Lee Brilleaux

by Zoe Howe

  Lee Brilleaux in later years to Jonh Ingham, Sounds

  The jug band went by many names: the Razzamatazz Washboard Band was one; at another stage it was Chrissy White and his Mad Mates (my personal favourite); then there was the Frisco Bay Jug Band, the Southside Jug Band … When it came to equipment, resourcefulness and imagination was key, and John Sparkes and Lee would tinker away in Collie’s garage, with Collie himself occasionally peering in to make sure they weren’t using up all of his paint.

  One such creation would be Lee’s own invention of an ‘eight-string guitar, tuned like a banjo’, as Sparko remembers. They would also customise paint pots and fix candles inside, ready to hang on the end of the guitar and warm the fingers when the weather started to bite. Equipment was wheeled about in an old pram, and once they’d worked up a set, Canvey, Pitsea and the surrounding areas were at their mercy. ‘You should see how they were dressed,’ adds Joan. ‘It was awful.’

  Rehearsals would take place in various halls and front rooms, including that of friend and promoter Maggie Newman, who would also fix up gigs for the band locally. Maggie remembered Lee was always friendly to her little girl, teaching her how to play cards. ‘They often played poker when he was round,’ said Maggie, ‘until she started beating him.’

  The set they were developing included numbers such as Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’, plus ‘a few Lovin’ Spoonful and Chuck Berry covers … not really strict jug band music,’ admitted Lee. ‘We used to put in old rock’n’roll songs as well, because we were playing in pubs and we wanted to please our audience. To attract their attention for at least half of the time, we’d be playing Buddy Holly songs.’ Even at this stage, Lee knew what his priority was: entertaining other people, giving the crowd what they wanted.

  Before long it became clear that just playing around Canvey and Pitsea wasn’t enough. It was time for the jug band to broaden their horizons. And so, during the summer holidays of 1967, they planned ‘The Grand Perambulation of North Kent’, also known as ‘The First World Tour of Kent’ – a ‘very Lee adventure’, as Sparko puts it, freewheeling, Tom Sawyer-esque and involving a bit of camping in the woods. They may have been restricted to performing relatively locally, but Lee’s mindset was global and he wanted to get out there and see as much as he possibly could. ‘They’d go to a place where Chris’s dad had some land,’ said Joan. ‘There was a dreadful old caravan on there, and dozens of them would go. The mind boggles how they all managed to get into it.’

  ‘It was part of our fantasy,’ explains Phil. ‘We’d done the Map of the World, and we’d created illustrations of ridiculous machines for travelling the world. We were all very excited, and I remember meeting up at Pitsea station where we would go down to Gravesend. On the first visit to Kent, we were near some place mentioned in Dickens: “Ooh, that’s in Pickwick Papers.” I mean, you wouldn’t associate Lee and Pickwick Papers.’

  The boys located said ‘dreadful caravan’ and set up camp after having ‘walked for miles in the dark, compulsively exploring,’ Phil says. ‘It was all a bit crazy.’ At least they’d planned ahead when it came to their evening meal. The intrepid gang of troubadours (think Mark Twain meets The Inbetweeners) had bought a chicken from a farm earlier that day. ‘This bloke killed it, and we cooked it on a spit and all got food poisoning,’ recalls Phil, although in true adventure story-style, ‘we all agreed it was “the best chicken we’d ever had”.’

  As the rest of the boys retreated, exhausted and ill, to the caravan, the embers of the fire providing the only discernible light, Lee and Phil walked off their stomach cramps before returning to the camp. ‘Lee said, “Let’s frighten them”,’ says Phil. ‘I was going to make a wooooo noise, but Lee said, “No, just break twigs.” So we snapped twigs and crept around carefully. They were really scared.’ Ghost noises were too obvious. Planting the subtle idea that a murderer was homing in? That’s another nightmarish level altogether, and not implausible. It’s hard to imagine how these fifteen-year-olds – with the exception of Lee – kept these slightly risky adventures under wraps from their families. But, as we know, what goes on tour, stays on tour.

  September swung around all too soon, inevitably ushering in the beginning of another school term. Lee’s now infamous stage persona might not have been in evidence outside the pubs, as he hollered out ‘Tiger Rag’ to the clack and scrape of Rico’s washboard and ceramic one-note toot of the jug, but combine these musical forays with being back at school – with all of the simmering frustration and barely contained personal anarchy that this brought out in him – then you have the first electrifying glimmers of the figure we would come to know as Lee Brilleaux.

  Because of their morbid fascination with ‘weird religious sects’, the jug band had recently had a photograph taken outside the Assemblies of God building on Canvey to give a certain swampy, God-fearing appeal. While one of Lee’s acts of theological mockery on school grounds didn’t go down especially well (demonically painting a huge cross in white paint with a broom on the side of the school building), Sweyne’s religious studies teacher Mr Little was naively heartened when Lee and Phil told him they wanted to ‘do a play,’ says Phil. ‘He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for … We wrote this thing, and I was the Scottish Calvinist minister who tells the story, all these people are in hell suffering, and there’s God on his throne. As the people go down through the hatch into hell, they shout, “Oh God, we dinnae ken!” And he goes, “Well, you ken noo!” and slams the trapdoor shut.

  ‘I ranted on with this sermon, and then we had this thing we culled from The Grapes of Wrath – early in the book there’s somebody singing “Yes, sir, that’s my saviour” to the tune of “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” – so we constructed a few words for that, and then Lee suddenly burst into this frenzied banjo solo. It was the same quality he showed years later, uncanny. He’d go bright red with the effort and sheer intensity. The class were just gawping with wonder at this energetic outburst of banjo chords.’

  The Grapes of Wrath was a favourite book of Lee’s, and his leather schoolbag always contained at least a couple of volumes of Steinbeck or Dickens or Heller, maybe a copy of the satirical The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, and Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He would become consumed by the detail and atmosphere of the stories, allowing them to seep into his own world, taking the elements he liked and working them into his character, his speech or his clothes. Before long, and together with Phil and Crusher, he would form the dandyish Utterly Club, harking back to another time altogether.

  They started turning up at school in waistcoats, attempting to wear their ties as cravats, sporting watch chains and even homemade monocles (made from National Health glasses they’d snapped apart). Bass player Dave Bronze, who would work with Lee in the latter days of Dr Feelgood, remembers Lee telling him about his school gang: ‘a bit like Lord Snooty and his pals,’ he said. ‘They’d wear monocles so they could then pop them out in dismay. His favourite thing was popping his monocle if a teacher spoke to him. I think the “gentleman” thing was nestling in the background just waiting to get out. He was a closet toff.’

  Lee would also start a Canvey-based society along the same lines under the name of the Lovely Club, as Geoff Shaw recalls. ‘We had to have waistcoats and canes, maybe hats, a watch chain – he got us all doing this. Also, you had to pass tests, one of which was on the railway bridge near Canvey. We’d have to walk over the outside of the bridge, risk our lives. Maybe we’d roast each other on a fire.’ It’s hard to imagine how the sight of the various Lovely Club inductees would have gone down on Canvey Island. These boys were brave.

  Members of the Lovely Club would also form a short-lived and unpromising band called The Dandies, with Lee at the helm. ‘It was awful,’ admits Geoff. ‘Hideous, terrible noise.’ Lee (or ‘Lee Collinson Esquire’ as he sometimes referred to himself, even in schoolbooks) was never off duty when it came to being Utterly or indeed Lovely – Phil
Ashcroft recalls ‘hitch-hiking to the Isle of Wight’ with Lee, and as they set up camp for the night, Ashcroft noticed that Lee had ironed his pyjamas and had fallen asleep with that Utterly Club badge of honour, his prized watch chain, coiled neatly by his side.

  Together the Utterly Club flooded their monochrome school days with colour, whimsy, pranks and constant attempts to outwit those in charge, in particular Lee’s arch-enemy: Sweyne headteacher Mr Bowman. On one occasion, after presumably being, in his opinion, unreasonably punished, Lee elected to urinate on Bowman’s door handle. Sometimes monocle popping just wasn’t enough. But this wasn’t merely an impulsive act of fury. ‘He did it on the Friday afternoon,’ explains Phil, ‘so that by Monday, it would be dry. It was vindictive but focused.’

  These acts of vengeance weren’t solely saved for authority figures. On yet another of Phil and Lee’s lengthy walks, a passing cyclist gave them a two-finger salute as they trudged along in the rain. Immediately incensed, Lee sprinted after the culprit, pulled him off his bicycle, tore off his hat, and beat the boy around the head with it. The full stop to this swift and spellbinding performance was nothing short of inspired. Lee flung the cap into the front garden of a nearby house, so that the sheepish cyclist would have to undergo the humiliation not only of being pounded over the head with his own hat, but having to enter someone else’s garden to retrieve it.

  Lee could be mischievous, but his behaviour was, as we have seen, often inspired by serious indignation. On a good day, he would laugh at the rules and subvert them. On a bad day, he’d explode. At home he was treated more or less as an equal, or at least with the kind of honesty his parents believed he could handle as a mature young man,5 which made the imposition of school life all the more disagreeable. From a distance, the cultural backdrop of the late 1960s might have seemed alive with psychedelia and freedom, but the predominant atmosphere as far as Lee was concerned was one of suburban mediocrity and postwar restriction, a Britain buttoned up tight. Lee and his friends weren’t waiting for someone else to give them the answer or guide them through life by the hand. They didn’t have time for that. It was a case of constructing your own world, or getting swallowed up by this one. It’s no wonder that Lee, and Wilko, in the context of the Feelgoods, would be instrumental figures in encouraging so-called ‘punk’ attitude just a few years later.

  ‘We had the Bonzo Dog influence, John Smith and the New Sound, “Winchester Cathedral, You’re Bringing Me Down”, we used to like that,’ says Phil. ‘If we found something different, we’d bring it into school to celebrate the weirdness. Lee bought a really colourful jacket in 1967, he wore that for a while, but there was always a hint of irony. At one point he had braces like a skinhead, then he bleached his hair with hydrogen peroxide. He’d gone from his normal mousey brown to blond, you could see him from the other side of the school field. At one point we all cut our hair really short at the front like Dave Higgs [from the Hot Rods]. It was about breaking out of this stifling lower middle-class world. We wanted to be personalities rather than just pupils.’

  There were three pivotal moments in Lee Collinson’s teenage life that would steer him firmly onto the right course. The first was, of course, the moment he first heard the Stones transmuting black American music from the South. The second was meeting John Wilkinson and being lit up by the music he was playing, not to mention the possibility that he could do it too. And the third must surely be the moment Lee and Chris went to see Howlin’ Wolf play the King’s Head in Romford after school. As hard as it may be to imagine Howlin’ Wolf emerging to play the back room of a dingy East London pub on a summer’s evening, he did, and it was a night Lee would never forget.

  More ‘Crollie Art Book’ madness, plus some Utterly Club maxims. Courtesy of Phil Ashcroft.

  ‘Lee said Howlin’ Wolf rolled on the floor and was crazy, just crazy,’ adds Geoff Shaw. ‘He’d never seen anything like it, eyes sticking out, writhing, wanking the microphone – he was an old guy – it made a massive impression. I think that’s what influenced Lee’s persona, scary on stage. It was all about the sexual edge, and there was an aggression, you didn’t know where it was going. One minute he’d be on all fours, the next he’d shake a bottle up and put it in his flies and open the bottle and spray the audience. He came up from juke joints and brothels, it’s raunchy. Lee saw how powerful that was.’

  Seeing Howlin’ Wolf changed everything for Lee. ‘I thought, I don’t want to sing “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” any more. I wanted to sing serious blues. That was the way it had to go.’ The jug band was jaunty, diverting, cheeky. What Lee had witnessed in Howlin’ Wolf’s show had depth, danger, sexuality, even offering a stolen glimpse into a darkly supernatural sphere. From the way Lee himself later stalked and stared onstage to the overtly provocative movements he made, much of Lee’s own stagecraft can be traced back to this.

  Lee spoke to BBC Radio 2’s Paul Jones (of Manfreds fame) about this seminal moment, his voice strengthening as the memory sharpened. ‘That really did seal it for me. I thought, that is what I want to do, what that big black man up on that stage is doing. That enormous guy with a harmonica just controlling a thousand punters in this sweaty room at the back of a pub – that was the most exciting thing.’

  A thousand people? In the back room of a pub in Romford?

  ‘It was a big old room,’ protests Lee, before conceding with a chuckle, ‘I might be exaggerating. But it seemed like a thousand people to me.’ Given how important this night was to Lee, it’s no surprise some elements of the story might have become magnified. It’s also no surprise that, shortly after this show, Lee went out and bought his first harmonica. ‘The first day I bought it, I was playing it. I never consciously sat down and played any instrument to become a virtuoso, I just used to play for my own pleasure.’ No lessons required, just spirit. And spit.

  Lew Lewis

  When I first met Lee, I was walking down the street playing the harmonica. It was quite a rare thing to be into the blues then. He taught me a few little tricks, and he ended up learning a few bits off me. Next time I met him, I was saying, ‘I’m getting on all right with the harmonica, but it keeps drying out.’ ‘Just dip it in some liquid,’ he said. Then he just took it off me and dipped it right in the pond. This pond had leaves in it, old fag ends. ‘Oh, thanks, mate, that’s much better …’ I’d rather dip it in whisky.

  By 1969, Lee was in sixth form and Chris ‘Whitey’ Fenwick6 had gone to drama school. In the wake of the Howlin’ Wolf show, Lee and John Sparkes decided that what was left of the jug band should move forward and go electric, and they spent a brief time in an amplified blues band called The Fix, a group they frequently used to watch live. The Fix featured the late Dave Higgs on guitar and, previously, Wilko Johnson in its personnel. The Thames Delta was ablaze with rock’n’roll and R&B, and The Fix was one of the early groups to foster this scene. Sparkes also explains that it was Dave Higgs who can be held responsible for what would come later, practically casting them in their future roles.

  ‘Dave used to play in soul bands. He was one of the first people we knew with long hair and a moustache and round glasses – we thought that was really cool. He said, “You can join our band if you like.” He turned to Lee and said, “We don’t need a banjo but you can be the singer.” I used to play 12-string then and he said, “Well, I’m the guitar player, you can be the bass player.” I said, “I don’t know how.” “Oh, I’ll show ya.” That was the big change. Very underrated bloke, Dave Higgs. He was instrumental. I’d say he taught us our craft.’

  Post-Fix, Sparko and Lee used their newly honed chops to form a new group called The Wild Bunch, aka The Pigboy Charlie Band, with a guitarist called Billy and the young Kevin Morris, who would later become Dr Feelgood’s longest-serving drummer.

  ‘We got a pianist and it was more like a rock’n’roll band,’ said Lee, although it all collapsed when the pianist quit and the van, an out-of-commission ambulance with a flashing ‘Pigboy’
sign7 courtesy of Sparko, ‘blew up’ on the M1. As for the variable nature of the band’s name, the general rule was that if they were going out as a four-piece, they were The Wild Bunch, (no doubt a nod to the 1969 Sam Peckinpah spaghetti western of the same name, which would have been brand new at the time) and if they had their pianist with them, they were The Pigboy Charlie Band – ‘Pigboy Charlie’ himself being the pianist. (His real name was Vivian, which caused great hilarity. Lee took it upon himself to give Vivian a moniker worthy of an old-time bluesman instead.)

  Kevin Morris, on the other hand, was at Rayleigh Sweyne, and while he was a few years younger, he was ‘allowed’ to hang out with Lee and his mates because he played the drums. ‘I got special dispensation to smoke round the back of the swimming pool with them. It was like, “He’s only a kid but he’s all right.” I was thirteen, fourteen. Lee seemed very grown-up. I was aware of him at school because he always had a bit of a gang.’ Kevin also remembers Lee’s prefect pretence quite clearly: ‘He’d come up and ask to see your homework diary, then take it off you and tear it up.’

  Current Dr Feelgood bass player Phil Mitchell, who initially joined the band in 1983, also remembers Lee at school. Phil was in a band called Daily Male at the time, but during an early gig at Hadleigh Public Hall, they were so terrified, they played their set at double speed and finished in record time. Leaving the stage was not an option – they still had a great chasm of time to fill and the audience was getting restless.

  Lee, who had been watching from out front, wandered backstage and after a quick chat to see what the state of play was, assembled a scratch band from the audience, broke the neck off a beer bottle, put it on his finger and started playing slide guitar on a succession of standards, ‘Dust My Broom’ being one of them. One of the musicians to hit the stage with Lee was Southend guitarist Pete Zear. ‘That was the first time I really interacted with him. We had a good old time.’ And as for Daily Male? ‘Without Lee, we would have been lynched,’ admitted Phil, who humbly offered him the money they’d raised from the door. He refused it, of course.