by Zoe Howe
Lee in full ejaculating-beer-bottle mode – à la his hero Howlin’ Wolf – at CBGB’s, New York, 1977. Note the righteous heels … He was already over six feet tall in socks. (Support act The Ramones were understandably ‘nervous’ in his presence.)
14.THE CALL OF THE WILD (PARTY)
The idea of machinery making music is interesting and obviously it has a place in the society we live in. But I also think we need raw basic rock’n’roll in our lives, with human feeling. If you hear BB King just play guitar and sing, there is energy and emotion there. You could get a machine to make the same notes but it wouldn’t sound anywhere near … not to me anyway. That music stirs my soul.
Lee Brilleaux, Radio Stockholm
The Feelgoods promoted Private Practice with a typically relentless European tour, fitting in a session for John Peel and a BBC in Concert recording along the way. Lee in his denim and Aviators, shoulders back, head forward, still mean, still drunk, still sexually intimidating the drum riser, charged forth with his band of (really rather nice) villains – pushing, pushing, pushing the record, pushing the sound, pushing the band further and further, his frenzied fist shaking practically generating power and speed in its own right. ‘Let’s have another fast one, eh?’ But Lee’s manic desire to propel them forward, faster and faster, could cause the music to suffer, as Figure had warned, and the band were becoming exhausted.
A few casual appearances in an intimate club in Spain before Christmas finally convinced Brilleaux to cool it. The London shows at Hammersmith Odeon, which had taken place on 28 and 29 October, ‘weren’t very good. Well, it’s the old adrenaline. It’s what Figure keeps going on about, and he’s perfectly right. The temptation is to play loud and fast all the time. We played in a club in Ibiza, jammed and laid back a lot. We learned a lesson from that. We’ve not slowed down but we’re letting things swing a little more.’ Still no risk of coming over all ‘JJ Cale on mandies’ then.
Any concern onlookers may have had that the Feelgoods were taking a chance to kick back would soon be smashed into the water, however. In the New Year of 1979, the tough but radio-friendly ‘Milk And Alcohol’ went straight into the charts, peaking at number 9. Cue appearances on Top of the Pops, myriad interviews and that aforementioned gloating. ‘For those critics who said, “Oh, they’ll never be the same without Wilko,” it was nice to be able to say, “Well, at least we got a top ten single with Gypie.”’
Lee insisted he ‘wished Wilko the best’ when pressed by journalists hoping to stir up gossip, but at this stage at least the scar tissue was still tender and a streak of competition still burned. ‘They were doing really well but there was always this sore point,’ Shirley admits. ‘Whenever they saw Wilko succeeding or releasing something.’ Wilko’s debut album with his band the Solid Senders had come out around the same time as the chart-bothering (number 48) ‘Down At The Doctors’ a few months earlier – a coincidence, but the timing was certainly noticed by the music papers.
‘Down At The Doctors’, incidentally, would have its own music video; in it we see the band playing in a dimly lit studio, and it’s probably one of the few music videos of this era to show a group, all five o’clock shadow and sleep-deprived squints, sweating, chain-smoking and, in Gypie’s case, wiping his nose on his hand as Lee, truculently lashing his mic lead about like a bored psychopath, oversees the scene while managing to look simultaneously fervid and as if the whole thing is a bit of an inconvenience. It’s magnificent. Go and have a look at it on YouTube right away if possible, then come back and we’ll continue.
Lee Brilleaux
The Feelgoods were an accident – like getting a parking ticket, throwing it away, having the computer foul up and never getting fined. If you’ve got that kind of luck going for you, it’s best to stick with it.
Dr Feelgood were something of an aberration; they were not ‘pop’ but key members of the pop press were still hooked, still watching their every move, still intensely interested in what they were about to do next – and the band had a Top 10 hit in the ‘pop’ chart without compromising their style during a time of seismic change. They’d never been in fashion, as Lee always said, so they’d never be out of fashion. That said, Lee Brilleaux would express revulsion at the fact that rock’n’roll was now being taken over by electronica. At least the punks were using guitars. As popular music became more processed, Lee Brilleaux wrinkled his nose, slammed the door and poured himself another drink.
Synthesisers were not for Lee. Organs, pianos – he could work with those, but these apparently cold, soulless machines were anathema to him, representing something rather different from the R&B-loving, snuff-taking, detective-novel-reading world that Lee had worked so hard to create. In conversation with NME’s Charles Shaar Murray, Lee summed up the sound of German synth pioneers Kraftwerk: ‘I thought it was a load of ice cream vans gone wrong.’ Murray was exasperated. ‘Oh, come on, Lee.’
New wave – which would encompass synth pop, pop punk and, within a few years, new romanticism (don’t get Lee started on Duran Duran) – was everything the Feelgoods weren’t. Its advent represented the nudging aside of the sweaty sexuality of the 1970s and the welcoming in of something cleaner, still fun, but clinical and stiff with hairspray. What was coming would be wilfully artificial, brightly coloured, often androgynous, sometimes childlike. Dr Feelgood, on the other hand, exuded testosterone and experience, made good-time music and came from a good-time place – Canvey Island, Southend, places where ‘women were women and men were men’, places where people would go to let off steam, to gamble, dance, eat bad food, drink too much, get in a fight, have a dirty weekend.
The record sleeve for ‘Milk And Alcohol’ was inspired by the classic Kahlua bottle design, the single was pressed up in both milk-white vinyl and coffee-liqueur brown – ‘surely there can’t be anybody stupid enough to buy both, can there?’ Lee scoffed to Smash Hits (UA’s marketing executives no doubt with their heads in their hands) – and sponsorship for the launch would come from ‘not Nike, not Marshall amps, but from Kahlua,’ said Jools Holland. ‘You could have as much Kahlua as you liked. Lee said, “Bring anyone you want.” He was very well-mannered and inclusive; that’s a proper gentleman. He had almost royal manners.’
Generosity and noblesse oblige aside, there might not have been much in the way of royal manners immediately in evidence at the launch party at Nick’s Havajah restaurant in Soho, especially with good old ‘Borneo’ Fred Munt still on the scene. Ribaldry was assured – it was a Feelgood party after all – and as the ‘dirty boilers’ (milk and Kahlua cocktails, lovingly named by Stiff’s Dave Robinson) were poured down every throat present, Munt would bellow out a volley of eye-watering anecdotes before joining Lee (sporting sunglasses and a badge emblazoned with the words ‘I’m Best’) at the piano. There, Jools Holland, his head bowing lower and lower with inebriation, was working his boogie-woogie voodoo with Gypie by his side. A vigorous if not melodious singalong rounded off the evening.
The bash might have been ‘just an excuse for a piss-up’, in Lee’s words, but it would be this very evening on which they would not only toast the success of their single, but also unveil Lew Lewis’s new release on Stiff, his own version of ‘Lucky Seven’, as well as the Oil City Sheiks single, the cover a blithely amateur-looking affair of the Feelgoods and Jools Holland ‘in disguise’ – all strategically arranged head-gear and shades – beaming and mugging for the camera, an array of empty wine glasses in front of them. They were just having a good time and doing what they damn well liked, which is what they had always done. You probably wouldn’t find a label like UA putting a single like that out today. (In fact you wouldn’t find a label like UA today either.)
‘That was a great thing about Lee, that couldn’t-care-less-ness about him,’ said Jools. ‘Couldn’t care less whether you liked it or not, this is what we’re doing, which is a very important factor for music. Unlike the [TV] talent shows today, not to knock them, but [it’s] all people who are d
esperate to be liked. Lee was above all that, that wasn’t his point.’
Lee and Chris had an almost obsessive drive to keep the Feelgood machine producing, producing, producing – they had both the record label’s and their fans’ expectations to keep up with – and so far the band had released at least one album, sometimes two, a year. Then there were the live shows, the television appearances, the BBC sessions … Naturally, there had been little time to work on anything new, even though they still technically had a ‘new’ album out in Private Practice.
They wanted to release something before the summer, and decided to ‘play the live card’, as Lee put it. It was about time their fans had another live album after all, and it would be their first to feature Gypie. The record would be titled As It Happens, a double entendre but also, of course, a favourite phrase of Lee’s. It would feature, on one side, a live recording taken from a show the band played at Hemel Hempstead’s Pavilion the previous October, and on the other, a set recorded at Rayleigh’s legendary Crocs (a key South Essex venue, later known as the Pink Toothbrush, which did originally house a pair of crocodiles in a tank). In a blazing red sleeve covered with black-and-white images of the individual band members in full flight, Gypie takes the main spot on the front top left, Lee beneath him, one hand over his face, wiping the sweat from his brow.
Numbers on the fast-paced romp that is As It Happens include ‘Take A Tip’, ‘She’s A Wind-Up’, ‘Milk And Alcohol’ and ‘Ninety Nine And A Half (Won’t Do), and at one point we hear Brilleaux chastising the increasingly rowdy audience. ‘Please don’t push,’ comes the voice from the front of the stage. ‘We want to make a live album, we want it to be a good groove … so don’t fucking PUSH.’ As It Happens would tide fans over until, well, September when the band would release yet another album.
Whether there was some neurosis about not letting people’s attention drop, whether they were concerned not to appear to be slowing down, it’s hard to say, but while three fifths of the Feelgood operation were starting to hanker for a bit of time off, Lee and Chris were doggedly steaming ahead. To be fair, they didn’t yet have families to miss – Sparko remembers Joan Collinson giving him a baby’s comforter she’d initially made for Lee for when he had children. ‘It was a beautiful little [blanket] that goes on a cot,’ said Sparko. ‘Really intricate, it must have taken her months. She said, “I might as well give it to you for your baby, Lee’s never going to have one.”’
‘It was kind of crazy but Lee just loved working,’ adds Figure. ‘Well, we all loved being on the road, but I love my family as well; they’re growing up, all the usual stuff, and when you’re on the other side of the world you miss that intensely. To try and get a break in the band with Lee’s work ethic, which was just to go on and on and on, was desperately hard.’
Another person feeling the effects of the Feelgoods’ extreme workload was, naturally, Shirley. It was very clear that, when the road called, which was most of the time, Lee would be off – and so it was around this time that Shirley decided to take off herself in turn and go back to America for a while. The lyrics to Lee’s favourite song ‘Roadrunner’ were all too appropriate, and being with Lee was never going to be easy: when he was home, the situation could be volatile, when he was away … well, he was away. ‘We broke up a couple of times,’ said Shirley. No doubt Lee’s way of dealing with this was to work even harder.
Meanwhile, rumour had it that the Feelgoods’ intention to release As It Happens was down to the fact that they had one last record to put out with United Artists before their contract was up, ‘and we had some live tapes so we just decided to smash ’em out,’ said Lee. ‘Well, we knew all along they was wrong but we weren’t in a position to say so, because matters were still being negotiated. We put it out because we wanted a live album, it’s as simple as that. There was no politics behind it.’
promotional information for the Nick Lowe-produced A Case Of The Shakes, a record powered by copious amounts of white wine (Lee had been told to lay off the gin for a while by his GP). Shades of Utterly Club style can be seen here in Barney Bubbles’ design (note the monocles).
Sparko and Lee onstage.
Lee and harp. Courtesy of Christoffer Frances.
The Feelgoods would negotiate a new contract with UA, who would then be absorbed into EMI. By 1980, the UA name would have been dropped altogether, with Liberty Records being used for all artists taken on during the UA years. The Feelgoods’ first release on the new contract would be Let It Roll,41 which they immediately started work on before the live dates started in earnest that September. Sessions would take place at DJM Studios in Holborn, central London.
With Brilleaux’s favourite producer Nick Lowe unavailable to work with the band on this occasion, Dr Feelgood agent Nigel Kerr suggested the esteemed Mike Vernon (Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall, Chicken Shack). ‘Great name in blues production,’ said Lee. ‘He inspired our respect. We had a lot of fun working with him.’
As the group jammed in the studio, there ‘was an element of the ninety-ninth hour’, Lee joked, but the Feelgoods would pull together six strong originals, including ‘Put Him Out Of Your Mind’ – a Mayo– Vernon co-write, group compositions ‘Shotgun Blues’ and ‘Hong Kong Money’ and Mayo’s laid-back ‘Keeka Smeeka’, an instrumental, much to Lee’s delight (more time at the pub), while the choice of covers was unusual and inspired (such as opening track ‘Java Blue’ aka ‘Java Blues’ by The Band’s Rick Danko).
Where Richard Gottehrer had drawn more out of the group in terms of performance, Vernon was ‘more interested in sound and tone,’ Brilleaux told journalist Ian Ravendale. ‘He was interested in feeling. He’d go, “Gypie’s solos are better after ten o’clock at night, so we’ll adjourn for an hour.” He’d break things up. I like the way he works.”
Let It Roll is something of a departure. It’s a step into glossier territory, boasting more of a soul pop sound, but it’s also a chance to hear other dimensions in Brilleaux’s voice. Here we have everything from snippets of Sprechgesang to all-out soulful elasticity, no doubt encouraged by this new influence in the studio. It’s also a treat to hear some gruff Feelgood humour in the spoken word moments within the irreverent Brilleaux–Mayo song ‘Bend Your Ear’.42 Lee evidently had a good time making the record, and he would look back on it as a favourite Feelgood release. One thing was for sure: they ‘didn’t want to keep making the same album,’ Lee told journalist Ian Ravendale. ‘That would be a waste of time and a waste of tape.’
The artwork for Let It Roll would feature the now famous Dr Feelgood Toby jugs, each portraying a member of the band. ‘Lee was the one who used to collect Toby jugs, he loved antiques,’ said Sparko. ‘But it wasn’t his idea to use them for the album. We left it to the label a lot of the time, although a lot of those things would have come from Lee’s ideas.’ The reverse of the record would show the group lurking in the Cluedo Club in Feelgood House.
Three and a half months’ worth of touring lay ahead, and, as roadie Neil Biscoe observed, the band became jaded as the weeks wore on. ‘That tour was hard, a massive stint. You could tell it was draining. When you do the clear-out after a gig, early in the tour there’s nothing left from the rider. Couple of weeks into it, there’s loads of booze left. They just wanted to get out of there. It was exhausting and you completely lose touch.’
It didn’t help when the few opportunities they had to sleep while on the road were decimated thanks to having to do promotion, much of this being on Lee’s shoulders. There would be an abortive ‘punk summit’ interview arranged by Melody Maker, which was intended to feature Brilleaux, The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell and Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley all questioning each other. On the first occasion, Brilleaux had been partying too hard the night before and didn’t turn up, much to Cornwell’s chagrin. On the second occasion, Lee was the only one to appear. During the one time the magazine successfully got them together, the trio were photographed looking awkward alongside a ‘tame’ bear. (‘Sure he
’s tame, as long as he’s got a pound of prawns to eat,’ grumbled Brilleaux.) It was an exercise the magazine conceded they would not be trying again.
When the band were expected to turn up to an in-store signing to push the new record in Berlin, in an incident redolent of a scene in Spinal Tap, they would find that little promotion had been done, and hardly anyone had turned up. On entering the record shop – a place referred to by accompanying NME writer Paul Du Noyer as reminiscent of the ‘Clockwork Orange Korova Milk Bar’ filled with ‘slumped, zomboid youths’ – the band are good-humoured. ‘Let’s all hold hands and see if we can contact the living,’ Lee is heard to say. A few of the faithful have turned up, however, and, albums in hand, nervously approach the group. ‘Sometimes I think they’re frightened of us,’ Lee tells Du Noyer. ‘They think we’re like we look onstage. We’d never try to be like that … there’s enough fucking aggravation in the world without us adding to it.’ Sharpeners are imbibed before the weary but always witty collective conduct a group interview with Du Noyer, during which Gypie Mayo apparently collapses, out cold, onto a bed while mid-sentence.
The players were in need of some R&R, but this isn’t to say that the shows were suffering – far from it. It was on this tour that the Feelgoods played a major festival package in Berlin alongside more mellow rock’n’roll fare such as Barclay James Harvest, Dire Straits and Lee’s pals Whitesnake. (Yes, you read correctly. Two years earlier Brilleaux had been brought in to play some harmonica on Whitesnake track ‘Keep On Giving Me Love’ during the making of Northwinds, thanks to Tim Hinkley who was playing on the album). The Berlin audience had had ‘six hours of melodious rock’, and were drifting happily into the arms of Morpheus as the soporific chords floated over the site. The Feelgoods, meanwhile, were backstage: ‘idle, for six hours, with lots of alcohol,’ said Biscoe. ‘They were steaming by the time they got on stage. They came on and just kicked ass, so hard. Mark Knopfler had half his band begging to get onstage with them, because anyone could jam with the Feelgoods. It wasn’t technical stuff, everybody just wanted to go on with them, because they were so, so good. Everyone thought it was going to be a disaster, but they rocked the place and woke everybody up. It was the number one show I have ever worked.’
