Lee Brilleaux

by Zoe Howe

Brilleaux’s take on it was breezy but unambiguous. ‘[It was] good fun doing it and very interesting to work with a producer who spent forty-eight hours on one track,’ he said to Blues Bag. ‘It’s an experiment I’ve no need to repeat. If we get the chance to make another studio album I’m determined it’s going to be a raw Dr Feelgood LP.’

  If nothing else, the experience had ensured that Lee would be assuming more artistic control in the future, and this was just as well, because before long the Feelgoods would receive the news that Stiff and Jill Sinclair had fallen out, ZTT had withdrawn all support, and Stiff were going broke. ‘We were back on the street.’ They had no choice but to go it alone.

  This, in a way, was a more positive development for the band than they might have at first imagined. They’d been granted the freedom to start their next chapter, strictly on their own terms. As Brilleaux later said, ‘If you don’t know what do to next, go back to your roots and have a think about it.’ It was time to follow his own advice.

  Lee Brilleaux on Wilko Johnson

  I’ve got no hard feelings against him for something that happened long ago. I don’t go through my life worrying about that, it’s finished. At the time I could have killed him, but now I don’t care. Life’s been good to me anyway.

  Will Birch

  They were playing the Douglas Lido on the Isle of Man, a bikers’ convention. I used to do the merch stall for Chris, selling the CDs and T-shirts – I can’t believe I did all this. Anyway, that night at the Lido was the night the promoter came in with the rider, and there was a pint of Gordon’s gin and Lee got three pint glasses almost half full of ice, and he decanted the entire bottle over these glasses, so they were each about two thirds full with neat gin. Maybe a slice of lemon. Then he floated about an inch of tonic on top and they were carried onto the drum riser on a tray. By halfway through the set, he’d drunk them.

  They were doing ‘Rock Me Baby’, and there were two or three bikers at the edge of the stage shaking up cans of lager. I could see what was going to happen, whether they were Feelgood fans or not, I don’t know, but they were spraying Lee with beer. Now a lot of performers would get a bit touchy about that – ‘my stage, my set, what do you think you’re doing?’ Lee was brilliant. He just stood there with his arms out under the stage lights and it was like a waterfall coming over him, he was beckoning them to do it more, it was running all down his suit. They weren’t being aggressive, but Freddie Mercury wouldn’t have stood for it.

  A merry night at The Proceeds.

  A 1986 set list, penned by drummer Kevin Morris. (Lee had given him the task of writing down the set list before every show.)

  Family shots. From top left, clockwise: Lee and son Nicholas on the bayou, Louisiana; ‘Collie’ and Joan; the Brilleaux family at home in The Proceeds (note Lee’s treasured collection of maps on the wall behind him); with Kelly and Nicholas in the bay window at The Proceeds; on the bayou with Kelly; providing some early driving lessons on the Dodgems; Lee and Shirley’s wedding anniversary in Almeria, Spain.

  18.BRILLEAUX’S LAST STAND

  I’ve always felt out of my time. Frankly I think I’m in the wrong century. I hate all forms of modernism, but I suspect I would have been uncomfortable at any time.

  Lee Brilleaux

  After some discussions with Chris, it was decided that the Feelgoods could, and should, take full control of Dr Feelgood’s output and start their own label. It would be called Grand Records, for obvious reasons, and, as Lee explained, ‘the idea is to obtain the rights from the original record companies of all our old records and to lease them back, to re-press them in disc and CD form, and reissue them with the original artwork. Our aim is to have our entire Feelgood catalogue out on our label. I just like the idea of knowing that all our old records – after all, they took a long time to record – [are] available. It’s sad when you go to a store and ask for a record and they tell you it’s been deleted.’

  Another change was on the cards in terms of live work. It was finally time to start streamlining the notorious Feelgood touring schedule, to a certain extent at least. ‘We’ve cut down to two hundred and twenty shows [a year],’ said Lee. (This may still sound like an insane amount of work – largely because it is – but bear in mind they were previously doing 280.) ‘We’ll get it down to about a hundred and fifty. I think that’s a comfortable amount, and you can enjoy every single one without thinking, another day, another gig. That way we’ll keep Dr Feelgood going for a good many years.’

  One surefire reason Lee wanted to spend a little less time on the road was because his family was growing. His son Nicholas had arrived in January 1988, and it was increasingly hard to be away, ‘because I know I might not be seeing them for three or four weeks,’ he said. ‘I make sure I spend all day with them. Some fathers work in a factory, by the time they come home they’re tired, the kids have gone to bed, they only see their children maybe half an hour a day. At least I get more time to spend with my family. I think that’s important.’ These past few years had at last put Lee in the position Figure had been in a decade previously. ‘When Lee became a family man,’ said Figure, ‘he took me to one side and said, “Now I thoroughly understand why you left the band when you did.”’

  ‘He’d take us to the beach and to Old Leigh,’ said Kelly. ‘And when we were very young he took us to Peter Pan’s Playground [now Adventure Island] in Southend. It was hilarious. Being a kid I’d want to do stuff over and over, so he’d walk through there with me about four or five times in a day, which is ridiculous. We went on the Helter Skelter only one time because he banged up his elbow. He had to sit on the mat and put me on his lap before we went down and it went a bit wrong.

  ‘I think it’s so sweet and funny that I saw this side. There was this dichotomy between his crazy, wild onstage persona, and then his real life persona. As I remember, he certainly had a temper but he was big on manners. If anyone wrote him a letter, he would always write back. He’d explain it to me: “These people have written me letters because they want to talk to me so I’m going to write back on a postcard.” That’s got to be really exciting for a fan. When I went on his memorial walk in 2014,50 there were so many fans telling me, “I wrote your dad a letter and he sent me a postcard back. I still have it.”’

  It was around the time of Nicholas’s birth, according to Shirley, that Lee underwent something of a metamorphosis. Already rather old-fashioned, eccentric and older than his years (‘it’s the mileage,’ he’d insist), the latest development was, in Dean Kennedy’s opinion, ‘weird. Lee seemed to change overnight. He just decided, “A man of my age should be like this.”’ He was thirty-five.

  ‘It all started when they were earning money again,’ continues Dean. ‘One minute he was wearing Doc Martens and Levis and the next it was hand-made suede brogues or Chukka boots,51 things he’d laugh at people for wearing ten years previously. He’d read books on Keith Floyd, and the restaurants got posher. He started to go to places like the Coach and Horses, where that playwright would go [Jeffrey Bernard] and the blokes who make Private Eye. He started getting the Barbour jacket, the Cavalry Twills …’ Indeed, on browsing the Barbours one afternoon, Lee was informed by the sales assistant that they were ‘good for catching grouse’. Brilleaux gently explained that ‘you don’t get many grouse in Southend’. Not that that put him off, you understand.

  ‘He was acting like an elderly country gentleman,’ adds Fred Barker. ‘Bit like Ray Winstone – what’s the tweeds about, Ray? You were born in the East End, now you’re a country gent? Lee went the same way … sitting around in the Grand being a bit of a country squire. Couldn’t work him out but it wasn’t for me to work out. Be what you want to be. And he was always being the way he wanted to be.’ Since childhood, Lee had always seemed significantly older than his physical years; now it seemed he was creating a period of distinguished old age for himself, a stage of life he would never actually see.

  Another alteration to the Feelgood line-up was on th
e horizon, and for the most devastating of reasons – guitarist Gordon Russell was soon to leave the band after the loss of his daughter from cot death syndrome, a tragedy that would send shockwaves through the group. The Feelgoods would hold a well-attended charity show in the child’s honour and, after spending almost the first three months of 1989 on tour, Brilleaux looked up Steve Walwyn, a guitarist who had played on the same bill as the Feelgoods a number of times with R&B group The DTs. ‘Basically,’ as Lee put it, ‘we nicked him.’

  ‘We also played as Steve Marriott’s backing band,’ explains Walwyn. ‘We played one gig with the Feelgoods, and I remember when we finished, Lee came up and said, “You’ve done your job, mate, you can get the gear in the van and get off home – and very wise, if I might say so.” That became a catchphrase for years: “very wise, if I might say so”. Because everyone else in the band kind of knew me I got the call, went down for an audition on Canvey and got the job straight away.

  ‘One thing that I think endeared me to Lee was that afterwards we went to the Lobster Smack and Lee was impressed that I bought the first round. “Can’t be bad, he can play the guitar and he buys a round. He’s in!”’

  As Steve Walwyn sat at home and feverishly practised along to Feelgood records, the band headed straight back out to tour Greece and Spain, bringing Gypie Mayo with them to fill in on guitar. While everyone would have understood if they’d just pulled the shows, another reason Lee was insistent on getting back out there was that his father had recently passed away. ‘Rather than just stay at home grieving, he wanted to get over it and be on the road,’ said Mayo.

  Hard work, as Lee well knew, always provided a useful diversion from heartache, and the man always put forward a stoic front anyway, but this tour would be especially distracting because Gypie was in such a state. ‘Twice he nearly missed the plane,’ said Lee, in the book From Roxette to Ramona. ‘Three times he drank so much brandy he couldn’t stand up. We had to throw a bucket of water at him to make him work.’

  It was a period of great anxiety for the rest of the band, and one of the Spanish shows was, truly, the nadir. The Feelgood set-up is a spartan one: no second guitar, no keyboards; in short nothing to hide behind if things go wrong. ‘It had to be abandoned after a few numbers,’ remembers Larry Wallis. ‘[Gypie] was incapable of standing up unaided by a roadie kneeling behind him. The crowd rioted, smashed up the amps, the band was lucky to escape with their lives.’

  Lee had long been saddened by Gypie’s apparent lethargy, ‘messing around in Southend’, taking his gift for granted, but he was, at this point in his life, out of control, and Brilleaux had to let him go. ‘He is a lovely man, the finest musician I have ever worked with,’ said Lee. ‘But he’s totally disorganised and unreliable. He needs someone to guard him all day long to make sure he don’t fall or hurt himself. It’s a tragedy but it’s impossible to work with someone like that.’52

  Gordon Russell would return to cover some of the Feelgoods’ French dates, but before long Walwyn would be a permanent fixture. One of his first shows with the group was in June 1989 at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, North London, ‘which I didn’t realise beforehand was going to be recorded, and televised,’ said Walwyn, the results of this recording making up the 1990 release Live In London.

  ‘Lee was very, very nervous about it,’ adds Walwyn. ‘Big crowd, one of my first gigs, he was more nervous than me! I think it shows on the record. Everything’s played really fast.’ It was a set of high-energy crowd-pleasers including ‘She Does It Right’ and ‘Baby Jane’, and Live In London proved to be the ultimate way to introduce the guitarist who, at the time of writing, is still in the Feelgood line-up to this day. (Lee, incidentally, was proud of Live In London on a personal level because, ‘very unusually,’ he said, ‘my vocal performance is almost word perfect’. So there.)

  ‘Bit nerve-wracking,’ admitted Lee later that year, ‘but now it’s as if Steve’s been playing with the band for ten years. Gordon was very fluid in his playing. I think Steve’s probably a bit more aggressive. They’re both interesting stylists, and they both fitted in perfectly with Dr Feelgood.’

  As for the release of Live In London – ‘not a very imaginative title, I know’ – it was significant not only in that it was Walwyn’s Feelgood debut, but it was also the first new recording to be released on Grand Records. ‘We’re going to remix [the tracks] ourselves without doing anything horrible to them,’ said Lee (evidently still traumatised by the group’s Stiff releases). ‘Just tidy them up a bit, put a bit of echo here and there.’

  The promotional tour, despite Lee’s insistence that they were cutting back, still made for little time off throughout 1990. Those close to the group were becoming increasingly worried they were overdoing it, and Lee had to admit he was becoming ‘mentally bogged down’ by the strain. ‘The music – that’s the easiest bit,’ he said. ‘It’s the travelling. My arms feel like they are getting longer because the suitcase is getting heavier as I’m getting older. Hanging around airports, airplanes being cancelled …’

  Birch was hired in to help with admin at Grand Records while the band worked, Steve Walwyn quickly learning that the elements that made the rigours of a full-on Feelgood tour tolerable were, according to Lee, good food and drink, plenty of time to explore, an English newspaper (Lee read one as often as he could wherever he was in the world) and, as always, a few well-timed practical jokes.

  ‘One prank springs to mind which will illustrate his humour,’ says Walwyn. ‘We were playing a gig in Spain, and Alvin Lee, the guitarist with Ten Years After, was due to play there a week later. The dressing room had been whitewashed, no graffiti anywhere. We were talking about Alvin and I said, “You realise that’s not his real name?” Lee said, “What is it then?” I said, “Well, he doesn’t like people to know, but it’s Graham Barnes.”

  ‘At the top of one of the walls was an electrical junction box. Lee got up on a chair with a black marker, and he wrote on this junction box in very small letters: “Graham Barnes!”, with an exclamation mark. You had to go right up to it to read it, almost get up on the chair, but when Alvin came to do the gig the following week, he’d have seen it. To even think of doing that was typical of Lee.’ Poor old Graham. I mean Alvin.

  Somehow Lee managed to snatch some time with his family in 1990 between flying to Russia, Spain, Holland and seemingly everywhere in between, and certainly Kelly’s fondest memories are of the frequent dinner parties her parents used to host. She was always treated as a little adult – as Lee had been by his own parents – and ‘doing grown-up stuff’ like joining in at parties and listening to music with her dad are memories she holds dear.

  ‘My dad would play music for us – I remember him coming home one night pretty drunk. I came downstairs and he was playing “Yakety Yak”. He had a really fine turntable which we obviously were not allowed to touch, but if he was up late and my mum had gone to bed, I did a lot of sneaking downstairs – any time anything was going on I had to be a part of it – and he would play stuff for me which was really cool.’

  Kelly and Nick were allowed to listen to CDs (Squeeze’s Singles 45’s And Under was a favourite), but not Lee’s vinyl, and definitely not Dr Feelgood; or at least, not when their father was around to hear it. ‘We loved listening to my dad’s stuff,’ said Kelly. ‘But he hated us playing it when he was there, which I can understand. If he got home and we were listening to Dr Feelgood, he was like, “No! No, no, no, no. Can’t listen to that.”’ Oddly enough (and undoubtedly when Lee was out), Shirley put on a Feelgood CD for the kids one afternoon, and Nick, still a toddler at the time, ‘stood in the middle of the floor and shook his head really fast and hard with his hands out, just like his dad,’ said Shirley. ‘Nick had obviously never seen the Feelgoods play; it was just a natural reaction to the music. It was the image of his dad, it was scary.’

  Christmases at The Proceeds were always ‘way over the top’, according to Kelly. ‘It’s a very Brilleaux
thing to overdo celebrations. We’d spend a lot of time with the Fenwicks, and my dad used it as an opportunity to cook a crazy meal and have a lot of people over.’ There’d be dancing in the living room to some of the greatest music ever made – everything from classical music (‘if you can believe that,’ said Shirley) to soul, and ‘Roadrunner’ by Junior Walker and the All Stars, still the record he loved and related to the most, would invariably make an appearance before the end of the night. Then there’d be the jokes, the anecdotes (probably when the children had gone to bed), and he’d whip up hot buttered rums for anyone suffering from a seasonal cold. The all-important port – for Santa’s benefit, naturally – would be bought in and Lee would start preparing the feast ‘weeks in advance’, says Shirley.

  ‘Harrison’s was Lee’s butcher of choice. He loved that place. He would order the rib of beef or whatever we were going to eat for Christmas dinner, go to all the different grocers, order casks of beer – it was quite a big to-do. I remember him having a whole Stilton delivered, it was massive. We had food all over the house and he would make pickles and chutneys to go with it; he used apples from the tree in the garden.’

  Even when they weren’t marking an especially festive occasion, Lee would create special menus – complete with wine and cheese courses – whether for one of their all-night dinner parties (it wasn’t unusual for guests of the Brilleauxs to stumble down the front steps of The Proceeds just as the milkman was approaching) or just for when Shirley was coming home from Southend Hospital, where she now worked as a nurse. Many a time Shirley would return for lunch to be greeted by a menu tacked to the front door, ornately decorated and proclaiming the goodies Lee had been preparing for them: rack of lamb, pears in red wine, gougères, jugged hare, cassoulet …53In terms of touring, 1991 would be a slightly lighter year again – apart from anything else it had been a while since Brilleaux had been in the studio54 and fans were hankering for new Feelgood material. Time was set aside for sessions during the spring, and Will Birch was, once more, primed to work with the group as producer. The next album would be, at Brilleaux’s insistence, closer to the band’s roots.