by Zoe Howe
On the same trip, coked up after several ‘beak lunches’, the boys went down to the Edinburgh nightspot Tiffany’s, where Lee became incensed by the sight of a fellow drinker’s kipper tie,37 yanking it as he snarled, ‘A tie shouldn’t be thicker than your finger. That is a bleedin’ bedspread.’ Shortly afterwards, during an in-store appearance to sign Be Seeing You in a record shop in Aberdeen, Jones remembers in his much loved Stop Me … column in Uncut that, before long, ‘Lee gets into an argument with someone who tells him music should be free. “No fuckin’ go, mate. Rock’n’roll is a business. We need money to live.” As he wandered off Lee was heard to mutter, ‘Overgrown fucking gerbil. If I had a hammer handy I’d have caved his head in. Anyone fancy a drink?’ The angry young man hadn’t quite disappeared, and the startling transformation from a shy and retiring gent to a crazed individual with a purportedly casual attitude towards violence didn’t exclusively happen onstage, depending on the chemicals and circumstances involved at the time.
They were forcing themselves to go further on this tour, aware they had more to prove, and the shows were duly ‘psychotic’, Allan Jones noticing with alarm how haggard the singer looked post-performance: ‘Brilleaux told me that some nights he feels uncomfortably close to death, so ferocious is the intensity [of the show],’ he wrote. ‘Tonight looks like one of those nights.’
It would take some control to cope with the next run of dates without committing multiple homicide. What was about to kick off would surely make Brilleaux long for the kipper ties of Edinburgh and the ‘fucking gerbil’ of Aberdeen. It was time to board the plane and make for the States, where they would be supporting the prog rock band Gentle Giant on their Missing Piece tour – a mystifyingly bad idea, it has to be said. Punk and prog were pitted against each other in the music press – you either liked one or the other – and Dr Feelgood were almost doomed to fail no matter how well they performed. It wasn’t out of the question that whoever booked the tour knew the band’s contract with CBS was soon to be terminated, and just no longer cared enough to put the band with someone appropriate. The Feelgoods’ touring experience this time around would also be somewhat different. There was less of a budget, and less confidence all round. Lee, as the band’s leader, worked hard to remain pragmatic and keep up the band morale, but he had to admit that after having ‘made it’ in the UK, starting all over again and eschewing ‘luxuries’ like having one’s own hotel room with a shower could be hard.
‘Out there they’re conditioned to having everything hyped up, and believe me, we were hyped up something wicked,’ said Lee. ‘No wonder a lotta kids were confused. We made a half-hearted attempt to go along with it – whatever it was, but we quickly realised it was destructive. Images can be useful to a point, but they can be dangerous if you’re stupid enough to start believing in them.’
Gentle Giant were ‘gentlemen’ to the Feelgoods – Lee was always keen to point this out – but their audience were, in the main, decidedly unpleasant, and made their disapproval of the choice of support very clear. ‘We had a rough time of it. I was getting worried,’ said Lee. ‘People were throwing things and they’d hit you in the eye, it was frightening.’ Without fail, the crowd would yell for the headliners to come on within minutes of the Feelgoods starting their set. On one occasion, Lee cracked and was heard to yell, ‘OK, you’ll get your bloody Gentle Giant!’ before storming off stage mid-song. Various members of Gentle Giant would take Lee aside on more than one occasion to ask why Dr Feelgood continued to put themselves through it.
‘You come off stage very angry,’ said Lee. ‘You feel like killing all of them. You hate them, and then you calm down and see the funny side. It was ridiculous – drive five hundred miles to have people slag us off.’ It was an isolating situation, no doubt felt all the more keenly because, back home, Stiff Records’ Live Stiffs Tour had commenced, featuring the Feelgoods’ mates and contemporaries (Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Elvis Costello and Wreckless Eric) basically having a party onstage every night.
Lee, rightly determined to extract something positive from the situation, was also convinced that the hellish slog of being abused by thousands every night had pulled them up. The UK tours had been going so well, Lee confessed they might have become a touch complacent. ‘It’s all very easy if you become successful in one country. You start walking around with your head in the clouds. You’ve got to go somewhere you don’t mean nothing. It can be a jolt to the ego. If you can get over that, it’s a good way of making a band work hard, do what it had to do in the first place – winning over audiences.’
They also had the opportunity to return to New York and play the punk club CBGB; here they would be treated as heroes rather than howled at by outraged prog lovers, and photographer Ebet Roberts’ images from the end of the show display an unusually boyish-looking Lee gazing calmly down the lens with a hint of a smile.
All the same, by the end of 1977, a supremely stressful year for the Feelgoods all told, the band would return to England emotionally bruised, exhausted and minus a US record deal. Drowning his sorrows in the company of Larry Wallis, Lee let slip the positive, dignified front he reserved for press interviews, concluding flatly: ‘The septic tanks?38 They don’t like us and we don’t like them.’
The chaps might have needed a little time licking their wounds – not long, mind – but 1978 would see a reversal of fortunes for the new lineup. Before long, Lee would even have no small reason to gloat in the face of the doubters and cynics convinced it was a matter of time until they folded without Wilko.
The mission for this new year was to head back to the continent as quickly as possible, where they were loved and missed. A series of events awaited, including Belgium’s Rock & Blues Festival in Werchter alongside Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and Rockpile. This show would largely be memorable for Lee because the Feelgoods and Rockpile had been travelling together in the same van, and ‘gentleman as ever,’ Lee remembered, ‘I closed the [van] door and slammed Dave Edmunds’ fingers in it. I thought, oh my God, one of the finest guitar players in the western hemisphere, and I’ve just chopped his fingers off.’ Lee looked over at Nick who simply stared, horror-struck, which probably didn’t help. Fortunately this would not mark the end of a prestigious career and Edmunds would, somehow, play on.
As usual, the live shows would give the Feelgoods a chance not just to promote their most recent output, but to polish up new material. They wanted to make a killer new album that would chainsaw its way through any negativity and put them, if not back on top (they were realistic – they knew they’d gone from being ‘extremely hip, the bee’s knees’, as Lee put it, to being leapfrogged by the punks and new wavers) then at least in a stronger position than before. They were determined to build on their post-Wilko catalogue and prove they could still make the operation work on their own terms.
Plans for Dr Feelgood’s next album were underway, and if Be Seeing You was reflective of the band’s insularity, warm-blooded pubbiness and sandpapery charm, its follow-up would be a harder, shinier affair. The fact that it would be called Private Practice gave it a loftier aspect (or saucier, depending on which way you looked at it), and lined up for the job of producer was Martin Rushent, who had a longstanding relationship with United Artists and had previously worked with Jerry Lee Lewis, The Stranglers – great admirers of the Feelgoods – and Buzzcocks among others. It made sense to pair the ‘godfathers of punk’ with such a producer, but sadly it wasn’t to be. Shortly after sessions began at Eden Studios in Chiswick, West London, Rushent was taken ill with hepatitis, only working with the group on the Brilleaux–Mayo co-write ‘Every Kind Of Vice’.
Andrew Lauder suggested the producer Richard Gottehrer, who had previously worked with Richard Hell and Blondie, as a replacement for Rushent. After ‘checking the guy out’, Lee was satisfied. Gottehrer was in and work could continue.
The Feelgoods, as we know, were always prepared. When on the road, for example, when fuel strik
es threatened to strand many a touring outfit, Dr Feelgood kept jerry cans of petrol in the van. And when it came to that other kind of fuel, namely beer, there was no way they were going to rely on whatever happened to be on hand. Rather, kegs of locally brewed and extremely potent Canvey ale were transported with them to West London for the Private Practice sessions. McVitie’s chocolate biscuits provided the solids until the band could break from the studio to get a curry late at night. ‘Their stomachs [were upset] most of the time,’ remembered Richard Gottehrer, as well he might.
In addition to his status as producer to the great, the good and the ineffably cool of New York’s new wave cognoscenti, Gottehrer was also a member of 1960s band The Strangeloves, a garage rock trio – but not just any garage rock trio. The Strangeloves were a band of New York songwriters and producers who pretended to be three sheep-farming brothers from Australia, who went by the names of Niles, Miles and Giles Strange – just the sort of thing that would appeal to Lee’s sense of humour. When ideas for covers were being knocked about, Gottehrer suggested The Strangeloves’ ‘Night Time’ and showed them ‘his way’ on the piano. ‘We tried but it wasn’t working,’ said Lee. ‘So he said, “OK, you do it your way.”’ The Feelgoods kicked off by jamming the groove, Lee singing along all the while, and then, as Lee put it, ‘I just jumped out of the way and said, “Keep going.”’
Other songs on the record would include ‘Take A Tip’ (which pays tribute to various Feelgood chums including then Clash tour manager Johnny Green), written by Gypie and Lee, and ‘Sugar Shaker’, a wry song that tells the tale of ‘losing your faith in human nature’ while propping up a bar. (Doesn’t sound like much of a jolly-up to me.) The band suggested including their current encore number, the Eddie Floyd song ‘Things Get Better’ – a rare low-key moment of warm-hearted, Jezebel-free romance in the Feelgoods’ repertoire (make the most of it) – and the whole album would open on a hard-boiled shuffle straight from the pen of Mickey Jupp, ‘Down At The Doctors’. It was crammed full of sex, drugs (about a ‘Dr Feelgood’ character dishing out ‘shots of R&B’ at all hours as if they were flu jabs), fat guitar hooks and underlined by a heavy groove. It was, as many Feelgood fans well know, also to feature eight bars of piano. Lee explains: ‘Richard, God bless him, he’s not the world’s greatest piano player, right? He said, “I’m going to put some piano on it, man!” OK … so I shouted out, “Eight bars of piano” to give some atmosphere and he was going to dub on some piano afterwards. He did dub it on. We mixed it out!’
What is especially amusing is that Lee’s call for ‘eight bars of piano’ would be deliberately left on the track, and indeed Lee would say the words live onstage and during television performances, always preceding eight bars during which the band, totally straight-faced, would vamp purposefully and accompany the imaginary keyboard solo. ‘Lewis Carroll would approve,’ noted Charles Shaar Murray, adding that ‘eight bars of piano’ became something of a catchphrase after the single’s release in September 1978, with his NME co-worker Danny Baker becoming ‘positively besotted with it. “A definite case of eight bars of piano,” he would say, when anything which had been promised failed to materialise.’
During sessions, the Feelgoods had developed a strong rhythm track based on a riff Gypie Mayo had come up with – the kind of hard-hitting riff one could happily do ‘The Ace’ to and not feel remotely ashamed – but, as Lee recalled, ‘we were having our usual trouble writing lyrics, so we called in the man who can write words for every occasion, off the peg or made to measure’. The Feelgoods played Nick Lowe the backing track, gave him a whisky and sent him away. Twenty minutes later, Lowe returned with the finished song.
‘People say, “that Nick Lowe writes songs on the back of a fag packet”,’ said Lowe. ‘But I think on this occasion I actually did. They cut the song that night and off it went.’ The song would be ‘Milk And Alcohol’, inspired by that illusion-shattering night in LA that Lowe had spent with the Feelgoods, watching an ageing John Lee Hooker trudge through a lacklustre show (‘main attraction nearly dead on his feet’) – a hero long past his prime. The song, sparse and penetrating, basically tells the story of that evening right down to the Feelgoods’ arrest after going through a red light. It was perfect.
Richard Gottehrer observed how Lee simply read through the words a couple of times, stood up and prepared to record his low-key growl of a vocal take. ‘I said, “How about a couple of run-throughs first?” but Lee said, “No, no, I’ve got it.” There he was standing with a pint of beer and his biscuits in his other hand and holding the lyric out in front of him and he just sang it. That was it; he just sang it. I asked him, “How did you do it?” He just told me, “I know the story.”’
The track would take the Feelgoods veering into lower-gear, headbanging mainstream rock territory, but, Lee insisted, ‘I’ve got no regrets. I’ve never regarded Dr Feelgood as a purist rhythm and blues band, we are a rock’n’roll band that plays blues.’ ‘Some of [the record’s] a bit more laid back than what we’ve done in the past,’ Lee would explain to Allan Jones. But it’s not like JJ Cale on mandies39 or anything.’
During these West London sessions, the band would cut two tracks under the name of the Oil City Sheiks with Lew Lewis and Jools Holland, who, with Squeeze, had supported the Feelgoods in previous years and was always touched by how kind the band were to them. When he received the call to join the band and lay down some keyboards, he needed no persuasion.
‘They were all really nice to us – they didn’t need to be,’ remembers Jools. ‘They were all what you would call proper gentlemen. I remember once being on the side of the stage, about to go on. Lee was going to watch us, and he said, “Good luck.” He had a Mac on, he looked like a private detective from some 1960s crime novel. I said, “You’re nice and wrapped up there.” He said, “Well, don’t think I’m an old mum, but you can’t have enough layers on, can ya, mate?” As I went on stage to this pogoing crowd, I thought, I doubt they’d realise that’s the conversation myself and Lee have just been having. Lee always made me laugh. He had huge volumes of charm. It was that understatement, and mixing the mundane with the extraordinary.’
The A-side of the single they would record together would be ‘Don’t Take But A Few Minutes’, written by the assembled ‘Sheiks’. ‘It was all verging on the edge of chaotic,’ remembers Jools, ‘but they just pulled it together. The Big Figure had this Dodge Challenger car. I’d never been in anything so amazing, and he gave me a lift home in it. I remember being propelled through the narrow roads of Bermondsey in this car at a speed you just couldn’t believe. And to be honest, we all got right off our nut in the studio, which I never really did before, and then I got a lift home. It was just great.’
Back to the main task in hand, the front of Private Practice would feature a close-up of a deranged-looking ‘doctor’ looming over some poor victim – us – with a medical gas mask (‘We found him in an actors’ catalogue,’ said Lee. ‘He looked crazy enough.’) The artwork on the rear shows our shifty heroes, suited up and looking grubby and murderous, heading towards their ‘surgery’ on Harley Street, a pretty nurse waiting anxiously on the steps (a similar scene is displayed on the front of the ‘Down At The Doctors’ single). On the street is one of ‘Steve’s Cabs’, Lee’s preferred taxi company, all the way from Canvey Island (one would hope they waived the fare), and a much used service indeed, as Lee would often require assistance transporting himself home from the Jellicoe after taking a few too many sips of the healing waters.40Come October 1978, and the album would be launched in time-honoured Feelgood fashion, a liver-blasting bacchanal at the Admiral Jellicoe. But this would be a party with a difference. This would be a party with strippers, and their presence would engender a mixture of, from a safe distance, laddish cheer, and from a less safe distance, embarrassed consternation. Jones recalls everyone suddenly moving back when the women bounded in, as if fearing a demand for audience participation. The mood relaxed when Lee and Lew polit
ely invited them to play a game of pool.
Chris Fenwick proudly announced that the following week ‘we got album of the week in three papers, which just goes to show’, although it would be unfair to assume this hallowed position was merely clinched, so to speak, by the presence of breasts jiggling about in cupless bras as the record played. The ‘solid rock’, even metal-inclined sound of Private Practice, seemed to rejuvenate the Feelgoods and, as NME’s Phil McNeill, unimpressed by Be Seeing You, wrote, ‘Brilleaux’s performance is simply superb … evidently they’ve been practising in private. And they’re still the best-looking band in the land.’
The Big Figure
While on tour in Yugoslavia – ‘Milk And Alcohol’ was in the Top 10 there – we were dining in a government-sponsored restaurant. The staff were all trainees. We were playing just down the road, a ten-minute walk.
The orders got completely confused – probably our wine starter wasn’t helping – anyway it took hours, but food comes first. By the time we’d finished, our government-installed guide said we were late … so, full of whatever it was, we arrived at the gig in a bit of a sweat, only to be confronted by a gun-waving doorman refusing entry to us. After a second’s thought, Lee confronted him, waved his gun away, told him not to be so ridiculous and gained entry, with us as the battering ram.
You see, it’s not all chocolate and roses.
Lee Brilleaux sporting a grinning Dr Feelgood tie-pin. When it came to his various outfits and accessories there was often, as Lee’s old schoolfriend Phil Ashcroft observed, ‘a sense of irony’.
Lee looking understandably exhausted just after coming off stage during the Be Seeing You tour in Scotland. Melody Maker writer Allan Jones, who accompanied the band on the tour (much to the chagrin of his liver), recalls Lee telling him that some nights after a show he felt ‘uncomfortably close to death. This looked like one of those nights.’
