Lee Brilleaux

by Zoe Howe

  Lee invited Kevin into the line-up on the recommendation of their mutual friend Alan Catton, who assured him he could play, and not to let his comparative youth put them off. There would be no rehearsals – they were mostly playing standards anyway – and off they went, playing rock’n’roll and a bit of Chicago blues to the good people of South Essex. Regular venues would include the roller-skating rink on Pier Hill, The Gun and the notorious Railway in Pitsea, also known as ‘The Flying Bottle’. ‘Quite a rough house,’ confirms Kevin.

  Sometimes the only way Lee, as frontman, could control the situation would be to unsettle the crowd, and his tactic of acting like a complete maniac went down extremely well. In terms of cultivating a stage identity, Lee was learning what worked as he went. ‘He’d jump out of the window and play harmonica out there, singing in the car park,’ remembers Sparko. ‘We realised then that whenever you do stuff like that, the crowd love it.’

  Sadly the Pigboy Charlie Band were doomed to fall apart (literally, in the case of the van), which disappointed Lee to say the least; he believed the group could go somewhere – they even had rather professional-looking cards printed, proclaiming their credentials for functions and the like – and he loved performing live. There were already whisperings wherever they played that the group had ‘a star on their hands’ in Lee.

  But, perhaps with a little help from his family, Lee had to face facts: this wasn’t a realistic dream. The blues boom of the 1960s was waning, it was now 1970, and prog and heavy metal had taken up where psychedelia and R&B had left off. The now clichéd ‘twenty-minute guitar solos’ and lofty rock explorations that were increasingly in favour were not the kind of thing Lee had in mind.

  Lee Brilleaux on his First Hangover

  It was after drinking eight pints of Guinness and four double rums. That was on Southend seafront when I’d just finished my A-levels. I remember waking up on Southend beach with the chap I’d been drinking with. It was a really hot day, and this was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and the beach was packed but within a twenty-yard radius of us there was just puke and all these families keeping well back. That was when I realised one has to be a little careful.

  School was out, and Lee’s mother Joan had fixed him up with a job at a local law firm as a solicitor’s clerk. ‘He’d said, “I know I’ve got to find work, but for the life of me I haven’t got a clue what to do.” I said, “I know what you think of solicitors, but if you go as an outdoor clerk, it’s quite a nice job for a lad. You go to the court in a car, go up London.” He said, “That sounds all right.” I said, “You even get to go to the prisons.” That seemed to clinch it,’ said Joan.

  Lee was sanguine about his supposed future ‘serving writs’. He enjoyed the work, the compulsory suit-wearing and the fact that he could drive the company car – a 1960s Ford Consul – on a daily basis. It also appealed to his fondness for crime novels. He later claimed to have done a spot of moonlighting as an assistant to a private detective. Whether this was true or not, it certainly fitted his image.

  Lee Brilleaux, Legal Eagle

  I was serving writs on people. I haven’t had any writs served on me. That’s one thing about being a travelling man, you keep one jump ahead of your creditors. Only joking.

  ‘I was filing divorce petitions, which, in a way, I liked,’ he mused. ‘I didn’t really think about it that much. As long as I’m having a good time I don’t really care what’s happening.’ It was hardly a vocation, but it was, at least, surprisingly ‘free and easy,’ Lee noted. ‘Like everything else on Canvey.’

  Had he ever put pen to paper himself and written a novel, the opportunities for character study were rich. Lee would often find himself utilising his sharp writing skills working up ‘cagily conciliatory letters from one spouse to another’ on behalf of his Canvey clients, many of whom, he told Hugo Williams, ‘had trouble reading and writing’.

  In the main, though, Lee admitted the bulk of his duties consisted of ‘driving my guv’nor to and from Newmarket racecourse. He’d indulge in large quantities of alcohol and it would be my job to drive him back. In between interviewing clients for prospective matrimonial proceedings, I’d be driving up and down Canvey High Street with five hundred quid in my pocket to put on the horses.’

  Not every day was ‘free and easy’, of course. On one occasion Lee was ordered to Chinatown to serve a writ on a Chinese gangster who’d been involved in smuggling heroin. Lee arrived in Soho with Chris White by his side as his ‘heavy’, their childhood roles reprised (when playing pirates in Benfleet Creek, Chris would row the boat and take care of the more physical side of things while Lee would do the talking). Thankfully business would be taken care of in a perfectly civilised manner over a cup of tea in a Chinese restaurant.

  In terms of the band, or what was left of it, Lee and John Sparkes still wanted to play together, but Kevin was still at school and their guitarist had moved on. There was no way Lee wanted to stop performing, but he decided the next venture would just be a bit of fun to raise some beer money, a diversion which would temporarily release him from the frustration of ‘the real world’. With every other band he’d been in up to now, he’d hoped for something more to happen, and it hadn’t. Little did he realise that the situation was about to reverse.

  One of Lee’s many satirical poems and his sardonic ‘Regulations for Schoolboys’. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but the loaded ‘pupils with imaginations must NOT bring them to school’ is a good one, and rather telling of Lee’s frustration. Courtesy of Phil Ashcroft.

  Here be men. And flares. Early 1970s promo shot of a denim-clad Dr Feelgood on Canvey Island, or ‘Canvey Isle’, as it is rather more exotically referred to in the top right of the picture. Left to right: a moustachioed Lee Collinson, Wilko Johnson, The Big Figure and Sparko.

  3.TALES OF MYSTERY, IMAGINATION AND HEINZ BURT

  I remember saying, ‘Even if he can sing only slightly, he’s a star. He’s a star, even as a solicitor’s clerk!’

  Wilko Johnson

  Early 1971. John Wilkinson had recently returned from a mind-expanding trail across India and was back on Canvey, family life underway, his guitar tucked safely under the bed under a thickening film of dust. Wilkinson was twenty-four to Collinson’s nineteen, but both of them had had simultaneous, if misleading, epiphanies that it was now ‘own-up time’, as Wilko puts it. Lee was ensconced at the law firm, while Wilko, complete with hippy tresses and flares, was about to start teaching English at King John’s School in Benfleet; one of the most unusual candidates to take on a class of unruly kids you could imagine.

  Wilkinson hadn’t played guitar since university; at this stage, he was more interested in poetry and painting, although this would soon change. ‘I’m walking down the road in the council estate and who should be coming towards me but Lee? “’Allo, mate!” Fuck, he looked sharp. Pinstripe suit, sideburns … man, he looked good. I was wearing paisley-patterned denims or something.’ While the pair caught up, they talked about their respective jug bands of yore. Lee filled him in on how his band had evolved into a rock’n’roll group, but that they were lacking a guitarist. Hint hint.

  ‘I’m thinking, I’ve still got my guitar … Lee didn’t have the nerve to just ask me to join. We were standing there talking for about twenty minutes and then I just walked home and thought, that was bloody mad.’

  Part of the problem was that Lee was a little inhibited about presuming Wilko would want to join his band. ‘Sparko was a shocking bass player, and I was a terrible singer,’ he admitted, although this was hardly the general consensus and, as far as Wilko was concerned, hardly the point. Lee just ‘had something about him’. But Wilko was waiting to be asked. Both walked away from each other with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction.

  Later that day, Lee caught up with Sparkes, who, after a quick chat with Dave Higgs, then staying chez Wilkinson, took matters into his own hands. ‘Sparko came round,’ remembers Wilko. ‘He said, “Look, do you wanna joi
n our band?” I said, “YES.”

  ‘I asked Dave Higgs, “That Lee, can he sing at all?” And he said, “Yeah, he’s a pretty good singer.” And I remember thinking, well, that’s it, man. Because he just is a star. If he can half hold a tune, then I’m his man! And the fact was, he had a great voice. Very edgy guy but capable of being very, very funny, obscene and witty. In those early days [we’d have] a lot of laughs. He looked up to me … he probably never knew that I had absolute respect for him.’

  The name of the new band was Dr Feelgood, which sparked mental images of a decadent and unscrupulous member of the medical profession, over-prescribing drugs for nefarious thrill-seekers. The name was also a nod to Willie Lee Perryman, aka Piano Red, a barrelhouse blues pianist who released the song ‘Dr Feelgood’ (later covered by The Pirates, Wilko’s favourite band, in 1964). Piano Red was often referred to as Dr Feelgood himself, but this lot weren’t bothered about that – they were convinced no one would hear of them beyond Canvey anyway. Roll on rehearsals, and many an evening getting stoned on some of Wilko’s strong black hash, playing records from their respective collections – Lee’s in particular having become so monstrous it was soon to force him out of his family home at the request of his increasingly desperate parents.

  After pasting up an advert for a drummer, Terry ‘Bandsman’ Howarth, fresh from the army and living in Benfleet, spotted the notice and briefly joined before signing back up to army life to play in the ‘tank band’ instead. But a run of dates in Holland had been secured, thanks to Chris Fenwick, and a drummer was required quickly, so Wilko brought in his old friend and fellow Canvey-dweller John ‘The Big Figure’ Martin. Martin had been playing drums with pop bands around the country, including a group called Finian’s Rainbow, or ‘Flanagan’s Flamethrower’ as Lee preferred to call them. John shared their absurd sense of humour (‘Sorry I’m late, I was cutting the kitchen in half’) and was more than happy to use his downtime playing something other than chart music. ‘Wilko dragged them over to my caravan where we proceeded to negotiate,’ said Figure. The definitive Dr Feelgood line-up was complete.

  ‘As soon as we had a rehearsal, it was just magic,’ remembers Figure. ‘Lee seemed fairly shy at the beginning. But as we got to know each other, he came out of his shell. He showed me how to drink properly and appreciate real ale. But how he often appears on stage, like a menacing growler, that wasn’t him at all. He was a very nice guy, he had time for everybody.’

  Musically, Wilko introduced a choppy, beat group sound, while Lee brought a pure blues influence to the table, and the combination was fresh and exhilarating rather than retro and staid. They still practised rock’n’roll and pop covers in an attempt to keep the punters happy, but something special happened when they simply played the music they loved. Singing ‘Heartbeat’ (‘Can you imagine Lee singing that?’ asks Wilko, still incredulous more than forty years on) to an indifferent audience on a Sunday afternoon in Pitsea was starting to pall. ‘We were having a rehearsal and Lee put a Little Walter record on,’ remembers Wilko. ‘I said, “Oh, fuck all this pop music, let’s just do this stuff.” Which is what we did.’

  Lee needed no persuading. As far as he was concerned, even playing rock’n’roll was a compromise. He’d only conceded to playing ‘rock music’ to secure the band some gigs. R&B was everything, and Lee was a purist. ‘I was snobbish,’ Lee admitted to Sounds’ Jonh [sic] Ingham in 1975. ‘To me, [rock’n’roll] was the stuff the generation before me were into. I used to half send it up. My uncle was into Elvis, he had a silly haircut and you know … fucking rubbish. But after a while I started to get into it, and [it was] fucking great. Then I started to feel really guilty.’

  One afternoon while strolling on Canvey, Lee spotted a face from the not too distant past – that of his childhood friend Geoff Shaw. He’d recently come out of Borstal – ‘I just decided to be a bit bad for a while,’ he says airily. ‘Lee loved that I’d been to Borstal. He was fascinated by the bad-boy thing. He wanted to know about the hierarchy, the language of the badass people: what do they do? What’s it about?

  ‘When you think about it, blues came out of a primitive environment. Most musicians would carry guns and knives, and in the South, at most of the dances, someone would get killed. The women would poison the men,8 this is what they did. Lee was fascinated by that. He wanted to know everything. He wouldn’t just take things on face value.’

  While the pair caught up, Lee told Geoff about the new band he was in with Sparko, and invited him to come and see them play. ‘I’d come out of this environment where even the tough guys in prison were listening to Gentle Giant, Yes, Gong, Rod Stewart … Dr Feelgood were weird and really shouty. It was hard-arse, my ear wasn’t attuned to it, but it was definitely interesting. This was before punk; everyone else was singing about oak trees and swans.’

  After the gig, the band took a stunned Geoff back to Wilko’s house where they put on Chuck Berry and Little Richard albums, turned up the volume as far as it would go, and smoked ‘ridiculous amounts of weed,’ says Shaw. ‘I mean, I smoked a bit of weed, but they were just off the Richter scale. I was sitting there witnessing this craziness, and they’d be playing this raunchy R&B really loud and just getting out of their minds. It almost scared me, but I liked it. Some of the records they played, I thought they were being ironic. Gimmicky R&B songs, ‘Riot In Cell Block Number 9’. After a few more gigs, I started to get the hang of it, and it was fantastic. Fierce, bit sinister. It was a spectacle. The alternative was to go to a disco – so boring.’

  Dr Feelgood spent quite a lot of time ‘grubbing around the pubs’, as Lee put it, even sending out circulars offering to play ‘anywhere for nothing or, at the most, expenses’ to increase their following, but that golden opportunity to play abroad for the first time was looming ever closer. Chris had recently attended the wedding of a fellow drama student over in Holland, where he met a small-time entrepreneur who had just set up a music agency. Chris proclaimed himself to be an in-demand DJ, bigged up the Feelgoods and blagged them some gigs that May, well and truly securing his own position as manager in the process. What followed was a short tour in Chris’s ramshackle van, which attracted no small amount of attention from the Dutch police, and it was often Lee at the wheel, himself and Figure being the best drivers.9

  They played a tight run of dates, drank, smoked, were decidedly merry, and the whole shebang was, as Chris put it, ‘fun with a capital F’. This was their first tour together as Dr Feelgood, and the band’s proficiency and stage presence suddenly ramped up several gears as a result of this intense stint of playing live. ‘Now we were playing twice a day for a week,’ said Sparko. ‘And as they say, one gig’s worth a hundred rehearsals.’

  It was a shame, therefore, that just as Dr Feelgood was turning from, in Sparko’s words, a ‘crap amateur local band’ into something that could be a going concern, Lee announced on the boat back that he was planning to quit and turn his attentions solely to a legal career. Not that there was any way Wilko would let Lee throw away his future with a ‘proper job’.

  ‘I remember us talking about this,’ said Wilko. ‘He had his legal exams coming up and I was saying, “Come on, man, I wanna go for it – I’m twenty-four, but you’re nineteen, for God’s sake.”’

  ‘Lee was being torn in half,’ remembers Joan. ‘Something had to give. He came to us, my husband and me, and explained it all, and he felt guilty because we’d supported him [while he studied for his exams]. He said, “I’ve got to make a decision – go on with the law or Dr Feelgood. It looks as if it’s taking off.” We said, “Which makes you the happiest?” He said, “Dr Feelgood.” So I said, “Well, there’s your decision made.” The boss didn’t take it quite so well.’10

  ‘I quite enjoyed my days as a lawyer’s clerk,’ said Lee, ‘but the idea of being in a rock’n’roll band sounded better.’ Damn right it did. After all, what young man in his right mind, as Lee later expressed with a twinkle, ‘would turn down foreign trave
l and crumpet?’

  Further foreign travel would have to wait (crumpet, on the other hand …), but before long the Feelgoods would be keeping their skills sharp on the Southend pub circuit and with a residency at the Cloud 9 (later known as Bardot’s) on ‘Canvey’s Golden 100 Yards’, as guitarist Pete Zear describes it – the short strip by the amusements, just up from the Monico pub.

  Local Feelgood aficionado Hugh Cumberland remembers hearing from ‘some of the cooler kids at school about this great band that they went to see at the Cloud 9. My sister came home one night raving about them – apparently Lee had slipped the mic down his strides in the middle eight and couldn’t get it back out in time for the next verse so he sang it cross-legged on the floor with the lead sticking out of his trouser leg.’

  Another new live outlet for Dr Feelgood would be the Esplanade on Southend seafront. A regular gig night had been set up by future Kursaal Flyers Paul Shuttleworth and Will Birch, who had also played drums in local 1960s band The Flowerpots with Wilko Johnson. The pair had been looking for gigs for their own band, then a country rock group called Cow Pie, and had finally decided to take matters into their own hands.

  Birch takes up the story: ‘This would be the spring of 1972. We put a gig on once a week, free entry. We played there, Mickey Jupp [played there],11 and then Wilko got in touch and asked if the Feelgoods could play there. That was when I first met Lee, Chris and Sparko.’ Will would play with the Feelgoods at their Esplanade debut as Figure was playing with ‘Flanagan’s Flamethrower’ for the first part of the evening.