic tramlines, Figure looks threatening, Sparko looks like one of those Irish navvies you’d see later that afternoon in the Shepherd’s Bush Odeon watching a film, pissed, flared trousers and stack heel boots … but not hip ones. Then there was the short hair, the way they moved, the choice of material, it was just fantastic.’