by Zoe Howe
‘I said to Dave Robinson, “Have you seen the Feelgoods lately? They’re really good.” Stiff were going through a bad patch; they’d had Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry”, Tracey Ullman, the Belle Stars, but they didn’t have a rock band on their roster at that point,’ explained Will. ‘Dave needed to feed the machine. He called Chris and offered the Feelgoods a deal. Then Robbo said, “And you’re going to produce it.” Right.’
For Lee, the development was ‘wonderful news’ – not only was he looking forward to working with his old friend Will in the studio, but the fact that Stiff were keen to work with the band meant a lot. ‘Everyone had heard of Stiff Records,’ said Will, ‘and he was totally flattered by the intention. “What, they want me?” He was knocked out.’
As usual, there wasn’t an abundance of original material on hand, and, as Will recalls, ‘Lee was not particularly inspired in that area at that time in his life.’ Will, on the other hand, had remained very much plugged in to what was happening in the pop world and was writing songs that, he hoped, would work for the Feelgoods. ‘I shamelessly pushed [my songs] forward.’
Birch also selected some songs to cover (including John Hiatt’s ‘I’m A Real Man’ and ‘Where Is The Next One?’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘Get Rhythm’) and he would, somehow, convince Brilleaux to try a softer, more modern approach with a view to get the band back in the charts. ‘I wasn’t interested in making an R&B album,’ said Will. ‘They’d already made fifteen of those and they were going to make another fifteen – let’s try and make a pop record. That was my take on it.’
Will’s songs were especially pop oriented, ‘Don’t Wait Up’ boasting a piano lick reminiscent of Carole King’s ‘It’s Too Late’ and a slinky pop sound that was far from Brilleaux’s comfort zone. (‘It was my attempt to be commercial,’ said Birch, adding, ‘it got on Radio 1.’) In addition to the numbers Will had presented, Gordon Russell provided ‘Play Dirty’ and the energetic ‘Come Over Here’ while Larry Wallis offered up the pacy, ‘Gloria’-esque ‘I Love You, So You’re Mine’. (As Larry recalls, if the titles made Lee laugh, that would often be the tipping point). Dave Robinson suggested ‘You’ve Got My Number’ by The Undertones, an idea which Lee was not sold on, although as usual he obligingly agreed to it.
‘When [Robinson] first suggested ‘You’ve Got My Number’, I thought he was crazy,’ admitted Lee shortly after the album’s release in August 1986. ‘I couldn’t see what he meant. But then I listened to it a couple of times and said, “Yeah, why not?” On this album, we have gone out of our way to do stuff which isn’t just old blues numbers, in fact I don’t think we do any real classic blues at all. We thought, we’ll try an experiment.’
The results of that experiment were smooth, largely light-hearted and ‘very eighties’, as Lee would say with a wince. Fellow Stiff artists The Mint Juleps were wheeled in to provide backing vocals, and the ambition to ‘go pop’ was achieved, although it would all sit rather awkwardly with Brilleaux. In direct contrast to Mad Man Blues, Lee was not following his heart. ‘The overriding view was that if somebody is prepared to stick up a budget, a producer and some material they thought we should do, we felt obligated to go along with it,’ said Kevin Morris.
‘We found ourselves recording material that was not your typical Dr Feelgood R&B. Sometimes it was augmented by other musicians while we were there, or even after we had left, session people and horns and singers and keyboards,’ continues Morris. ‘Lee definitely felt uncomfortable because he wasn’t sure whether he should be doing it; in fact we were all unsure. With this album, and Classic, the one that came after, we found ourselves in some very strange places.’
Sessions commenced at Trackside, and this time the ‘new toys’ at the studio would be utilised to within an inch of their lives. Dr Feelgood were at their best when they were themselves – tough and lean – but the album that would be Brilleaux would be a big, full-fat production number. (The working title was Southenders, inspired by the TV soap EastEnders, courtesy of Dave Robinson.)
‘Lee very sincerely put himself into the project, and where one or two of the songs were a bit of a challenge for him – ‘Don’t Wait Up’ being one of them – he did try,’ said Will. ‘We’d go in at about midday and record until about eight p.m., get about three tracks down, then we’d go out for dinner. Lee was mad for going out to eat. “Fancy another curry?” We’d had about five or six curries on consecutive evenings and it was starting to make me feel really odd.’
Lee was cautiously optimistic about his new working relationship with Stiff, and Dave Robinson had proudly proclaimed that ‘Lee is going to be my new ambassador’ – and let’s face it, if you could choose an ambassador, Lee would be at the top of your wish list if you had any sense. However, as sessions progressed, it emerged that Stiff were ‘going bankrupt,’ said Lee. ‘We thought, here we go again.’ Fortunately, the ailing label would be rescued by Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair’s label ZTT – ‘The money Frankie Goes to Hollywood were bringing in was keeping Dr Feelgood going,’ observed Kevin Morris.
Stiff launched a high-profile poster campaign for Brilleaux which featured the album’s eye-catching (and very Stiff) cover – a close-up head-and-shoulder shot of Lee in round sunglasses, hair slicked back and harmonica jammed into his mouth, looking to all intents and purposes as if his mouth was a harmonica – a play no doubt on the phrase ‘mouth organ’ and dreamed up by Dave Robinson. There was just one problem.
‘I had always been convinced he had a very big mouth, snarling around the place,’ mused Robinson. ‘But it turned out we couldn’t get a normal-sized harmonica into his mouth. I could, but he couldn’t. We had to root around and get a small one. Didn’t quite come off. Nowadays we’d have done it digitally.’
The image, plastered across town, was certainly eye-catching, but the problem was that the cover, and the album title, gave the impression that Dr Feelgood now really was just Lee (something Brilleaux would always strongly contest whenever referred to as ‘the Doctor’), and that the rest of the group had been demoted to session musician status.
‘I really regret that it [came over] as a pseudo-solo album,’ said Lee. ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ All in all, from the cover and the title to the material itself, little about Brilleaux seemed to represent the heart of Dr Feelgood. ‘It has some great songs on there, it’s produced very well, the performances are good,’ said Lee. ‘ The trouble is: it doesn’t sound like Dr Feelgood. It doesn’t sound like me singing. Who’s that guy? And I don’t think doing “You’ve Got My Number” was a good thing. It didn’t suit Dr Feelgood.’ To add insult to injury, Brilleaux failed to garner the commercial success they’d been shooting for anyway.
‘The record was only a hit in Scandinavia,’ said Dave Robinson. ‘Here we didn’t quite get it going, but we made the album, and it was like a thank you to Lee for all the effort he’d put into supporting Stiff.’ And so, Brilleaux came and went, as Kevin Morris confirms, ‘we kept our integrity live’, and several Brilleaux tracks would work well onstage. ‘The song “Get Rhythm”,’ said Brilleaux. ‘At first you’d think, Dr Feelgood doing a Johnny Cash song? Not really. But it works brilliantly. The song “Come Over Here”, written by Gordon, that’s a real stoater. Those two are the ones I’d pick out [as highlights].’
The band toured Brilleaux largely in the Nordic territories, and this meant another trip to Finland. Lee was becoming increasingly overwrought, and it didn’t help that the weather was rarely on their side as they made the gruelling journeys from show to show. A bit of on-the-road hardship had been bearable, even fun, in his twenties, but, loth as Lee was to complain, it wasn’t quite as much of a wheeze now he was in his thirties.
‘One day we had a huge journey to do by car,’ remembers Gordon. ‘Lee went, “I tell you what, I’m going to pay for this myself and fly us to the gig.” We got to the airport, and Finland, as you know, is famous for having a bit of snow. The flights got cancelled and they put us in this really unc
omfortable little bus. It was horrendous.’
The band arrived at the venue, aching and broken of spirit, shortly before they were due onstage. The road crew, on the other hand, had arrived two hours earlier and had been in an increasing state of panic regarding the whereabouts of the group. By the time the band hit the stage, ‘Lee was pretty wrecked,’ said Gordon. ‘He was so tired and so fed up that he’d spent all that money, and he was so drunk that he was just going for it. It was really funny, he was taking every song to the limit and over-exaggerating all the words, glaring at the audience, it was just such a funny night.’
The mid-1980s may have been a chequered period for the band, but a Lee Brilleaux performance was still a sight to behold, and it was often when things went awry that he would come into his own – no fuss, no hesitation, just a majestic display of improvisation. During the December of 1986, the Feelgoods played the packed-out Queen’s Hotel in Westcliff. It was an edgy gig, there was trouble in the audience, and at one point the power suddenly went off completely.
Will Birch was in the audience. ‘PA went down, place went black,’ he said. This was tantamount to dead air on the radio. The venue was crammed with drunk and, in some cases, lairy Feelgood fans; the situation was charged with all manner of incendiary possibilities. But within seconds, the voice of Lee Brilleaux rang out through the muggy darkness. ‘He just went: “Drum solo!”’ continues Birch. ‘Kevin starts a drum solo. The power came back on after about two minutes, Brilleaux goes, ‘“No Mo Do Yakamo”, one, two, three, four!’ and they just went straight into it. He was totally in command of that building. His showmanship and stagecraft was incredible.’
At home, Brilleaux was proving to be a devoted father to his spirited little girl Kelly – now two – and while he was away for two thirds of the year, when he was home, he was a hands-on, affectionate parent who rarely left her side. And yes, he did take Kelly to the Grand. ‘There was a playground there,’ said Kelly. ‘It was a way of giving my mum some time off. How great that he was able to do that. There’d be other kids there too, I spent a ton of time there. I had at least three birthday parties at the Grand.’
Lee also relaxed by spending more and more time cooking, finding quality ingredients from local purveyors of comestibles, trying out recipes and ideas sparked by dishes – street food in particular – he’d tried while abroad. ‘Musicians become interested in their stomachs,’ said Lee, largely because it is so hard to eat well on tour. But cooking would become a creative, almost therapeutic practice for him, and he’d miss the opportunity to whip up three-course meals – complete with a hand-written menu taped to the door – while he was away.
‘Sometimes I come up with quite a good meal, I’m quite pleased with myself,’ Lee said in an interview with Radio Stockholm. ‘Other times it’s a disaster. But I think cooking, and eating, is very important – you must eat well on the road. It’s a hard job you’re doing and it’s important not to eat too much rubbish. My favourite food is the home cooking of a country. That sometimes is the most difficult to find; when you go to a restaurant they try to make it international, and you end up eating steak as usual. What I’d really like to do is eat the cooking that people eat in their own homes.
‘I took a vacation in New Orleans and I learned a lot about cooking there. I went into some kitchens with people I know and they showed me how to make the special brown roux that you need to make that Creole cookery. I think my wife likes it; when I’m at home it saves her the trouble.’
And when Lee was home he liked to stay home. Visits to Soho’s Coach and Horses and the much missed Colony Room were diversions when he happened to be in town, but hanging around in a cheesy nightclub waiting to be recognised was never his style. ‘I wouldn’t go to Stringfellows.’ he sniffed. ‘I’d rather go to … I dunno, a dog meeting or something like that.’
Lee’s penchant for inventing humorous yarns would be stimulated by having a bright little daughter to entertain, and one series he would come up with would be ‘the Moggy The Cat stories,’ said Shirley. ‘And they were clearly modelled on the Feelgoods. Moggy is the singer, K-Cat pounded the drums, their agent Nigel Kerr was Niggles the Cat … Whenever he was about to leave to go on tour, he would go up to our children’s bedroom and sit there and tell stories about what Moggy the Cat did on tour, where he went, which Michelin-starred restaurant he’d go to for dinner …’ And to ensure his kids didn’t miss Moggy the Cat too much when he was away, he wrote them down in a spiral-bound notebook, complete with illustrations, for them to look through. ‘The way he wrote it, and the alliteration, was amazing.’
‘After we had our kids [their son Nicholas arriving in 1988], there was this span of six to eight years that were really wonderful,’ adds Shirley. ‘We had our ups and downs, of course, but it was a good time, and, like everyone, we didn’t realise how short life can actually be.’
After another Brilleaux Christmas with friends and family at The Proceeds, and another dry January (he’d still go to the Grand, mind, but he’d order orange juice instead), the Feelgoods were back on the road by February 1987, travelling out to Spain and then Sweden, kicking off another heavy year of shows. Meanwhile, back at Stiff HQ, Dave Robinson was already making plans for the next Feelgood album and, hopefully, a hit single.
‘Dave Robinson, once again, came up with another idea,’ said Brilleaux. ‘He said, “You should get Dave Edmunds to make a single with you,” and he said, “This is going to sound crazy” – and it did – “it’s going to be ‘See You Later Alligator’!” The old Bill Haley record. I thought, the man has gone completely round the bend.
‘But he paid to fly us back from Stockholm and interrupt a tour for twenty-four hours to make this cut, and then to fly us back to Paris to resume our tour. I thought, anyone who’s prepared to spend all this money on air tickets and hiring Dave Edmunds must have something to back it up.’
Brilleaux’s initial instinct was, as always, correct, but still, they went ahead with it, joining Edmunds at Sarm Studios in West London (courtesy of their ZTT connection) and making a ‘1980s version of a 1950s record,’ explained Brilleaux, brash synths (yes, synths, brash ones – Lee’s nemesis in musical form) and all. ‘I’m very pleased with it,’ Lee would declare, a claim that is hard to believe on listening to the single and considering his feelings about 1980s pop stylings. To make matters worse, once again this compromise would not provide the band with the success they or Stiff were hoping for.
Sessions to make the new Feelgood album were booked at Chipping Norton Studios, this time with the esteemed producer and arranger Pip Williams – providing, among other new tracks, ‘Hunting, Shooting, Fishing’, a co-write with Gordon Russell. The next Feelgood album would be titled Classic, the most finessed release in their catalogue, and, as Lee sadly would later concede, ‘the only Dr Feelgood LP I rather regret having recorded’.
The band was always great, Lee’s voice and harp playing faultless, stronger than ever indeed, and Classic is a perfectly fine 1980s soft rock release – all very well if you like that sort of thing. But this was Dr Feelgood. Dr Feelgood. There was a sense they were coming unstuck.
‘We do what we want – if people don’t like it, too bad.’ This attitude had once been in the bones of the band; it was what made them inspirational, but now the group were allowing themselves to be moulded by outside forces for the sake of a hit that Lee, arguably, probably wasn’t too bothered about anyway. It’s no wonder he was becoming increasingly unsettled – he was not being true to himself (except when he was on stage, when he could do exactly what he liked). You can see it in his eyes, in the uneasy cartoon play-acting of the ‘See You Later, Alligator’ music video, and certainly in a live TV version of ‘I Wanna Make Love To You’ – his vocal on the record is tremulous and expressive (he is miming on the TV appearance, of course) but as he performs for the cameras, Lee just looks like a cheetah on a leash, desperate to suddenly fly off at his usual breakneck pace.
‘Oh, fuck all
this pop music, let’s just play rhythm and blues!’ The words of Wilko Johnson from all those years ago may well have been ringing in Lee’s ears (not that he would have admitted it if they were), not least because EMI were also putting out Case History – a storming Feelgood compilation from the glory years to the present day – just as the band were working on Classic. Talk about rubbing it in. Or was the universe just trying to ram a message home?
‘We were taken out of our comfort zone quite deliberately,’ said Kevin Morris. ‘They were trying to make us more radio friendly. Pip Williams had come straight in off the back of Status Quo’s “In The Army Now”; they’d had a massive hit and I think Robbo (Dave Robinson) thought that the way the Quo had been tidied up, the same could be done with Dr Feelgood.’
Lee had been put through the wringer on Classic. While generally ill at ease during sessions, Brilleaux was usually a one-take wonder anyway, and that suited him just fine. Pip Williams, however, was not going to let him get away with that on his watch. ‘He made him record a line at a time,’ recalls Morris, ‘made a cassette and then said, “Now go away, learn it and come back and just sing it.” He found a way of getting him to articulate the music which wasn’t just getting up there and giving it all that. He had to sing, it was more tuneful.’
The album, released in the September of 1987, would feature the foursome looking debonair, making eyes at the camera, Brilleaux in a gleaming lilac whistle. They look as shiny and unnatural as the record in the sleeve, a handsome bunch of once rough diamonds, smoothed and buffed almost beyond recognition. Despite the album title, a classic this was not.