by Zoe Howe
Lee Brilleaux to Rock and Folk
Aware as the Feelgoods were that they couldn’t play a cover-heavy set for ever and maintain their momentum, Wilko Johnson had taken on the mantle of songwriter and was writing original material at a prodigious rate. Lee, on the other hand, was reluctant to write at all. This must partly have been because there was one member of the band who was more than happy to take on that task, and he was doing it with apparent ease and an impressive strike rate, but Lee admitted later that he was intimidated by Wilko. Lee was passionate in his continued self-education but Wilko had a degree, plus his credentials as an English teacher. Then there were the witty diatribes of free association, the spontaneous poetry recitation … words were, to Lee’s mind, Wilko’s job. Lee too had the imagination, the gift for wordplay, ‘he had everything, everything, everything,’ protested Wilko, ‘but he wouldn’t do it.
‘Lee was well read; if I wanted to indulge in some quotation, or refer to some literature, I knew Lee would know what I was talking about. We used to just talk about nonsense, very funny. Stupid surreal things. Once he came round and we got stoned and started talking about circuses, circus horses running around in a circle, and there’d be a guy in the middle and he’d crack the whip and then they’d all run in the other direction. That was enough to set us off.’
Still, Lee would not feel relaxed enough to write with Wilko. He would occasionally contribute ideas, a line or a riff, but he would write and work in a more collaborative way after Wilko’s departure from the band in 1977. During the Wilko years, however, as Lee’s future wife Shirley ‘Suds’ Brilleaux recalls him saying, ‘I sing ’em. I don’t write ’em. I ain’t fucking Shakespeare.’ This was, to be fair, possibly a barb directed at Wilko who wrote poetry and would frequently quote the Bard. If it wasn’t, then Lee was rather over-estimating the skills required to write an R&B song.
The themes were universal and basic: love, loss, money, sex, the Delta (Thames, natch – Canvey is often a backdrop in Feelgood songs). The words weren’t always one hundred per cent discernible anyway; judging by Lee’s performances almost all the way through his Feelgood career, he largely seemed to use lyrics as more of a rhythmic device through which he could express his own visceral musicality, barking and spitting percussively over the music, vocally performing complex, mesmerising interactions with Wilko’s chopping chords – therein lay his ‘art’ (a term he would smart at, I know). Still, somehow he felt blocked. Even his mum Joan had a bash at writing some lyrics. ‘Lee always sneered at them,’ she shrugged. ‘But I’d been listening to all these records anyway, and they’re not brilliant are they, the words? They’re so silly.’16 But Lee was resolute.
‘I really felt he stood above me in so many ways, and yet he had feelings like that,’ says Wilko. ‘I think there was a thing about this university business. I don’t go on about it, but I remember him occasionally passing comment, getting a bit sarcastic about university, which suggested that he felt intimidated by that because he wanted to put it down. He was clever. He could easily have gone to university, but he didn’t. So there were all these inhibitions.
‘As for all the creative work he did [as a teenager], the poems and drawings, well, he would have kept that right from me. Oh wow, when you think about it, what was going on there? There were all these hurt and misunderstood feelings. Man, we got each other so wrong in so many ways.’
Wilko wrote with Lee’s voice very much in his head, as if he was writing the script for a pre-formed character already on the set, awaiting his lines. The songs would have Lee’s personality, or at least the one he would ‘move into’ onstage, writ large throughout – sharp, jabbing, stripped-back little songs about sexual jealousy, driving through the night, squinting at the dawn on Canvey’s sea wall, wreaking revenge on hard-hearted women … One thing was for sure, the Milton-obsessed Wilko didn’t feel ‘poetry’ would be necessary for the Feelgoods. Admittedly, Lee would probably have agreed, saying at the time that ‘you’re not exactly inspired by [Canvey] to sing about beauty, are you?’
The band had worked Wilko’s new songs into their live set, pounding them out to ever more euphoric crowds around the country; the venues were getting bigger and the bookings more numerous. On one occasion, Lee was back behind the wheel of the van on the way back from a show in Glasgow – no road rage incidents were reported, but so much speed had been consumed that even an arduous overnight journey back down from Scotland seemed to go alarmingly quickly. It was an occasion Wilko remembers fondly, because, while the rest of the band were snoring in the back of the van, Wilko and Lee bonded as the hours flew by and the cat’s eyes whizzed past, Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston17 – one of Lee’s favourite albums – booming from the speakers as they went.
‘It was late,’ explains Wilko. ‘We were tired, so I gave Lee one of these black bombers and said, “You drive, I’ll talk.” Lee was driving down the A1, really intense, and I’m talking about Shakespeare and everything in the universe, I felt great. Lee was so tense at the wheel, everyone else had crashed out, and I’m talking away and thinking, I love amphetamine. Everything just seemed very, very groovy. We were getting quite close, Lee and I, we were saying things to each other we wouldn’t otherwise have said.’
Lee to Jonh Ingham, Sounds
The first album was approached in that we were asked to go down to Rockfield Studios and lay down anything.
Sessions had been booked at Rockfield in Monmouth, Wales, from 26 August 1974 for the recording of the Feelgoods’ debut album Down By The Jetty. Andrew Lauder had employed Vic Maile to engineer and produce, a figure who would become a great ally to the Feelgoods even if they didn’t always see eye-to-eye in the studio. The bottom line was that, as Lauder puts it, ‘he was a beat-group kind of a guy. I wasn’t going to have to sit down and explain it to him.’
There was an expectation from those outside the circle that the resulting release would just be ‘a bunch of old standards. But we weren’t into that at all,’ said Wilko. This was an opportunity to shrug off the retro stamp they were in danger of being branded with and bring in a haul of tense, flinty Wilko originals such as ‘All Through The City’ (which contains the lyric that would be used for the album title), ‘Keep It Out Of Sight’, the nonchalant boogaloo ‘I Don’t Mind’ and ‘Roxette’, which would outweigh a selection of covers including a live version of ‘Bonie Moronie’,18 segueing into ‘Tequila’ and ‘Cheque Book’, written by Mickey Jupp. The aim was to capture the Feelgoods at their tough, wired finest – in other words, retain as much of a live sound as possible.
‘The whole thing was really an introduction to the band,’ Lee reflected. ‘We wanted to show what we had been doing up until then, and to give some indication of where we were going. Another reason for not doing a lot of the standards was that I felt I couldn’t do them justice on record – the originals are so great. We did try “I’m A Hog For You” but when we listened to it, it just wasn’t good enough.’
In terms of preparation, they’d been playing so frequently that they were already ‘fit for the studio’, said Figure – the modus operandi was to stick microphones in front of them and record what they were like on any given night at any sweatbox in town. Just one original Feelgood track would see some major re-arrangement. The red-blooded ‘Roxette’ we know today was rather different to the ‘Roxette’ the band had been playing live up until that point. Hard as it may be to imagine, the song was originally Wilko’s attempt to make like the Coasters and bring a little doo-wop into the Feelgood repertoire. The result was a melodic and somewhat benign number involving quite a bit of ‘shadoodah-wop’ backing vocal action from Wilko and Figure.
‘We weren’t happy with the way we’d been doing it,’ admits Sparko. ‘I think it was Lee’s idea to use that riff, which is the main part of “Roxette”. It makes the song.’ The simple, three-note guitar riff in ‘Roxette’ was in turn, Lee confesses, ‘nicked from a Lee Dorsey song’. Rock’n’roll is excellent at recycling
– it’s just what and how you recycle that matters. The new ‘Roxette’ now had an attitude that better suited its baleful lyrics, and it boasted a more interesting rhythmic pattern between the guitar and the vocals. ‘Roxette’ would be their first single, released in November 1974 with their bright, jagged cover of ‘(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66’ on the B-side.
Recording took place over a period of about a fortnight, spaced between August and November – with the exception of their stay at the residential Rockfield Studios. The later sessions were necessarily sporadic as they had such a packed schedule. Wilko came into his own in the studio. Lee, on the other hand, was not exactly in his element.
‘What was Lee like in the studio?’ says Fred Barker. ‘Go in, do one take, get out, go down the pub. But it wouldn’t really be like that because you had engineers who’d go, “No, it’s got to be done like this.” Lee would say to me, “Go out and get me some more harmonicas. You’re bored, aren’t you?”’
Suggestions to use Dolby sound reduction technology were dismissed by Lee altogether. On being asked what exactly the problem was, he quipped, ‘Would you trust someone with a name like Dolby?’ Evidently many did, but the concept did not blend well with the raw Feelgood ethic. The idea of ‘noise reduction’ was a superfluous one in Lee’s eyes – it was like being at a live show and not being able to hear the electrifying susurrus of the crowd. (This is reminiscent of John Peel’s famous distrust of CDs – on being told they cut down on ‘surface noise’, he protested that ‘life has surface noise’.)
Sparko: ‘We were all involved every step of the way, including the mixing, but Lee didn’t take much interest in the technical side. You’d have the big recording desk and usually there’d be a bit at the end, like a blank bit of counter, and there’s a thing called a chinagraph where you mark positions on the desk, marking where the faders are. Well, Lee used to draw his own set of dials and knobs on the blank bit of counter to pretend he was using them. He didn’t have much understanding of how it technically worked, but that was his fun, I suppose.’
Lee might have been turned off by mixing desks and the sterile, repetitive nature of performing their songs in a sound-proofed, brightly lit room, but the Feelgoods’ time at Rockfield would be a happy one, and this was in no small part due to the discovery of the nearby Punch House hostelry in Monmouth. ‘The landlord wears plus-fours, takes snuff, makes mutton with onion sauce, serves delicious pints of beer and they never close,’ Lee declared to Charles Shaar Murray. How could any sane man resist?
‘We had a great time,’ says Sparko. ‘We got on so well with the landlord we used to detour and go down for lunch there for years afterwards. He said, “When you lot first walked in, I thought you were bad news. Didn’t like you much.” But we ended up great friends.’
Much to their amusement, Lee, Sparko and Figure (Wilko being teetotal at the time) were invited to join the Punch House darts team. Sparko continues: ‘We said, “But none of us can play darts.” The landlord said, “But you can drink, can’t you?” And that was our in, we used to go touring around the other pubs with the people from the Punch House and be part of their team.’ Those of you alarmed by the idea of rock’n’roll’s most dedicated drinkers being encouraged to fling sharp objects around in a confined space will be happy to know that ‘there weren’t many darts being thrown,’ Sparko reassures. ‘It was just drinking.’
The Feelgoods’ notorious intake of alcohol was not yet at its peak – a later sojourn to the US would really tip them over into Olympic-level consumption – but it was already starting to cause a gradual separation. Wilko could be, by his own admission, moody and uncompromising, but his disdainful attitude towards downing a beer or twelve would increasingly alienate him from the others over the coming years.
Still, another element of life at Rockfield that would give Lee a welcome diversion would be the presence of Brinsley Schwarz, who were there working with respected guitarist Dave Edmunds while the Feelgoods were recording. ‘We had a good time with them,’ remembers Figure. ‘Lee was at his comical best and we were just taking the mickey. We were being very Cockney with them and they were a little bit posh, but they were really enjoying it.’ There was also ample opportunity for practical jokes. ‘We’d put a hoover under someone’s bed and trail the cable out of the window,’ explains Sparko. ‘Then we’d plug it in downstairs.’ Then they would wait until the unsuspecting victim went to bed, bid them an innocent goodnight and, at a moment deemed opportune, switch on the hoover at the mains for heart attack-inducing results.
In addition to their time in Wales, there would be extra sessions in September at Jackson’s in Rickmansworth, and the album would be mixed famously in mono for that cohesive ‘live’ sound, at Pye and Conway Studios in London.
As far as the decision to mix Down By The Jetty in mono was concerned, ‘it wasn’t planned that way,’ Lee told BBC Suffolk’s Stephen Foster. ‘We recorded it in stereo, same as everybody else. What we did was refuse to do any overdubs. We were suspicious of the recording studio and the idea of playing two guitars … Vic Maile would keep saying, “Put another guitar on the track,” and we’d say, “No, no, we can’t do that, it’ll destroy our natural sound.”’
‘We didn’t actually put it into mono until we mixed it,’ Lee explained to Blues Bag. ‘Vic quite liked the mono idea, but I think he was frightened he might be overstepping his brief as far as UA were concerned. When we came to mix it originally into stereo, frankly, it sounded terrible. So we remixed it into mono and it sounded fifty per cent better. Then some UA bright spark said, “Perhaps we can make this a marketing ploy and play this mono angle up.”
‘Of course, all the critics said, “Oh yes, they’re going back to mono and it’s a big …” you know, but it wasn’t like that at all,’ said Lee in later years. ‘We just did it by accident.’ Wilko wasn’t happy about UA using the mono mix as an ‘angle’, concerned that it threw the band straight back into the nostalgic mode they were trying to avoid, but Lee regarded the issue with sangfroid. ‘Looking back, [it] was quite smart really.’
Much to the band’s chagrin at the time, however, the record company were keen to print the word ‘mono’ on the cover to make a feature of it. ‘We didn’t want it to be called mono, we just wanted it to sound good,’ explains Sparko. But ultimately, what they arrived at was an album they were proud of – the album they wanted to make. ‘It was our first recording,’ Lee told Stephen Foster. ‘We didn’t have anything to judge it by – we all thought it was stupendous! We thought it was the best thing we’d ever heard. It was us on record.’
Once sessions were complete, the Feelgoods threw themselves straight into an ever more hectic gigging schedule. ‘It had become very groovy to see Dr Feelgood,’ confirms Chris Fenwick, and, as was becoming the norm, there was increasingly little time to devote to anything else. Therefore, the shoot for the album artwork had to be fitted in at the only opportunity they had. This happened to be at 3 a.m. after yet another evening’s work, throwing R&B grenades at stupefied London audiences before screeching back down the A13 to Canvey.
The Feelgoods, still in their soaking stage clothes, headed to the historic Lobster Smack pub by the sea wall with a photographer, and, looking righteous if sleepy-eyed, proceeded to pose,19 before wandering out to the jetty as dawn broke. They were shattered, unkempt and probably hadn’t looked in a mirror for a while. It wasn’t a typical band shoot. As the photographer took some black-and-white test shots by the jetty, Lee actually fell asleep standing up, leaning against the sea wall, arms folded against the brisk Estuary chill.
The initial plan was to use colour, but once the band had seen the striking monochrome shots, there was no contest. They fitted the band’s saturnine image and chimed appropriately with their inescapably old-school feel. Even the picture with Lee mid-snooze was included on the back.
Chris Fenwick: ‘For the moodiness we created, black and white was perfect. Everyone else was saying, “Are you sure, boys? Colour
’s the name of the game these days. People are buying colour televisions, you know!” But it was the right thing to do.’ Perhaps it was also taken as a cosmic sign that when the glossy colour prints were presented to the band at Conway Studios, ‘Figure immediately spilled a cup of coffee over them,’ says Wilko. ‘Straight away. It was awful. But it didn’t matter, we’d already decided.’
Scribbled lyrics to the defining song ‘All Through The City’ from Wilko Johnson’s 1974 appointment diary.
Lee Brilleaux, resplendent in his now infamous white jacket, on slide guitar.
During an era in which many recording artists were inclined to embrace rather more escapist themes than their perhaps unlovely local roots on the cover of their debut, the Feelgoods’ decision to present themselves thus was significant, even if it wasn’t completely strategic. ‘All we were anti was people prancing around with make-up on,’ says Fenwick. ‘We did play that Canvey-Island-Delta thing consciously [though]. We come from the Thames Delta, there’s oil refineries, it’s bluesy … And it had more of an edge to it than if the poor buggers had come from Swindon.’
The album was scheduled to hit the shelves in January 1975, appropriately marking the half-way point in the decade. After this, little, musically, would be the same – not that the Feelgoods could have known the far-reaching effect Down By The Jetty would have at that time. The band had, however, cottoned on to the fact that their ‘Canvey mystique’ was capturing imaginations up West, so really there could only be one way to launch Down By The Jetty, once the time came. “Bus ’em all down to Canvey, right?’ says Chris Fenwick. Throwing parties was something the Feelgoods were very, very good at. They practically had one a day anyway – the general ethos being, ‘Good day? Have a party! Bad day? Have a party!’