by Zoe Howe
According to Wilko, his own songs weren’t quite doing it for the rest of the band at this point in time – ‘Back In The Night’, a song he rightly intuited would be a hit, initially failed to spark Lee’s interest (although Lee would later claim this was a favourite of his to perform live, not least because it gave him a chance to play some slide guitar). Another nail in the coffin in terms of Wilko’s relationship with not just Lee but the rest of the group would be hammered in when they discussed inviting Nick Lowe to write some material. Taking care of the songwriting single-handedly was a lot to expect for one already overextended person, also a husband and a father, but, as Wilko remembers, all of these things were perceived, rightly or wrongly, as slights and would serve to drive them further apart.
‘I was difficult to get on with then,’ admits Wilko with a rueful laugh. ‘It’s embarrassing to think about it now but that’s how it was. I’m a sensitive guy! The pressure of the songwriting, I don’t think they realised what it was like. Also back then I did want to control everything. I had a total idea about what Dr Feelgood should be. Maybe that didn’t go down too well. Sometimes I was a bit out of order – but so were they.’
The Speeding Through Europe tour would feature Lee’s now infamous white suit. This outfit would become so legendary it was practically a band member in its own right, and it would never, ever be cleaned. There was no time, after all, but the sheer filth became a feature in itself, as would the contrast with Wilko’s ubiquitous black whistle: two kings on opposing sides of the chessboard, stalking each other warily.
‘They were so fucking hot. Nobody had seen anything like Lee and Wilko since Mick and Keith,’ said Pink Fairies/Motörhead guitarist Larry Wallis, who would later write material with the Feelgoods himself. As for Lee’s attire? ‘Arguably a suit possibly only slightly less historically famous than Presley’s.’ The defiance of wearing a pure white suit and then rolling around on a dirty stage in it was almost amusing. The smell, not so much.
Lee Brilleaux in classic air-punching mode on stage.
a refreshed Lee salutes the poet Hugo Williams behind the camera. Yes, the picture is blurry, but it’s probably no clearer than Lee’s vision at the time.
Lee behind the wheel of the bus. He was a good driver, but his duties were eventually passed on to someone with a calmer disposition, particularly after he once leapt out of the van to wave a baseball bat at the driver in front, who was a little slow for Lee’s liking.
‘The main man and his poxy, stinking suits,’ shudders Fred Barker. ‘They were rank, and he knows they were rank. He’d throw them off, chuck them in a flight case and they were taken out the next night – we wouldn’t touch them! Practically stood up in the corner of the room on their own.’
As the shows got bigger, the crew expanded, as did, inevitably, the number of people who wanted to wheedle their way into the inner sanctum. The band decided between themselves to stay separate from their audience rather than mingling with the crowd. This theatrical tactic of ‘not breaking the spell’ didn’t just add to their enigma but ensured they weren’t distracted during the crucial moments before walking on stage, psyched up and ready to attack, because ‘even between the dressing room to the stage you get people wanting to have a conversation with you, right at that moment,’ said Sparko. The rising tide of hero worship that was rushing towards the Feelgoods – Lee and Wilko in particular – was all very well, but not everybody respected their boundaries. That was where Chris, Fred and Geoff came in.
While Lee was kind to enthusiastic punters – frequently citing the old showbiz ‘be nice to people on your way up …’ mantra as well as keeping in mind that the fans ‘put bread on my table’ – ranks had to be tightened in order to maintain order. Even when it came to new crew members, ‘it really was about whether they fitted with us or not,’ says Fred Barker. ‘Wouldn’t take no fools. It was a tight team. The only fools we took in were the entertaining ones that could add something to it, otherwise you’re out. It was very closed, it had to be. We had loads of guests, but they were our choice of guests that we tolerated. Wilko started getting these odd guests that no one really wanted around, but that was his choice and it was respected.’
Possibly another element that would add to the tension between Lee and Wilko would be the fact that it was Wilko who seemed to attract the most idolatrous attention from fans, groupies and lost souls, evidently hypnotised by his crazy-eyed gaze, ecstatic to have been impelled to ‘stick ’em up’ as Johnson pointed the business end of his machine-gun Telecaster at them.
‘At the end of a show there’d be twenty crazy fans,’ observed Barker. ‘Nineteen of them wanted to see Wilko, one would want to see Lee. Once you’re all in the bus on your way home, you’re all just blokes, so what? But it took its toll, naturally.’
Lee was, to be fair, more likely to give nutters short shrift rather than just tolerating or ignoring them if their presence was becoming vexatious to the collective spirit. Sparko: ‘Lee said, “If ever you get confronted by a nutter,” which you do quite often after a gig, “just pretend you’re more mad than they are. It freaks them out.” And it does. Lee would start flailing his arms about and shrieking. If someone weird was coming on to him or trying to talk to him you’d soon see them back off.’
Admittedly, most people took one look at Brilleaux onstage and assumed they were probably better off not meeting him at all. He looked like the kind of villain who’d look you up and down, bark out a humiliating list of your shortcomings, pour your own pint over your head and then punch you in the face. His dodgy-car-salesman-gone-berserk aura most likely shielded him from hassle, but the reality was that, if you were respectful, Lee would have time for you.
Family and friends were always welcome. Wilko’s friend, the poet Hugo Williams, once turned up accompanied by the poet Thom Gunn, who loved every moment of it. Gunn was further thrilled when, backstage, he was politely greeted by Lee, who then told him, ‘We used to do your poems at school,’ before launching straight into a recitation of ‘Elvis Presley’. The word-perfect performance was particularly notable because, as Lee later admitted to Hugo, he never actually liked the poem.
Lee’s old school pal Phil ‘Harry’ Ashcroft would also attend shows, reconnecting briefly with Lee during the band’s spring tour and meeting up with them at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). Lee put aside a backstage pass for Phil, gave him his first line of cocaine and invited him to watch from the wings.
‘There was a lot of cocaine,’ said Phil. ‘Lee was smoking loads of dope, and they were drinking Carlsberg Special, so when they went on they had Carlsberg, cannabis, cocaine inside them, I don’t know what else, but they were fucking tremendous. It was like being next to a nuclear reactor. I was just so proud. There they are, they’ve done something, it’s something from my part of the world that’s actually happened.’
Offstage, there was a moment of intimacy and a glimmer of the old days when Phil sat down with Lee for a conversation. ‘That was just like being at school,’ said Phil. ‘It felt right.’ Brilleaux had momentarily morphed back into Lee Collinson, before morphing straight back again. ‘I have a letter from Lee from March 1975, we nearly started corresponding on a regular basis but the band suddenly got really big, and I found it a bit intimidating, this great Dr Feelgood machine. I went to some concerts when I didn’t make contact with Lee afterwards. I was in my red loons and had long hair, beard. It was such a different vibe.’
The letter Lee had sent Phil, written during a rare period of downtime, started off cheerfully enough, making references to the tour, although he didn’t mention the fact that said tour had concluded in Le Havre under something of a cloud. It was the first time Lee and Wilko ‘almost came to blows’, as Wilko remembers, and it happened onstage at the Salle Franklin in front of a crowd of rapt fans.
‘We started to do “Riot In Cell Block Number 9”. I can’t remember if Sparko was late on the beginning, but I looked across and
said, “Where are ya?” and both Sparko and Lee said exactly the right reply: “And where the fuck are you?” Lee threw his microphone down, the drums were still going, and we’re squaring up, and the crowd were going apeshit. We got close to each other and suddenly it was like, “What are we doing? We’re supposed to be working here.” We both just turned away from each other and swung into the song. The atmosphere was fantastic. That was the closest we came to a fight. We were both obviously very angry with each other, but because I realised I was slightly in the wrong, it made me more angry.”
In the letter to Phil, Lee just conveys that he’s now back home and hoping to do as little as possible other than ‘duties’ such as decorating the bedroom and ‘visiting aged grandmother’. But by the next side of paper, the mood becomes reflective and then irate – albeit not towards anything directly connected to the Feelgoods. He is possibly just exhausted, and this has caused his defences momentarily to slip, but he opens up to Phil as he used to at school, letting rip about the people and situations that vexed and disgusted him. The letter seethes with raw memories, feelings of helplessness about the homeless, the battered wives, the wronged innocents, and fury directed at the exploitative ‘sodomites’ who had wormed their way into ‘Sweyne Idiotsville’.
Wilko might have felt pressure as the band’s songwriter, but being viewed as a leader, the life and soul of a seemingly endless party and, to some, even at twenty-three years old, an avuncular figure who always seemed to have the answers, Lee evidently felt pressures of his own that were not so openly expressed. Hence the courteous letter which soon transformed into a multi-page, existential and nihilistic rant, written as one fluent outburst with barely a correction. On the fifth and final side of paper, Lee wearily concludes that ‘it is all hopeless and everything seems grotesque … I’ve given up caring about it … I am not afraid to admit “I am a human being; ergo I am too stupid and low an animal to comprehend anything other than my own life nor that I could be wrong about that.” Sorry if this letter sounds like someone thinking out loud …’ It’s the sort of letter one might think twice about posting, one more like a furious diary entry than a correspondence with an old friend.
Lee was starting to ‘veer into another world’, according to Phil, a more showbiz world that would outwardly seem to numb some of his more introspective qualities. However, Lee obviously still contemplated things profoundly; what he chose to present to the world, especially after becoming well known, was far from the sum of who he was. He would still observe, brood, analyse, rage. Alcohol may have dulled the edges of his unusual sensitivity, as Phil observed, but this will have been a necessary protection within the walls of the ‘cruel and shallow money trench’ of the music business, ‘where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs,’ as Hunter S Thompson famously put it, before concluding with the immortal line: ‘There is also a negative side.’ Wilko admits he saw Lee as more a ‘man of action’ than a ‘thinker’, an observation which does seem at odds with the evidence (although, as Wilko said, there was plenty that Lee wouldn’t have shared with him), but it does, in turn, fit with the public image Lee put so much energy into projecting.
Lee learned not to take the industry and its associated mores too personally and he found a way to remain, largely, calm at the eye of the storm. That said, some people still managed to press his buttons. One person in particular. Wilko and Lee might have been close at first, but by the summer of 1975, mutual admiration had turned to irritation and worse, and the cracks were starting to show.
Lee playing slide guitar.
A rare sketch of Lee and Wilko, the ultimate rock’n’roll duo, drawn by Wilko himself back in the day.
Do not approach these men. Dr Feelgood in their spiritual home – at the bar – with amphetamine kid Wilko prophetically if not deliberately standing apart from the drinkers.
BRILLEAUX GLOSSARY
absolutely disgusting – tremendous, impressive (Larry Wallis remembers Lee reporting back about a shop on Carnaby Street which stocked an ‘absolutely disgusting range of foot furniture’)
as it happens – to commence or conclude a sentence or point (and to be said as often as possible. Same rule applies for jolly-up.)
beak lunch – daytime cocaine break
bit of a goddess – woman (for example, ‘bit of a goddess, as it happens.’)
‘The book’ aka ‘The Bible’ – originally either the Good Beer Guide or a guidebook compiled by the Feelgoods themselves – no doubt Lee and Chris – containing information about their favourite hostelries. This would then be kept in the van, updated according to their discretion and referred to while on the road: ‘Pass the book, Whitey.’ The aforementioned Feelgood-compiled guidebook would be left in a pub somewhere by the band’s sometime tour manager Fred ‘Borneo’ Munt (the termination of his contract would not necessarily be entirely to do with this, all the same, Melody Maker’s Allan Jones observed Sparko looking ‘distraught’ at the memory.)
bunce – money
bunch of bollocks – nonsense
the business – good, excellent
the do it yourself – off licence
extra double buzz – particularly exciting, fun
foot furniture – shoes
jolly-up – party, or any visit en masse to a public house
primo – very fine
sharpener – an enlivening alcoholic beverage
swift arf – any drink at all, could be an actual half of lager, could be a brandy
uncle – mate, fella (informal noun, as in ‘Fancy another drink, uncle?’)
A classic Feelgood tableau – Wilko is borne aloft, apparently powered by some unearthly energy, while Brilleaux, er, romances the drums. The Marquee Club, Soho.
8.ANGRY YOUNG MEN
It’s a better word than rock, don’t you think? Rhythm, yes. Blues, definitely.
Lee Brilleaux in ‘The Breeding of Dr Feelgood’, Hugo Williams
In July 1975, the Feelgoods visited Finland shortly after the release of ‘Back In The Night’, the first single from the Malpractice album. During their trip, the band were interviewed by a journalist for a filmed segment now visible on YouTube, a rare opportunity to see not just Lee or Wilko being interviewed during this period, but all of the group members (although, as Big Figure put it, he favoured the ‘morose’, monosyllabic approach). This clip makes for interesting viewing not least because it is a visual display of the now unequivocal antipathy within the band.
We can only imagine what had happened earlier that day, but Lee appears to be in a foul mood, and the way the interview unfolds doesn’t improve matters. The camera zooms in on the silver chain around his neck before zooming back out to reveal his dark expression as Wilko speaks. ‘We were the only ones playing [R&B]. It’s the best sort of music. People have been sitting around for the last five years listening to stupid synthesisers and things. Rock’n’roll’s not about The Hobbit and things like that, that’s for girls … This is for people who want to have a good time,’ he sneers in conclusion, brimming with (proto)-punk attitude. Wilko is, admittedly, always good value when it comes to a quote, but he’s already come up with a pithy soundbite before Lee has even had a chance to open his mouth.
The journalist tries to involve Lee, citing the fact that the NME’s rival, the Melody Maker, had recently caught up to the hype and pronounced Dr Feelgood ‘ones to watch’. Lee gruffly responds, with a slight laugh, ‘Well, they’re right, I hope.’ On being asked as to whether this gave them ‘some kind of certainty of the future’, Wilko steps in with a proclamation. ‘The Melody Maker, as usual, is two years behind. Now it’s nice and safe, they say we’re a name to watch … Probably means we’re not a name to watch now it’s in the Melody Maker.’ Wilko gives a smirk as Lee casts him a sharp look. You don’t have to be especially perceptive to spot that all is not entirely dandy in the Feelgood camp.
While Wilko insists they ‘never took [the tension] onstage with them’, it was that very tensio
n, whether staged or real or somewhere in between, that was proving ever more intoxicating as far as the audience was concerned. As the mercury rose during the summer of 1975, the Feelgoods only became more sultry and magnetic as they paraded from show to show, systematically grabbing rock’n’roll with both hands, cracking its neck and resetting it like some insane chiropractor night after night.
On 16 August, the band flew to Avignon, France, for the Orange Festival in a privately chartered Handley Page monoplane (during this flight, Wilko Johnson insisted on ‘having a go’ at being the pilot while the rest of the party prayed to gods previously ignored). NME editor Tony Tyler was present to document the experience. His piece would be titled ‘Oil City Meets The Riviera – And Wins’. The fact that no one had said it was a war in the first place was neither here nor there.
The festival was set in a Roman amphitheatre, heaving with in excess of 12,000 fans by the time they arrived (it seated 9,000). There was something gladiatorial about the whole affair, and the general atmosphere in turn was not a little combative. They landed into chaos – ‘the usual panic over hire cars,’ said Lee – although the band didn’t care: their ferocious tour manager Jake Riviera was a dab hand at speaking French, not to mention settling issues in whatever manner he felt would be the most effective. Lee Brilleaux viewed the maelstrom with detached froideur. ‘Silly buggers, frogs,’ he was heard to sigh as everyone around him flapped. (This may or may not have been the same occasion on which Lee suggested that France would be better off being turned into a giant golf course, with the French serving as caddies. It was, as we have previously established, the 1970s.)