Contains very strong language.
So, I come
here and prop it up like that.
And then, skilfully, I come across... keep a low profile. There.
Here's my telescope.
what we've got around us here in this neighbourhood is a settlement of humans, right, there'd probably
been a spaceship crash, or something like that, and this small town has arisen.
And we're waiting to be rescued.
My terrible job is to stay up all night scanning the heavens for the rescue ships.
And that's how I while away the weary hours.
where in the world is Dr Feelgood very big?
In Canvey Island.
Canvey Island.
♫ I got a girl
♫ A man's best friend
♫ I'd have her now
♫ If she'd just come back again
♫ But she left me in the fog
♫ Told me that I treat her like a dog
♫ I bought a brand-new motor
♫ And I'm waiting for a loan
♫ So I can fill her up and start her
♫ Then I'm going back home
♫ Oh, yeah
♫ I wanna live the way I like
♫ Sleep all the morning
♫ And get my fun at night
♫ Things ain't like that here
♫ working just to keep my payments clear... ♫
I was born here, which means I was born below sea level.
I think this affects the consciousness profoundly.
It's kind of submarine consciousness, I think.
And um,
I live up on top of the hill now.
Cos of the flood, you see, 1953.
People used to use this flood
as a kind of a historical reference point, like the war.
Oh, was that before the war or after the war?
Here, of course, it's was that before the flood or after the flood?
Biblical stuff.
Yeah, 1953, I opened my bedroom curtains, I was at the age of six.
I saw a rowing boat going by, which I thought was a tad odd.
Our neighbour was screaming at us through the walls,
and we realised at that time that we had been flooded.
I would have been born at home but because of the flood,
I was born in Romford Hospital.
Our house fell down. we had to get another house.
I knew that there was something wrong. I was a perceptive child.
There was a girl in our class at school.
Unfortunately, her parents had died and she was found floating in her carry cot, like a Moses basket.
A lot of people were forced to spend the night on the roof, which was freezing, freezing temperatures.
A lot of people just died from exposure.
About a hundred people were killed.
we were evacuated from Canvey Island to a school.
Of course, as a kid, it was a big adventure.
There was a big tea chest full of Dinky toys, which we could all help ourselves to.
On the radio, there was this character called Wilfred Pickles.
How do? How are you?
And he was down at this school, interviewing the refugees from the flood.
And he was asking anybody if they wanted to sing a song,
so we could have a sing song, cheering everybody's spirits up.
My mum thrust me forward and said, ‘Yeah, he can.
‘what are you gonna sing?‘
And that's Johnny, Big Figure, right? Little Johnny Martin.
And he sung Me and My Teddy Bear.
when we eventually got back onto the island I was inundated with teddy bears from all over the country.
He was the first Feelgood to actually make it onto the media.
Right, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to Canvey Island.
This is the birthplace of Dr Feelgood.
This is where our adventure all started out in the early '70s.
The walk will be about two hours, so if you're not feeling up to it, you had too much to drink last night, at
any point a taxi can be organised to come and get you, because we're going round the perimeter of the island.
we'll make a start, OK?
Onwards and upwards.
All sorts of people are getting fascinated by Canvey Island.
It gets to you. I think I'm going to move back here.
Canvey Island is a great place, really, but it's strange, even today.
It is a very unique place,
and there's nowhere I've ever been in the world quite like Canvey.
There's this mud flat rescued from the sea by Dutch engineers in the 17th century.
In the last hundred years, because of the railway coming to Southend,
it's become a popular haunt of Eastenders, people coming down from London and weekend bungalows.
It also has that end of the line feeling about it, because you step off the
end of the creek in Canvey Island, and if you just keep going along the waterline, your next stop's Belgium.
And that's a fact.
It feels like a million miles from anywhere.
Also it's not really an island, it's a peninsula.
It still is an island. we can go right round Canvey by boat.
well, maybe it is an island.
You must edit that out, I'll take that out.
People were quite proud to come from Canvey and liked that it was
an island and there was something unique and different about it.
To us Southenders, you had to cross a bridge to get there.
So even though the bridge was only 30 yards, it was almost like a
different country, going to Canvey.
People are somewhat suspicious of Canvey Islanders.
They have a fear, because of the East End links, they
think it's a bit of a rough place, full of East End rough people.
which, to a point, there's something to be said for that, you know!
People take the Mick out of Canvey, like, you know,
people on Canvey have got webbed feet cos it's always flooded.
Canvey's Canvey, and it's a little bit like the old East End of London used to be.
Before they all moved to Canvey!
we tend to close ranks a little bit and defend the place
to outsiders, although we're constantly knocking it ourselves!
You could look across the river there, there you see Kent.
It's like a sort of promised land, Kent, you know, it's the Garden of England over there, and you think,
I wonder what's over that hill?
You don't need to leave Canvey, everything is delivered here,
and if you're happy with being here 365 days a year, then why would you want to leave?
when I was a little tiny lad,
they were building the refinery at Shell Haven, just across the water.
And you all day long you could hear these pile drivers, driving piles deep down this mud.
Boom, boom, all the time.
Steam hammers,
you know. And gradually this thing rose up over the horizon.
It's the catalytic cracker plant. My mum told me it's a cat cracker!
Cracking cats.
They have these big chimney stacks with flames coming out of the top.
And you get the flames at night time, you know, flickering underneath the clouds, you know.
Very Miltonic.
‘Yet from those flames, no light, but rather darkness visible served only to discover sites of woe. '
It was where my father worked, he was there on security.
And they used to come up on the seawall at Canvey to watch
the Spitfire pilots attempt to tip the wings of the V1s, you know, the flying bombs,
to stop them reaching London.
The Germans were always trying to bomb the oil terminal to light their way up into London.
I remember my dad used to work on these jetties over here, and he'd bring me up here when I was a kid.
And he bribed the captain of one of the small oil tankers to take us to
London once, which was quite a good journey for a little kid to make.
One of these tankers would go by, you'd get a big wash from it.
It'd come washing up, very exciting.
Bit of surf.
we'd sit here and waiting for the wash from a tanker, watching these red sails go by, and...
paradise.
Canvey Island was the nearest beach to the East End of London.
There was the Thorny Bay Holiday Camp, which was, well, weekend holidays for Londoners, really.
They all had an old-fashioned '50s caravan, wasn't it?
Come down, most of the time was spent over the casino eating whelks and eating candy floss.
Not a great site for a caravan park, cos you've got these oil tanks there.
But they solved this problem, they used to sell postcards of the caravan site, and they'd
actually painted the oil tanks away with blue paint, you know.
And it looked like a nice caravan site.
It had a bit of a bawdy reputation.
People would go there for a dirty weekend.
If you said you came from Canvey Island, people
would raise their eyebrows, as if questioning your parentage.
we laugh about it now and make jokes about the funny hats and the sticks of rock and
everything, but that was a large part of the income of this town.
Perhaps we were all in show business.
This is a map of Canvey Island.
As I would understand it, I mean, the bands all come from somewhere.
But this is quite a tight area to have pulled in four band personnel.
we lived there.
Sparko lived there.
Figure lived there.
And Wilko lived there.
'Hi, there, this is Radio Canvey...’ Hello, how are you? Not bad, not bad.
what can I do for you today?
just a very short trim, please.
Literally my oldest friend.
we were born in close proximity to each other on Canvey Island.
Four doors away. Four doors away.
I had to go to Wilko's to watch BBC television for children.
That's how deprived we were.
Hello, everyone. Hey, Muffin.
Don't be in such a hurry. Say hello.
when I did go to the grammar school in Southend,
you were looked on slightly askance, coming from Canvey Island.
My first year, there was this English teacher and he used
to get me to stand in front in the class and go, go on, say 'bottle'.
I can't even say it, 'bottle', and I'd go 'bottle', 'little', and all that, to show them how not to speak.
You see, my glottal stops. But of course, I loved it. 'Bottle', 'little', you know.
I knew Chris, who became the manager of the Feelgoods.
we were in the local Cub troupe together.
And Spark and I were in the same patrol, in the Squirrel Patrol.
Lee was a different deal, because Lee, he was born in South Africa.
He had spoken, allegedly, Zulu, because he had had a Zulu nanny.
Nanny Rosie.
Yes, she was a Zulu girl, lovely person.
He spoke Zulu when he couldn't even speak English.
But I think he was back in the UK fully by the time he was five.
First of all, his grandparents had lived on Canvey Island.
He used to come at weekends, it was a slow transition.
He loved it at Canvey.
He liked it so much that on Friday I'd get home from
work and there was a note on the table, ‘Dear Mum, gone to Nan's.'
And he'd gone for the weekend.
It got so dreadful, we never saw the boy. So we all moved down there.
He was an only child, he had no brothers and sisters.
we became neighbourhood mates, because we lived five rows from one another.
Because we lived right on the sea wall, you would swim over in the creek.
You would play mud larks, and that would be great fun.
just sort of buggering about in the mud.
That's Lower Horse Island.
And Lee and I had our rowing boats,
and we used to row out to the island in the middle, and this was
our real pirate's playground. This, that you see here, is all our garden.
Chris would row the boat,
and Lee would do all the talking.
And Lee would make up all these stories about monsters and things.
This boat, he called it the Corsair.
He put up the skull and crossbones, and there he was. Pirate Lee.
To us it was a magical island, Treasure Island,
wind in the willows, general Boy's Own adventure books.
when I was 15, 16 and that, I was a right rebel at school, but I was deliberately a philistine.
And I took it in my head, I fancied myself with a guitar. You think you're gonna get all the girls.
Probably the first people I saw on the television actually using guitars were the Shadows.
Those great twangy sounds, those instrumentals played on the Fender Stratocasters.
Wilko bought himself a very cheap guitar from the Exchange and Mart,
and he suggested I get myself a very basic drum kit, so we could start play and emulate the Shadows.
Some Shadows’ stuff.
I do not use a plectrum,
and this is my excuse. I'm left-handed.
And, um, the first guitar I got was left-handed,
like this, see, you play
it this way round. is this the way, isn’t it? That's it, this way around.
Is it this way or that way?
I think it's this way round, yeah.
So anyway, I got a right-handed guitar and started learning again.
I couldn't keep hold of the plectrum.
So I just did without it.
Strummed like fury.
Red scratch plate. So the men won't see the blood.
This is my group, this is about 1964.
There's me with my Watkins Rapier guitar, and there's Figure, again, that's him very sensible.
Not at all a clown.
Oh, man, the Stones, the Stones.
They just looked so outlandish, and here was a band you knew your parents wouldn't like.
You see, Keith Richards, I've got it, ain't I? Look.
There we are in Irene's back garden, and you can tell it's the early '60s by the clothes she's wearing.
Irene, I mean we were going together when we were 16.
I remember the first time I kissed her. There were a bunch of us all walking back from the youth club,
we got to a gate, and I kissed her, and I'm telling you it shook me, it just shook me.
Lee, he was a clever boy.
He was far more intelligent than I was.
There was no way I passed the 11 plus or anything like that.
Lee looked different and he came over different from anybody else in the school.
we had what you could basically call a gang.
we called it the weasel Club.
It was modelled very heavily on Harry Flashman from Tom Brown's
Schooldays, and we all sported waistcoats and pocket watches.
I thought he was a prefect,
because he was carrying himself like a prefect.
well, well, well.
Hello, Flashman.
He was obviously the sort of leader of his gang.
He just had that aura about him.
Lee was extremely good with words, very persuasive,
and he could be virtually an intellectual.
Pierre by Collie
The end.
He had a tremendous sense of outrage.
If he felt the headmaster was unfair on him,
he'd urinate on the headmaster's, er, door.
Like most kids, I always liked music, pop music and all the rest of it, it wasn't until I heard Blues
that I really started to become obsessive about it, I wanted to collect Blues records,
and used to subscribe to Blues Unlimited magazine, and became quite,
probably to all my friends, a complete bore about it all.
♫ Oh, the train I ride... ♫
You know, he was evangelical about the music.
♫ ..Oh, they shine like gold... ♫
Howling wolf, when I saw him perform live in Romford,
at a pub called the King's Head, he was absolutely superb.
I thought he looked the business.
You know, he was the King.
He came out on stage, there was an old man. And he just rocked.
A Hohner harmonica in one hand and a microphone and you couldn't see it.
It was just a big fella. He was like a bear more than a wolf.
The first guitar that I got obsessed with was one of these things - a Fender Telecaster.
And one day I was at home, and I'm walking across the room, like that.
And err, and somebody goes this is Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, right?
♫ Shaking all over. ..♫
I went...
And there's, there's this guitar.
I discovered the music of Mick Green, who played
for Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and he used a Fender Telecaster.
But usually in bands you had two guitar players, one playing rhythm.
And, another one playing what they call lead.
well, Mick Green was doing both these things at once.
I thought, I want to be just like him,
and I started finding all the records I could find,
Johnny Kidd and the Pirates.
I listened to them, you played them at 33 and a third.
♫ They call me the doctor... ♫
So it's slow.
♫ I'm really hard to please
♫ well, you talk about... ♫
How's he doing that? How's he doing... I can't...
so I tried and tried and tried, got it completely wrong, and ended up with my own style.
Like that.
Me and my brother, we used
to come up here with our jug band, and we'd stand outside the Monaco.
we used to play down there.
we'd just stand here, kind of rather embarrassed, with our tea-chest bass and our banjos and things.
And, and hang out, wait till it was half past 10 or whenever closing time was over there.
And people would stagger out in a sentimental mood.
"Can you play a sad one?‘
♫ You are my sunshine
♫ My only sunshine
♫ You make me... ♫
Get out! And stay out!
♫ ..You'll never know, dear
♫ How much I love you
♫ Please don't take my sunshine away... ♫
And they'd give you a 10 bob note, and you could buy a hamburger.
Wilko was a couple of years older than us. I remember when we were
quite young teenagers, seeing Wilko and his brother,
err, playing in what they call a jug band, which is a kind of a skiffle group, really.
And I remember this, being most taken with this idea.
Lee was the one I remembered, and he was very, very interested in what we were doing, this music.
And it made a powerful impression on me, just that he was so kind
of eager. So it didn't surprise me when a year or so later he'd got a jug band of his own going,
and they were rather good, but...
Yeah, I well remember talking to him.
I don't think any of us could play a chord, but Lee, it was something that he, he aspired to desperately,
so he couldn't play guitar chords, he learned banjo chords.
Lee was definitely the driving force.
He carried people along in his wake, really.
Lee and Sparko were the core rhythm section. They're the ones who could play.
This was a schoolboy thing, and this was weekends and youth clubs. Quite lucrative, actually.
I remember when we used to busk outside the Monaco, and we won
a talent competition at our local holiday camp.
He would start off at the Admiral Jellicoe and busk outside.
well, then we started getting small amplifiers, we couldn't carry them,
so we used to have to make barrows out of pram wheels and stuff.
Then we would move across the road to the Canvey Club.
we always took the hat around, so we, we had plenty of pocket money for 14 year olds.
Then move on to the original Oysterfleet pub.
And we would do a full set there that would probably take us through till 12.30, midnight.
And although we weren't 18, the governor always used to buy us a pint, and err, it was great fun.
Figure, he left school when he was about 15.
His dad had a lock-up shed on Canvey where he used to do panel beating and spraying.
He hated Ford cars, you see,
so this is his way of being satirical about Ford cars.
Well, Wilko found a couple of friends over in westcliff, we just started playing R&B.
After a couple of years I joined another band over on Canvey called the Essex Five,
earning a reasonable living.
Coming home after three gigs with 50 quid in my pocket, which wasn't bad in 1968/1969.
This is the last years of the '60s.
Revolution.
LSD.
when I eventually tried it, it was it...
Beyond anything.
Beyond anything I'd ever. ..
imagined or been told.
I had a fascinating LSD experience here.
Me and my brother walked all the way along the wall from the other end of
the island, right, gradually getting more and more involved.
I remember one point here, it used to be a shelter.
And it just involved a kind of ritually jewelled palace room,
like something out of the Arabian Nights.
And then it all suddenly turned into pink plastic knives and forks.
just about then I was, in fact, about to go up to Newcastle,
to the university there, where I was studying English.
Check out the opening lines of, err, Piers Plowman.
It's... it's good.
‘I was weary for wandering, and went me to rest under a broad bank by a bourne's side.
‘And as I lay and leaned and looked in the waters,
‘I slumbered in a sleeping, it swathed so merry.‘
I also, I had some ambition to be a writer myself.
I remember saying to Irene, I said if I get to the age of 21 and
find out I'm not a great poet, I'm going to cut my throat.
And I think the first real time I focussed on Wilko is when our jug band was playing in Canvey Carnival.
I would come back to Canvey in the summertime, during the vacation.
I would see them playing, in the Carnival. Look at these guys.
And there was one point Wilko came up with his brother, and said,
‘Hello boys,‘ and ‘Oh, great, what a great jug band.‘
After I'd, err, graduated, travelled overland to India.
India! My father actually was a soldier in the Raj. He was on the north-west frontier.
Sometimes I'd heard him say stuff about India, so I had this thing about India in my mind.
I was so scared, I'd never been out of England before, I was sure I was going to die.
I had 50 quid stuffed down me Y-fronts when I set off, and um, that sufficed.
we went through Turkey and Iran,
Tehran, Mashad and then through to Herat, Kandahar, Kabul,
and then through the Khyber Pass.
And we'd got a room in this Bahar Hotel, which was completely empty.
we went out to the shops that day
and we bought some opium and some eggs.
This is my room I had in Kathmandu.
And in the morning, you see, you'd open these shutters, and it would be all misty.
And then slowly the mist would lift and you'd start the see the temples,
the pagodas, coming out of the mist.
And then the mist would lift further and you would see the Himalayas.
Actually, I don't normally like mountains.
Maybe that's because I come from flat Canvey Island, I don't know.
Lee was still on Canvey, and had a very Canvey-centric view of things.
There's Canvey Island in the middle of the world,
and it's surrounded by the Black Sea
and the River Crouch drains from the Black Sea to the Loch Ness Ocean.
♫ And I been to the East And I been to the west
♫ I been this whole world wide
♫ I been to the river and I been baptised
♫ Now lead me to my buried ground
♫ Lead me to my buried ground. ♫
when I came back from India, I decided I wanted to be a painter.
Yeah, I'm very fond of the old cumulus clouds in the
summertime, and you just look at it, there's all sorts of stuff in there.
There's my brother playing the lute.
And there he is looking after me one night, and in the background there's Irene.
I knew that we were marrying very young, and
people would say we shouldn't do it, but I knew absolutely that there was
nobody in the world like her for me,
I knew that I wanted to be with her forever.
To be in a jug band 14, 15,
is acceptable as a gag.
To be in a jug band at sort of 17, 18, all of a sudden this lot's a bit weird.
It's about time you were in a band and did a bit of rock'n'roll.
when it was being talked about that the band should go electric, Chris was a bit miffed, really.
He was a not so sure about me giving up the jug.
what could be my role, so Lee said to him, well get yourself a van
and you can cart us around, and we'll cut you in as the fifth member, and that's how it stayed.
If I was home at the weekend then I'd, I'd go along and help with the gear,
and I went with them on one of the first real, long haul gigs,
it was exit 27 off the M1 at Nottingham.
we played the Silk Top Hat Club, which is a big working man's club.
This was the real thing. And Lee came out with some gloves on for the show,
and his denim jacket, and threw a great little rock'n'roll gig.
He just did, and I remember the local D] there had kind of seen it all.
He said, ‘You've got a star on your hands there, mate.‘
Fucking right, I tell you what, it take the shiver down my back.
I'd given up playing, and I'm back on Canvey Island and then bumped into Lee.
He was a solicitor's clerk at the time.
I think he was about 18 or 19 then.
He's got a pinstripe suit on, three piece suit, fucking looked really mean, you know, really good.
I worked in a law office, yeah, serving writs on people, that was my job.
And, err, he was saying, ‘we've got this rock'n'roll band,‘ and err,
the guitar player had left, and I was thinking, ‘Ooh.
‘I've still got my guitar under the bed.
‘Is he going to ask me?‘
But he didn't.
He was too shy to suggest that I should join his band.
And so we had a long talk in the street and parted company,
and I thought, ‘Oh, man, I could have, you know, I haven't played for a long time and.
And then of course, later that evening, Sparko came knocking at the door.
He'd come round and, later on he's at my door going,
‘Look, do you want to do a band?‘ And I went, 'Yes.'
we were quite in some awe of Wilko, you know, as a musician, also as a character.
And, err, absolutely delighted when he agreed, condescended, you know, to join our little band.
I was happy to be his guitar player.
we learned some pop songs so we can get work.
we went around someone's house and had a rehearsal, and I think Lee,
we got, Lee put this, err, record on, it was, err, Little Walter.
I said, ‘Fuck this pop music, let's just play this, let's do this!‘
How many rhythm and blues fans does it take to change a light bulb then?
Well... it's one, you know, and ten to say it's not as good as the original.
Wilko on board made a big difference.
We became fast friends, and he was very welcoming of you.
You could always go round his house and have a cup of tea and a joint.
We used to go round your place and have very good sessions, didn't we?
A complete laugh, right.
I thought this guy's cool, right, it was like your first guru that you'd come across.
He'd been on lots of political rallies and things.
Look, I'm a revolutionary, I'd got this donkey jacket on, and boots and that.
We demonstrated when a new road was opened on Canvey Island because we
felt that it was done purely to have a lot more oil refineries put in.
But it felt a laugh to go along and say, ‘No more oil on Canvey!‘
No more oil on Canvey soil!
The Pit of Canvey, pretty browned off about the idea really,
I mean, we didn't want another oil refinery on Canvey.
Will you stand up?
This whole debate so far seems to me, err, to be taking the shape
of people who are considering economic interests,
they're considering fire risks and things like this,
as though the refinery is coming, whether we want it or not.
We're not rich people, we're not millionaires,
so you can stick it on our doorstep, you won't stick it on anyone else's.
That's the economics behind citing it here, because we don't care.
They did actually shelve the oil refineries being built on Canvey Island.
When we started the band, and we got this idea about this is where, this is Oil City.
Canvey Island doesn't sound very American, let's call it Oil City.
The blues, the sound of the blues. Mucker Joe, he called this, yes, this is Thames Delta.
If you close your eyes on a sunny day it could be the Mississippi Delta,
it could be some strange place, not really anywhere, not part of England.
I used to love all these little shacks, and the balconies on the front and everything.
My first record advance, I went and bought one of them, it was my first house!
'Hello, is that Mr Dean Kennedy?’
I, err, I see them when they used to play on Canvey.
I was about 13, 14.
And it was in the time of sort of like,
skinheads and football hooligans,
and yeah, there was a lot of anger on Canvey in those days.
It was a bit of a lawless society down there.
And they were just ordinary street kids, and they just brought that to the stage.
♫ Well I'm a hot for you baby
♫ I can't get enough of your love
♫ I'm a hot for you baby
♫ Can't get enough of your love
♫ When I go to sleep at night
♫ Girl, you're the one I'm dreamin' of. ♫
So we started playing in pubs and clubs and roller-skating rinks in Southend,
and a dodgy pub called the Railway in Pitsea,
otherwise known as the Flying Bottle.
All the usual kind of like, rough houses and places where musicians go.
This is the Monaco Pub, and we used to play there to the local Feelgood crowd every Wednesday night.
It was 30 pence door money.
If you can win a crowd on Canvey, you can win a crowd anywhere.
I think Canvey to the rest of us
felt like something that was dressed up but bound to sink.
We all had this awareness that it was going to drown.
There was an underlying sense of violence.
And there was a lot of alcohol on Canvey, big drinking culture.
The drummer we had been using,
he wanted to go back in the army,
and I said, ‘Well, I know a good drummer.‘ Figure.
Wilko come knocking on my door one night with Chris and Lee.
and asked if I'd join their band temporarily to go to Holland
which I jumped at, never been abroad before.
I remember going to Wilko's house one night.
Instead of opening the door, he pushed out a poster that had our pictures and names,
and that was really exciting, to see something was actually happening,
rather than just playing at the local bingo hall.
We played these youth club places, which were really cool,
like hippy kind of vibe places, and we would play twice a day.
It was the first time we'd played
to that kind of actual rock'n'roll audience,
and I really liked it.
You know, so you get all the girls.
Very nice girls. Somewhere or other I thought we'd got something.
I think it was largely to do with Lee.
If he went into a room, he would attract attention.
Because we were always trying to get some sort of reaction,
Lee would jump out the window of the pub
or start singing in the car park. It had a unique sound to it.
There was something about it
that was very spiteful and knocked you about.
Passionate R&B, played with venom.
♫ Down in Louisiana close to New Orleans... ♫
We're nowhere near New Orleans, but we are in the Thames Delta.
I don't think we were very highly regarded round here.
All the local bands and that, they were into wearing frocks
and singing about flying to Mars, you know.
So, you know, we were just completely un-hip.
And this is Pilgrim's Progress.
Everybody else was doing progressive rock, with long hair and greatcoats.
Pink Floyd, King Crimson and all that stuff.
The Feelgoods looked very much like they were out of the '60s
and they were playing R&B.
Nobody was doing that. It was so different to what was happening.
Crusade is the right word.
You're trying to impose something different on people.
It was time that the balloon was burst.
Wilko, at that time, was my schoolteacher.
'He was teaching English to secondary school kids.'
I really enjoyed teaching. I loved it.
He weren't a very orthodox schoolteacher, I could tell you that.
We really liked him.
He'd sit cross legged on the table, chewing his hair,
telling us stories of walking across India.
Oh, dear, er...
You should not have seen this.
I really am a schoolteacher there.
And this is fifth years, right,
and they've got a super 8 camera, and they're making a film.
They come into me and they're going, listen,
we want you to cane jill.
And, I go 'Huh?'
And this girl, I liked this girl.
You know... You mustn't, you know, look at them or anything,
but I did like this girl.
Lovely girl.
Then jill says, she goes, 'I'm wearing some frilly knickers.‘
And I'm going, ‘Now look, hold it right there.‘
I said, 'I'm not doing anything of the kind,
‘I'll be arrested‘
And then I sort of blew it out and merely struck this pose,
which could still go on many a website.
Then I've got to go and see the headmaster.
Come in.
So I go in there, and say, ‘All right?‘
He said, 'I'm gonna have to say something to you
‘that I've never had to say to a teacher in 20 years.‘
He says, ‘You've got to do something about your appearance. '
How dare you come in here looking like that, boy!
Slammed his hand on the desk and said, ‘Damn it boy, people think you're a student!‘
I said, 'Don't you call me boy. I ain't a boy.‘
I said, ‘I've travelled further, geographically and intellectually
‘than most of your f. . .staff. Don't call me boy.‘
‘When do you want me to leave?‘
Right now, you've been a bloody disgrace to this school! I was well out of there.
When I was leaving, I was saying, 'I'm gonna be in a rock'n'roll band.‘
I said, ‘I'll be back, I'll be back in a golden Cadillac full of paintings, then you'll be sorry.‘
Well, the one bit of artwork I did was actually the Dr Feelgood logo,
which even now people have actually got tattooed on them.
So, a little bit of an achievement.
In those days, we used to sometimes get gigs backing this character called Heinz.
There was this big hit record called Telstar.
So, here's the Tornadoes.
Heinz was the bass player in the band, right.
And this was produced by joe Meek, who took a close interest in Heinz.
He was sort of a blonde, Aryan-looking young chap.
♫ ..and love today... ♫
He had a German mother, didn't he?
Actually his surname was German, so I suspect him of being 100% German.
♫ Heinz bakes the meanest beans... ♫
He was still going out doing Teddy Boy gigs and he needed a backing band.
♫ Woo, I love to rock'n'roll... ♫
He got a spot on this Wembley rock'n'roll show in 1972,
when they had Chuck Berry,
Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and then there's Heinzy.
There's me. Red and black shirt.
I'm thinking, ‘This is all right!‘
I quite like this, I was a schoolteacher last week.
♫ I love to rock'n'roll... ♫
Ironically, he died a few years back.
I don't know if you can guess what age he was?
57!
The band, the style, we were playing in the band
and your barnet's getting in your face, things like that.
It come the time to cut my hair, so I cut it.
One day, he just got in the van, he had the short back and sides, which shocked us all.
There was a point where the Feelgoods became characters.
The problem was that there were three Johns in the band.
There were three... four. . .three Johns!
In fact, Lee's middle name was John.
So we go, ‘All right, John? ‘Yeah, John.‘
There was John Martin the drummer.
Wilko and Lee christened me the Big Figure, but it was more a title than a name.
This is the Big Figure.
Will Birch, I think, first, suggested the name of Wilko Johnson.
Wilko is John Wilkinson.
Someone suggested Sparko for me.
Lee Collinson became Lee Brilleaux.
Brilleaux come from his hairstyle, which he claimed looked like a Brillo pad.
He liked the, er, New Orleans aspect of the word Brilleaux.
B-R-O-L-L-E-A-U-X.
I remember standing in the pub with Wilko,
dreaming about becoming rock stars.
We were saying, wouldn't it be great to have the limos, the roadies, the groupies and the drugs.
I think the other three thought
that, well, this is part-time, bit of fun.
We used to think, wouldn't it be nice if we could earn enough money out of playing music
that we wouldn't have to go to work?
Little did we know, of course.
And that was about, certainly in my case, as far as the dream went.
Once we got to London, all right, the game became serious, quite honestly.
London is a hub.
You needed to operate out there to do the gigs,
to get the buzz going initially.
So what's the plan, eh? I'm coming to that.
It was impossible to get gigs, unless you had a record deal and an agent.
You couldn't get an agent unless you had a record deal, it was catch 22.
All that changed with the pub rock circuit in London,
around about 1972.
Suddenly it was possible to play to small audiences, 100-200 people in a room, minimal equipment.
That was the scene that suited the Feelgoods.
We took an expeditional journey to London in the Big Figure's Rover.
Went to this pub and saw a band called Duck's Deluxe.
We thought, yeah. Not a million miles away from what we're doing.
I'm gonna go through it once more to make sure there are no slip-ups.
I would have the van. Pick Lee up, drive, pick Sparko up.
Figure, Wilko, off the A13, and off to London.
Go up like a little strike force there.
Do your show, turn around, and come home.
I said to this friend of mine, there's this group in Southend.
You really ought to see them. They look and sound like nothing else.
And he said, ‘Oh, OK, we'll put them on.‘
And magically, out of the blue, Duck's Deluxe had cancelled.
13th july 1973, your mates, Dr Feelgood, can come and do it.
♫ I saw you the out other night
♫ I saw somebody hold you tight
♫ Roxette
♫ I wonder who it could be... ♫
♫ It was so dark I couldn't see
♫ But I know it wasn't me
♫ When I tell you it ain't right
♫ I know you've got to agree
♫ And now you're gonna pay... ♫
They did their show, it was OK.
They didn't set the place on fire by any means.
Bearing in mind what was around at the time, Sweet, bands like Sweet.
♫ We just haven't got a clue what to do... ♫
We must have stood out like sore thumbs.
Who's this lot, was the kind of feel as we mounted the stage.
We had to get to work the next morning. So, we were basically getting our stuff back in the van.
Picking up a Chinese on the way home, or a curry. That was it, back to bed.
I think the bank raid, the smash and grab approach, was probably what was on their minds at the time.
I suppose audiences thought they might be watching four guys who'd just done a bank job
and, oh, and in their spare time they play R&B.
People up in London weren't quite sure about Canvey Island.
They'd heard about it, and it had a bit of a reputation.
We quite consciously exploited that
with a load of Herberts from Canvey,
and turn up in big motors and things.
I prefer the morose attitude, you know, just try to look and feel mean.
It seemed inappropriate somehow to look like you were enjoying yourself.
With your little smile...
I don't know, what were we? Some kind of gang.
I used to go up to London on the pub gigs after bunking half a day off school.
You'd think there was a riot going on in the pub, you know what I mean?
The places were small and they were just giving it as much stick as they could.
Us lot started jumping about and climbing up the curtains and things.
It really did bring the house down.
People found us a bit startling, not the sort of thing you're supposed to see in a pub. All this energy.
Obviously if you're taking people by surprise, you see the reaction, you know?
They were just out of the Essex Estuary
and just kicking off.
They'd been sitting around for the last five years
listening to stupid synthesisers and things, you know, and it's...
Rock'n'roll's not about the Hobbit and things like that.
That's for girls, you know?
Children's music.
This is for people who want to have a good time.
A lot of it was actually quite tedious.
Dr Feelgood, when they appeared,
the first time I saw them, they had a buzz.
They have short hair, they have suits on, they have ties.
Lee Brilleaux looks like a used car salesman.
He looks as though he should have cigarettes nailed to his lips.
I was still working on a building site. I'd come home from work
and the van would be waiting for me outside my house,
and I would just have time to get changed and jump in the van.
We basically went up to town in our working gear.
Lee works in a solicitor's, so he had a suit on.
A white suit, once white, as though it's been kind of
rolled on the floor several times, as though someone's thrown up on it.
Lee's white suit was actually quite famous.
It featured on the back of the NME at Christmas time one year.
He lived in that suit.
There wasn't time to go to the cleaners.
Well, I always gone for the black suit, this is 15 quid in Asda.
Wilko wears a black suit, day in, day out.
Get up in it, go to bed in it. Lee'd have his white one on.
He'd be the one under the bonnet when the Transit blows up,
so that's all full of crap, isn’t it?
The other two, John B Sparks and Big Figure, they kind of look more like Irish nawies.
They were like small-town hoodlums who'd lucked out on getting a job with this outfit.
The one you'd really see would be John B Sparks in a wedding suit, with big wide lapels.
Pretty broad, flared trousers, stack-heel boots.
It's what you call a bastard suit!
Couldn't have been a less glamorous rhythm section.
That first time that I went to the Kensington,
it was absolutely heaving, and beer flying all over the place.
There's this one guy who was really moving around
and kind of dancing and knocking people over, and he turned out to be Jake Riviera.
I can remember they were tremendous.
Everyone was interested, because the word was out.
There's this bunch of kids from Canvey Island
who were really red hot.
Most of what we played was cover stuff.
They realised they had to write their own material to take it to another stage.
There was a song called She Does It Right. It had this riff, er...
♫ Well, if there's something that I like
♫ It's the way that woman walk
♫ If there's something I like better
♫ Is the way she baby talks
♫ She does it right
♫ She works hard every night just to make me feel all right
♫ She told me not to worry Cos there ain't a single trouble in sight
♫ You ought to see her jerk
♫ You ought to see her walk on the floor
♫ And when she gets back to her seat
♫ All the people cry for more
♫ She does it right
♫ She works hard every night just to make me feel all right
♫ She told me not to worry Cos there ain't a single trouble in sight. ♫
I would write songs, definitely kind of imagining Lee's voice.
They were written for him.
Couldn't have, er, too much poetry or anything like that.
I don't really like poetry.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!
Lee would be quite happy just to sing an old classic.
He weren't into art, was he? Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
What we're singing about is bad luck, a lot of the time, but I think most blues singers
have got their tongue very firmly placed in their cheek.
They're almost saying, ‘All right, this is a lousy deal,
‘but it'll be all right at the end of the day.
'Let's have a good time anyway, get drunk and forget it.
In those days, and up until. . early middle age, I was very strictly teetotal.
The very word pub has bad associations for me.
We shouldn't forget that although Wilko doesn't drink, Lee really consumes huge amounts.
When you see Lee sweating on stage, you realise there's beer coming out of him!
Wilko would just seem to look into the eyes
of every single person in the audience, and almost hypnotise them.
A lot of the time, actually, I'm just gazing into middle distance, I don't actually see anybody.
If you gaze into middle distance, everybody thinks you've looked at them.
A little trick I learned when I was a schoolteacher. just go like that.
They all think you're looking at them, but you're not.
That stare was quite frightening.
Wilko's eyes were a very important factor of Dr Feelgood. Were they big?
Yeah, they're extremely big.
It was scary, and I think that scariness is what appealed
to a young audience, and out of that young audience
came a shit load of punk groups.
You can see that bands would come and check us out.
They put on a show. It didn't look like they was acting, they just went for it.
Got the hairs on the back of your neck going.
We met Johnny Rotten and people like that. Yeah, they were fans.
joe Strummer goes along to the Windsor Castle.
He looks in the window, and he is riveted by what he sees.
Dr Feelgood were just like a machine of intense proportion.
Few groups have ever rivalled Dr Feelgood at their most intense.
It's an epiphany for him.
He goes out and buys the same guitar for when he forms The 101'ers.
He'd seen us, what we were doing, and I think it galvanised his ideas about what he was trying to do.
No attempt to try and dress themselves up as celebrities
and enjoying some kind of privileged lifestyle. In fact, quite the opposite.
Had anybody done that before? I'm not sure if they had.
They were punk before punk, weren't they?
The pub rock scene was very small, sweaty clubs,
lots of people drinking and smoking fags, and it was free, most places.
And each different pub had its own group of people.
They would be a bunch of bricklaying gangs that were in there,
who were absolutely riveted. Faces were in the crowd.
There was a buzz going on.
This taxi pulls up, and people getting out of the taxi.
I'm thinking, ‘Bloody hell, man, people who can afford to ride in taxis are coming to see us!‘
You know, so we're making it, you know!
Lady Diana was a regular. She would come to the Feelgood shows when we played the Kensington,
with her three flatmates who had a place around the corner.
And all of a sudden someone would say, ‘You know, that bloke who's here, that's John Mortimer.‘
I didn't know who John Mortimer was.
After the seventh week I said to this landlord,
‘Are you happy enough with everything?‘
And he said,
‘I want Dr Feelgood playing at this venue
‘until such time as they are out in the big field.
‘Cos I know this band is going places.‘
We were on our way.
The sort of lower part of the sky was the limit.
And the NME put Dr Feelgood on the cover before they'd even got a deal.
This caused a tremendous furore in the music business.
How can you put a group on the cover of the NME who haven't got a deal?!
The Feelgoods were made for the music papers.
They got acres and acres of press. Which was soon to become the darlings of the press.
Editors of NME and Melody Maker, scuttling all around London
trying to find the seediest pub with the seediest band playing in it.
They started saying, ‘Where are you from?‘ ‘Canvey Island.‘ 'Where's that?‘
‘This funny little place in the Thames Estuary.‘
We brought a journalist from the NME down and he'd say, ‘Look, here it is.‘
The wow factor would be very strong on that.
It had a certain romance to it. We saw that was a worker, and we used it.
And we used to say that there was this great oil scene going on here,
and it's an ugly existence, and that's what's making us
want to crawl out and make our way in the world.
We went down to Canvey Island, because that's where they were from.
We thought it would be a lost island of rhythm and blues.
It was a lost island - a lost island of gasometers, and wasteland.
I think we did a good PR exercise.
Thousands of tourists flood here from the four corners of the earth.
This is Canvey Heights behind us, which used to be Canvey refuge tip.
I love it, because all of a sudden we've got a bit of altitude on Canvey Island.
We've now got a 15 metre hill to climb up.
There's very much a sense of them coming from Canvey Island.
I think it's quite important to their mythology.
It is the sort of perfect backdrop for them.
It's almost a seaside town, but it's so completely busted and broken.
Wilko's very good at painting pictures of Canvey
being like the Mississippi Delta.
The Thames Delta, that's it!
Yeah, you thought you were going to Mississippi or somewhere.
He would liken the mud flats and the little inlets and the creeks
to the sort of place where maybe somebody like Muddy Waters had played.
When you get this thing Oil City,
you see the flame burning down there, the stacks, the towers.
I always used to think of it as Babylon. I babble on about Babylon frequently.
You see this beautiful oil refinery in the night time, you see the flame burning, all the lights.
In the morning you would look across the room and you'd see the refinery there,
and a kind of blue, misty light. It looked wonderful.
You were standing there and looking across to this sort of celestial city... Shell haven, really.
♫ Stand and watch the towers burning at the break of day
♫ Steadily slowing down On my feet since yesterday
♫ Gotta get a move on to try to find a man I know
♫ Money in my pocket Looking for a place to go
♫ That's what I've been doing baby
♫ I've been searching all through the city
♫ See you in the morning down by the jetty... ♫
Everything looked good. Our form was good, and our pedigrees were good
but we couldn't get a deal, not that easily.
And then all of a sudden we were signed up.
Andrew Lauder from United Artists Records signed us.
I've got a heart!
We were given completely free reign and allowed to make our own mistakes.
♫ I've been searching all through the city
♫ See you in the morning down by the jetty
I've got this Muddy Waters album.
He's coming down a wooden step. I love this picture, and thought, I want a picture like that,
that we could have a picture on the sea wall there.
When we come and take the pictures, we'd done a gig in London that night
and we all come to Canvey in the van,
and we were all soaking wet still from the gig
and we come up to the lobster smack, where these jetties are.
Four o'clock in the morning, and Lee fell asleep, just about there.
I think I... What was it, 1974,
I think I slept about three times that year.
And this photographer, he took a couple of black and white ones,
and then we started posing around and he's got these lovely colour prints, didn't he?
But these black and white ones were all like... They were the ones.
They were the kiddies. They turned up the studio,
he's got these beautiful colour prints.
He comes in, he said, ‘Look at these,‘ and you spilt coffee right on them, didn't you?
A cooler cafe!
The main tour in the UK which broke us was the Naughty Rhythms tour.
It was a 40-odd day concert tour, right around the country.
There was no looking back for the Feelgoods after that.
Keep going. Keep going!
Record companies signing bands, they think, they work in clubs,
what will they be like when they're on a big stage?
We couldn't wait for that. We want room to move.
Lee was the nucleus, he was this solidity in the centre of the stage,
who provided a kind of gravitational force for Wilko,
who'd move about the stage quite frenetically,
sometimes being drawn towards Lee, sometimes shooting off.
It was like two planets that would occasionally collide.
It was a very good rapport between Wilko and I. I think we were a good foils for each other.
Like bullfighting, you know, it's just that, peacocking,
putting their chests out and dancing for each other. Come on, take me on.
Lee Brilleaux's presence, the way that he wore a suit and jutted his jaw,
for boys that wanted a hard-on and couldn't admit to it,
that'd be Lee Brilleaux doing it for them.
I really don't understand any of it.
The way Wilko moves around stage is phenomenal.
I could never figure how he did those moves.
The original amphetamine kid.
Skittering across stage. Scuttling all around London.
Whizzling around on these psychedelic tram lines,
scattering across in front of Lee, who took no notice of him.
The charisma of that, you cannot buy in shops.
Who invented that term, skittering?
Skittering? You'll find it in the OED,
I believe the first recorded example...
It's in William Langland's Piers Plowman,
when the character of Gluttony is said to skitter across the pasture looking for food.
Skitter.
It... Well, it says here "Diarrhoea."
'Looseness or laxity of the bowels. '
There's another one.
‘A light skipping movement or the sound caused by this.‘
I was just trying to express myself and I realised it looked a bit deranged.
In Wilko's stage persona there was an element of possible psychosis.
He was almost in a kind of angry revolt against his own life.
You felt that this man, in his struggle with these demons,
was entitled to be on the edge of madness because he was engaged in such an epic struggle,
and it was a perfect parallel to somebody working in a small town job
that they are completely frustrated by.
Is it an expression of urban angst or something? Maybe.
But I don't think you necessarily have to see anything like that in it.
And there was a big groundswell of fervour around the Feelgoods.
1975, I think, being their breakthrough year.
Mr Brilleaux, Melody Maker has you on the 18 Best Names to Watch.
How do you feel about that?
Well, they're right, I hope.
It probably means we're not a name to watch now it's in the Melody Maker!
Do you have something to say about it? No, it's been said.
You realise you've actually got a following.
You're going out in front of bigger audiences, realising that all these people,
They're wearing a nice black suit.
They feel like part of it and you start to feel like a star.
Shhhhh!
And it's a pretty good feeling.
Back to the studio again for Dr Feelgood. This is great, this is Keep It Out Of Sight.
♫ You movin' up
♫ Man, the place is getting hot, yeah
♫ You just can't lose, baby
♫ With all that stuff that you got
♫ You know the people understand you got a reputation
♫ You don't wanna argue, fuss and fight
♫ Keep it out of sight, yeah
♫ You keep it out of sight... ♫
Wilko thought when we do the second album we could have a go
at doing it ourselves, which we did, and we think Malpractice is quite a good album.
♫ I wanna live
♫ The way I like
♫ Sleep all the morning
♫ Go and get my fun at night
♫ Things ain't like that here
♫ Working just to keep my payments clear
♫ Bought a brand new motor
♫ And I'm waiting for a loan
♫ So I can fill her up and start her
♫ And I go back home... ♫
Sometime in '75 I went to the UK for the first time,
saw Dr Feelgood.
I bought back the second album, Malpractice.
We were having a party at our rehearsal loft over here on the Bowery.
Everyone that was involved in the whole New York rock scene was at the party, pretty much,
whether it be Johnny Thunders, the Ramones, or Blondie, Richard Hell, all the bands.
We put on that Malpractice record, and it never really left the turntable the whole night.
Everyone went nuts for that record.
We were pretty big all over.
France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, all of Scandinavia.
The most magnificent gig I think we played was in Orange, in France.
We'd flown in by private aircraft.
It was our first time in a chartered plane,
and we were flying to Orange in France to play in a Roman amphitheatre.
We were in this plane, all very excited,
and Wilko decided he was going to fly the plane.
It's a four-engine plane, it's a Handley Page Heron.
The next thing we know he's in the cockpit.
I'd just taken it off from Avignon.
I was just about at the top of my trajectory.
And I knew he was out of his brains.
And the pilot lets him fly.
I'd just got a camera, so I went in and tapped him on the shoulder and I took this picture of him.
I started mugging to the camera. Still flying, right.
Do you want that person flying you round the world? You don't.
We were all cramming in vodka and tonics cos he thought it was funny to sort of fly around.
Rock'n'roll!
Yeah. Oh, you're gonna loop the loop, are you? Not with me in it.
We made a statement to the pilot, and said ‘Enough of this.‘
Let's strap him in his chair. Do you have any straight jackets on board?
I know what I'm doing, you see!
We were alight that night.
We hit the stage and everything sounded fantastic, the drums sounded like canons.
And the sun was just going down, the light was just perfect.
That was the best I'd ever heard the band.
And that cracked us in France.
♫ I'm going back down
♫ Back to Oil City soon
♫ I'll bring back my second cousin
♫ Let her join the conker room
♫ I'm a man
♫ I spell M...
♫A...
♫N...
♫Man...♫
If you'd been dreaming about becoming a pop star, or a footballer, or anything,
all your youth and teenage years, it's almost impossible for it not to have an effect.
Lee lived very modestly.
I'm sure he enjoyed the fame and all that came with it,
but he kept a level head, I think.
I think Wilko really enjoyed it,
and he was gonna enjoy it, and he did enjoy it.
We had a lot of difficult times with him. He was different from us in his social habits.
He was spending a lot of his time off of Canvey,
more so than the rest of us. We did tend to see less of him, yeah.
What happens invariably is one member of the group
meets girl in London, and that group member starts living in London.
In the case of the Feelgoods, Wilko was the guy who has taken off.
We didn't set out to be stars, but when that started happening,
you walk into a place and everybody's looking.
I mean, that feels good.
You just walk along, you keep very cool.
You know. But all the time, of course, you're really on stage.
You can't go out for the evening and be one of the chaps, you're posing away there.
When I've seen the stars and they're complaining about the paparazzi -
leave us alone and all that - it's just bollocks, man, you love it.
I actually started working with them.
I must have been about 16, I think.
We were very, very rock'n'roll.
Whatever we could get hold of, we'd do.
After gigs we'd all come back to hotels, we'd end up in one room and
just jolly up, and didn't really seem to worry about the next day.
What's your name? Jan, who are you?
I'm the doctor, Doctor Eager.
How do you feel? I feel good.
Oh, doesn't she do it well?
That sounds just like the title of the group.
Dr Feelgood. And here they are with their brand new single,
called Back In The Night.
♫ Back in the night
♫ We laid down by the fireside
♫ Back in the night
♫ You shook me like a landslide
♫ I nearly missed the early shift
♫ Dreaming in the morning about the things that we did
♫ Back in the night... ♫
It's like a roller coaster that runs out of control.
We weren't in control of what was happening.
It was just all happening so fast. Put the brakes on.
♫ Back in the night
♫ Beneath your love light... ♫
The idea that you've got to live in some ivory tower
and can't go out without a bodyguard,
people bothering you in the street,
that's something I wouldn't be interested in at all.
I'd rather quit than go through that, I don't know how other people stand it.
Do I want to go to String fellows?
I'd rather go to a dog meeting or something.
We're in the Grand Public House in Leigh on Sea.
And this is where Lee Brilleaux used to drink.
Nobody bothers me in the town I live in, I'm accepted, not as somebody who is well known
round the rest of the world or anything like that,
I'm accepted purely as me.
The vast majority think, that's that bloke in a rock'n'roll band.
just as if I was working in the garage around the corner.
I remember once when Lee came into the bar here,
he'd been on tour, and the Transit was stopped at the door
and he'd come in for a drink before he went home.
And he came in one day and asked for a gin and tonic.
And they didn't have any ice.
So he called for a taxi, he sent a taxi
down to the supermarket, come back with a bag of ice.
And he slammed it on the bar and said,
'There's your fucking ice, now give me a gin and tonic.‘
He could throw a shape. He had a temper.
Especially if there was no ice in the dressing room.
Despite Lee's look of confidence,
inside there, there was a lack of confidence.
We all get over that in our own way and Lee's way
was to show off incredibly on stage.
Lee was a kind of Dickensian gentleman.
If there were ladies in the shop, he would stand back
and allow the ladies to go first if they so wished.
He was a complete gentleman
when you were out talking to him in the pub of an evening,
but on stage he was completely opposite,
like a lunatic, a madman.
I don't know if I'd have even recognised him.
He wasn't really angry, I mean, it was all an act.
It seemed to go over all right, didn't it?
Who are you, who are you, who is the real Lee?
I like to think that part of the real me is the part speaking to you now.
There is another me, which is the one that gets up on the stage and performs.
When I'm up on the stage I become something different,
something more aggressive, maybe.
If I carried on like that in a restaurant or a supermarket I'd soon be arrested.
It's a little bit like going to a wrestling match.
You know the wrestler is not really a monster.
He's not really going to hurt the other man. That's part of the fun.
The Feelgoods went to America.
They were signed over there to what was then CBS.
And they had a convention in San Diego.
We had a fantastic time!
It was cocktails by the pool. And we did a few little gigs.
We found a bar and we met a couple of dancers in there.
And we were having a good time, and one of the girls, her name was Suds,
and I said, ‘That's an interesting name,
‘Suds, why are you called Suds?‘
She said, ‘Cos I like to get men in a lather.‘
Not something I'm really enamoured of, that nickname,
but yeah, people called me that.
And she became Mrs Brilleaux.
And I'll never forget it because I glanced up at this guy,
and he had the most intense gaze I can remember ever seeing.
I was slightly frightened.
We all ended up getting quite inebriated
and when it came time to leave we went out and got in the car,
and as we were about to drive away we realised that Lee
had climbed into the car with us
and he was kind of all contorted behind the seats.
We had to ask him to get out, please, and ride back with the band.
I went with Lee to Canvey Island after dark
and then the next day, when it was broad daylight,
it was kind of quite surprising really.
It was flat and bleak.
The parallel that I saw was that it looked so much like
southern Louisiana, kind of up river from New Orleans,
there's a refinery town called Norco.
I thought it looked a lot like Norco.
It wasn't really what I was hoping.
We were under pressure after the Malpractice album
to come up with more products.
Record companies are always pushing their acts for that.
Wilko was finding it more and more difficult to come up with the material.
When it came to the third album, which everybody knew
was going to go mental, cos they were so huge live, what have you got?
Nothing.
So it was decided by the record company with our agreement that we do a live album.
We had a very intense touring programme.
So to actually do a live recording was a kind of easy way out.
♫ I can tell I can tell
♫ I know you don't love me no more... ♫
I didn't really have any rucks with the company or anything
until we came to do Stupidity.
I found out when they record a live concert they have their microphone
up against everything, the way they do in a studio.
Also what they have is two microphones
up in the middle of the hall somewhere.
I wanted to use that sound.
♫ I know pretty baby that you put me down... ♫
But the A&R guy at the company didn't like this idea.
He wanted us to do overdubs on it and clean it all up.
And I said, ‘No, if you're making a live record
‘that's the way it should be.
‘If you want to make a smooth record, you do it in a studio.‘
Jam it!
It got really eyeball to eyeball with me and this A&R guy
but I didn't waiver.
He's a very powerful person. He's got means of getting his own way.
And the guy who was an engineer, he said to me,
‘We're gotta let Wilko have his way on this
‘and this record is gonna die a death, then he'll do as he's told.‘
So we put the record out and it went straight to number one.
He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But I felt pretty clever.
That night we had a huge celebration
in the Trust House Forte Hotel at Southampton.
We got so drunk
that we demanded to have all the tropical fish out of the tank,
trying to eat them and all this sort of thing.
The manager was going, ‘Please don't eat my fish!‘
I had no idea that the band was so huge.
I was astounded when I got to London
and there were posters of them everywhere.
It was all about Dr Feelgood at the time. It was fantastic!
We went to the Odeon Hammersmith, my husband was going crazy.
He was as bad as all the youngsters.
We was so exhilarated.
We never went to bed all night.
We couldn't, we couldn't stop talking about it.
That show was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
All these kids just packed in there, it was sold out.
They had kind of rushed the stage
and were just jumping up and down and punching the air
and singing along with the lyrics and punching each other,
there was beer flying everywhere.
I didn't know if I was gonna get beaten up,
it was pure theatre to Lee
and he would perform songs like Cell Block Number 9.
That used to be a real show-stopping song.
♫ October 2nd 1953
♫ I was serving time
♫ For armed robbery
♫ 4 o'clock in the morning I was sleeping in my cell
♫ I heard a whistle blow and I heard somebody yell
♫ There's a riot going on... ♫
At that time Wilko was doing extraordinary things on stage
with the guitar, like a machine gun.
He was effectively acting out the mowing down of the audience.
You would kind of laugh when he did it,
but it was a kind of a nervous laugh.
It was his catch phrase, 'It's a gun.‘
You used to get wrapped up in it.
I used to look on Lee, Lee's there, right.
He's like the leader, the gang leader and I'm, I don't know,
I'm the guy with the machine gun.
I'd do whatever he says.
♫ There's a riot going on
♫ Up in cell block number 9... ♫
The atmosphere was completely electric.
It was an amazing experience.
And it was completely trashed, all the seats had been ripped up
and destroyed and it looked like it had been hit by a bomb.
Dr Feelgood were the biggest group in England by the summer of 1976.
But they didn't know what was just around the corner.
We were too busy enjoying ourselves to worry about the future too much.
But of course at the back of our mind niggling away,
was, what's going to happen with the next album?
Wilko didn't drink. The other guys in the group
did develop a drinks. . .culture.
Legendary-
We had a reputation of being big drinkers.
From where I was standing, I think
that was a big divide between us and Wilko.
There was a big, big split in that band.
Some people were smoking weed, some people were taking speed.
Dave used to like a drink
and I used to like to slope off to my room and...
Smoked hashish?
I also remember being in Wilko's room
and him snorting a lot of speed
and then saying, right, I'm going to bed now.
What a rogue and peasant slave am I?
After going to America on the first tour
I think we really discovered alcohol in a big way then.
The Americans didn't really know what to make of it.
The only town that liked them was New York.
You go down Fifth Avenue in a big stretch limo
and there's this ton of guys with you, and you think,
‘Bloody hell, this is mad, we come from Canvey Island.‘
But then again, we can look New York in the face.
We'd done the Bottom Line in New York
with the Ramones opening the show for us.
We all went because it was sort of a big step up for the Ramones.
The Feelgoods had this buzz about them like the next big thing,
with a number one record in England.
Wilko really looked psycho.
That was another attractive thing.
The air of danger he exuded
was something that we could all relate to here in New York.
They did seem like thugs, like gangsters.
Maybe they really were, I don't know!
Even though Lee Brilleaux had an incredible presence on stage,
it was sort of Wilko that was stealing the limelight
with his manic guitar stage moves and zipping all around.
I remember we tried to talk to Wilko. We were telling them how great they were,
but he wasn't interested in hearing how great he was.
You'd get very sleepy, and you just. ..
Oh, then you've gotta go on stage, and you just want to curl up
and go to sleep, and I wish everyone would leave me alone.
He was very stand-offish, I don't remember there being much, if any,
interaction between Lee and Wilko.
And I do have a series of photographs I took of Wilko
sitting in the bar at the Gramersea Hotel,
looking extremely moody, gazing out the window away from everyone.
And while we were trying to immerse ourselves in American culture,
Wilko would stay in his room, ostensibly to write songs.
Doing what in reality?
Taking speed, or complaining, or on the phone to someone, I think.
I don't know, I wasn't there. I tried not to be there.
He'd often get very depressed about something, and say,
‘Oh, I don't want to do it, the whole thing's a load of shit,
‘this whole business stinks.‘
And he's perfectly right.
My philosophy is to laugh at it, but his is different.
He'd be all right for five minutes
and then he'd just disappear and become very distant and sulky,
throwing wobblers, and didn't really seem like the person I used to know.
T'is not alone, my inky cloak, good mother.
I did have the misery a lot of the time,
and I have to take a lot of blame for that.
I'm not. ..not easy to get on with, I suppose.
Another thing about success is that it's bad for your personality in a lot of ways,
because you're suddenly surrounded by people,
and all you've got to do is stamp your foot and throw a tantrum,
and you get anything you want.
That's terrible!
I was insufferable. Yeah, I know, it's embarrassing to me really.
There was bad feeling between me and Lee and it got heavy.
I mean we couldn't be in the same room together.
Looking at it now, why, I do not know, I do not know.
But it just got out of all proportion.
Lee talked about Wilko a lot.
They'd been friends but,
I mean, Lee was almost like a band member scorned.
Wilko?
He was sort of, well, troubled sort of person really.
They never knew where they were with him,
he walked off the stage one night and left Lee to it.
He run off into the broom cupboard, cried,
and frankly I was ready to go and beat him up!
I hadn't actually heard that story!
But I can believe it.
That was probably due to my own over-indulgence,
but, I wasn't doing it to make any point, I was terrified,
I didn't know where I was.
I came back and I finished the show.
I can't really even tell you how bad it was, it was awful.
Lee became so wrapped up in how much he disliked Wilko
that it was difficult for him, really,
to concentrate on anything else.
Lee was racking his brains
to whether they had capital punishment in the States,
that they would perform on him,
because he thought he'd go off the stage and kill him.
It seemed with Wilko that there was always this paranoia,
kind of, in the background, this faint sense of thinking that people were out to get him.
♫ My mind's in neutral... ♫
I guess the perception was that he had become
a little bit of a prima donna.
I mean the bloke is a genius,
you gotta take him as he was, good and bad.
There was a lot of good and bad things about him.
He could be a right cunt when he wanted to be.
Sometimes I get this bad feeling come on me and make me feel very lonely.
Like you'd be in a restaurant or something, having a meal,
and there's all the record company people and that,
and suddenly you get this loneliness comes on you,
and you just don't want to be there.
All you want to do is try and say to people, ‘Look, I just feel bad.‘
But because you, you know, maybe you're not that close any more
because you've antagonised each other and things,
so you can't say anything at all.
So you sit there and you don't say nothing, and you're aware
that all around people are going, ‘What's the matter with him?
'He's not speaking, he's getting heavy.‘
You look around and you realise there's a big scowl on your face.
And it builds up, it builds up, you think, just keep cool,
you're looking at the plate and it starts swimming around in front of you,
and you think, ‘I've got to go.‘
But there are people on either side of you and you can't squeeze out.
And so you just smash your hand down
and push everybody out the way.
And you know, there is another psychopath story,
and you end up walking down the street thinking all that,
just cos I can't turn to anyone and say, 'I'm feeling a bit bad today!‘
By this point they had been working together for six years,
and with Feelgoods we'd always been an intense touring band,
so probably over that period we'd made over 1,000 shows.
I think the highest amount was, I think 330 gigs one year.
It was incredible. Enough to kill anybody.
That in itself is difficult enough
without having to try and write songs in-between gigs.
Where the Feelgoods fell was when Wilko stopped writing songs,
or didn't evolve into a great songwriter,
like Jagger and Richards did.
And if you don't have your own material, you're fucked.
I also think, as well,
he didn't always want anyone else to write the songs.
Not that we were any good at it anyway.
Songwriting, that always affects, I suppose,
a lot of musicians, doesn't it?
Cos one of them starts making money and one don't.
I was always encouraging them to write,
but they didn't, and I think that they used to think
I'd turn up and go, ‘Oh, I've got this song.‘
I always thought Lee should have written
because he was very funny, very witty.
That always puzzled me, why he didn't,
and why he couldn't, even.
I found myself writing some.
I've always been a little bit frightened that what I'd write wasn't up to scratch.
I was always a little overawed by Wilko's talent for it.
What he said was, ‘I ain't fucking Shakespeare.
‘I sing them, I don't write them.‘
The fourth album's coming up, and the songs had started coming,
writing the songs, and I thought 'It's gonna be fine.‘
And then it just all... it wasn't fine.
Then the final row came
while we were making the recording of Sneaking Suspicion.
We were at Rockfield Studio in Wales.
And you kind of stayed there, you know?
Like we'd go into the studio in the afternoon and work through
till the early evening, then they would go off to the pub.
And I would stay up for two or three days at a time, I was writing songs.
Then when we come back to the recording,
Wilko weren't at the recording, there was a session musician called Tim Hinkley.
He was playing the guitar parts.
It just became sort of very apparent
that there was going to be a lot of aggro amongst them.
I think we were all kind of cranked up pretty tight.
Lee and Sparko and Chris, particularly,
had an aversion to the song Paradise.
Before the album I'm walking along in the rain on Canvey Island,
and I'm getting this repetitive riff in my mind, like this.
I wrote this song called Paradise,
and then suddenly a name,
for the first time ever, came into it, which was the name Irene.
It was all about. ..us.
♫ Well I went out walking
♫ I recall
♫ Me and my best girl
♫ Along the wall
♫ In the long grass
♫ Side by side
♫ Where the big ships
♫ Go gliding by
♫ Go gliding by... ♫
And it was a song that Wilko had written exclaiming his love
for two women, and not being ashamed of that.
And it just kind of went against the grain
of everything that Lee felt the Feelgoods stood for.
It got the straight-laced horrors about my...
..concubine!
You know, it was the rule that,
no wives or girlfriends, and Wilko's girlfriend and Irene were there!
Which, you know, kind of put paid
to the rules they were attempting to set for the band.
None of their business, really.
I can't tell lies to anybody,
I can't go in for subterfuge and everybody knows the score.
♫ I love two girls
♫ I ain't ashamed
♫ I ain't ashamed... ♫
And one of the things they was throwing at me was
that it was a fucking ego trip, and I'm going...
'It's not! It's not.‘
♫ Thinking about what might have been
♫ I love you still, Irene, Irene... ♫
So I said, we've gotta finish the album, if you don't write the songs,
we're gonna come up with them.
And there was this song that Lew Lewis had given them.
From the day we were going to the recording studio,
Lew came to my house and just handed me a song
that was scribbled on a bit of paper, called Lucky Seven.
They had gone into the studio and bashed out a song.
Now, I didn't like it.
Right, I've got to say, I didn't like it.
He said it wasn't Dr Feelgood.
I do remember thinking to myself,
'He ain't the only one that's got a right to define what Dr Feelgood is about. '
They thought that Lucky Seven was a better song, and Wilko stood his guns, ‘I want my song.‘
And there was a big split about these songs, which one is going on the LP.
It was night, I was about to crash out and they turn up from the pub.
Figure wasn't there.
Figure never once set any trouble.
Sparko's an easy going guy.
So it was me and Lee.
So you're saying that when an irresistible force
meets an immovable object, something's got to give?
Maybe I was cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I was thinking,
'It's sink or swim, you've got to make a stand once in a while.‘
They were taking it one-by-one to argue with me.
But they were talking about things they didn't like,
and it got to some point, I'm going, ‘While you're talking about things we don't like,
‘I don't like that fucking song you've done!‘
just suddenly it all went bang.
Terrible.
Devastation.
In Canvey Island.
And a bit of Benfleet too, probably.
And he more or less said,
‘Well if you want to do it this way, I'm gonna leave.‘
And we said, ‘Well, OK, old chum, go.‘
And the morning come,
and the band had broken up, you know, and er. . .that was that.
In a very stupid moment he left and we let him leave, you know,
I think it was a great pity.
Wilko maintains that he was given the push and they say that he left.
Now I just leave it at that.
I think that what really happened, we'd run our course with Wilko.
I look back now, and if we were all a bit older
and we'd acted a bit more sensibly,
we probably could have sat down and discussed it.
It didn't do either side any good splitting up. I thought Dr Feelgood
was going to be my one thing I can't imagine doing anything outside of.
And I thought, ‘What am I going to do?‘
And I realise I was kind of trapped by that, I just had to keep playing.
And I was very confused,
and I think I immediately started making all the wrong decisions.
Obviously it was a great loss, because there was this bloke
who's got this incredible stage presence,
skitting about all over the stage, that's what people wanted to see.
We thought it would end, and one day Lee and I said, ‘Well, let's give it a go.‘
Now if my memory serves me right, jippy had already been lined up.
So it was pretty much a case of one out, one in.
It's a bit like a football team that loses a star player.
You've gotta get a replacement, you've gotta keep going.
I think quite a few people lost interest in the band after Wilko had gone,
who'd probably been Wilko Johnson fans rather than Dr Feelgood fans.
It was never the same after Wilko was gone, it just wasn't.
I didn't see the band after Wilko left.
I never saw them after that.
I mean, I like the original line-ups of things.
It'd be like if Keith quit the Rolling Stones.
There would still be some Mick supporters,
but it's not really gonna work.
What was rather nice is we were able to prove a lot of people wrong
because we had chart success with a song called Milk and Alcohol.
♫ We got him on milk and alcohol! ♫
♫ White boy, in town
♫ Big black, blue sound
♫ Night club, I paid in
♫ I got a stamp on my skin
♫ Main attraction dead on his feet
♫ Black man rhythm with a white boy beat
♫ They got him on milk and alcohol
♫ They got him on milk and alcohol... ♫
Lee was a bit of a gourmet. He really liked good quality food.
Fortunately, that's what we provide.
He came in here and he was entertaining
his friends and relatives, to select the finest meat,
so that he could make the finest meals.
Often I would come home and find
a menu tacked to the front door of the house, and Lee would have
prepared an entire meal for us with the accompanying wines,
the dessert, the cheese course.
He loved doing things like that, and he loved being at home,
just as long as it wasn't for very long.
It was his idea to arrange a tour
around the Egon Ronay Guide and the Good Beer Guide.
By the time that Sparko and Figure left, we'd been kind of 10 years.
And in both their cases, they'd really had enough of touring.
But touring was what it was all about.
Lee was happy to do that volume of work,
it became in his blood to do that.
I don't think we could have remained together
if he hadn't been away as often as he was.
In the nicest possible way, of course,
but Lee was not the easiest person to live with.
He was a very intense guy and I think the fact that he
was away travelling a lot of the time is what saved our marriage.
I don't think he could exist outside the band kind of lifestyle.
You'd miss it if you were told to stop doing it,
like smoking, it's an addiction almost, actually.
As long as there's life in the old dog I'll keep doing it, you know.
You've all done very well, you're on the last leg, folks, you'll be able to smell lager shortly.
It was just before Christmas 1992.
Last night of what had been quite a long UK tour,
and Lee had, had an appointment
with the specialist in London that afternoon.
Essentially he'd been given a death sentence
by any other way of putting it.
He went on stage that night at a club in South London,
as if nothing was happening.
Lee just gets on and, gets on stage and delivers just,
just a fantastic show, and you're thinking, how do you do that?
In the last year of Lee's life we started getting close again,
and used to talk about
the days of the jug band, and we spoke about recreating
the jug band, which never actually happened in the end, unfortunately.
He came to me in January,
and he was really looking bad now, he was very thin.
He'd had lots of courses of chemotherapy.
And he said, I want to record a show at the Feelgood Music Bar.
I said, ‘When would you like to do it?‘ He said, ‘Within two weeks.‘
I said, ‘Why don't you leave it a few weeks,
‘you might feel better.‘
He said, ‘No, I might feel worse as well, I want it in two weeks time.‘
I'm not gonna do any histrionics, just one name for you, ladies and gentleman.
Lee Brilleaux, Dr Feelgood!
Lee actually glowed after that gig,
I mean, it was almost like he could step out of it.
But sadly, 12 weeks later, he died.
Thank you very much and God bless you all. Thank you.
I suppose sometimes Lee must have missed me, I certainly missed him.
He was the star. It felt very powerful to be on stage with him.
He was a really hard act to follow.
And I miss him very much.
You never get over it, and he was the only child I got.
If there's one thing I can console myself about his early death,
he really did have a magical life.
He was doing what he loved,
and I can't picture him having done it any other way.
He thought of himself as the Road Runner.
You know, that junior Walker song?
We actually played that at his funeral.
I think he used to really relate to that song, because when we had dinner parties
and we'd had a few, you know,
he'd always get up and put it on, and like, dance to it.
It's sad but you, you can feel that Lee
is spread over the spirit of the Essex Marshes here.
It is a kind of a pilgrimage, because people do
have to make a decision and an effort to come here.
This is the 13th memorial show we've had since Lee's died.
It's a celebration of a great, great guy.
We were just empowered by what we did, I still feel it now,
when I play now, I've got all the energy in the world for it.
It still makes the hairs of the back of my neck tingle,
when I'm standing at a show.
I'm just very proud to have been part of it.
Since my wife died
I've been very...
..sad about that, and really...
that's what I'm thinking about most of the time.
And I'm sad, and I miss her. Except that when I actually get
onto the stage, there's something that lifts that heartbreak.
I mean I'm still thinking about her then, but it's all right,
and I'm playing, and you're getting a reaction from people.
And for that hour, or hour and a half, or whatever it is, I...
I get some relief, you know? And I'm doomed to carry on doing it!
The Feelgoods kind of don't get the credit
that I think that they deserve, really, for just coming out
and being so different at a time when it was all so dull.
Throughout history of music there are many bands that
should have made it and for X number of reasons why they didn't.
Maybe their record company guy wasn't paid
the right payola, given the right drugs to get behind the band.
We slipped through a gasoline crack in history!
It's good standing here,
and seeing that.
Yeah, I think it's a very fitting backdrop to the band, yeah.
It's stirring up complex emotions.
Who would have thought we'd end up on the oil tanks?
When we were about 15, Lee and I used to just walk through this area
to the other end of Canvey, with our dream of what a band would be like.
And when it actually happened to us, it went beyond
our original dreams of what we could achieve.
We had a fantastic time.
We were in love with each other.
When I look back on Dr Feelgood, I'm proud of what we did, it was, er...
the four of us, or the five of us, with Chris.
You know, we come from Canvey Island, and we did that, and we...
we played a part in the story.
And, yes, I'm proud of that.
I don't know if I wasted my life.
But probably not.
All the very best to all of you.
This is from Lee, Dr Feelgood. Thanks very much, bye bye.
I live on my own now. I've recently got this wonderful
computer programme called Starry Night,
which is an astronomy programme.
So I've got this big telly, and it faces that way,
so I'm lying back down here, and, and I'm looking down, looking at it.
Then I think, ‘Well, I'm in my spaceship.‘
Cos if I had a spaceship, it would probably look a little bit like this,
books flying around everywhere, all clothes on the floor and all that.
You can fly round the moon, and you can fly around Saturn.
You can go right out the galaxy.
We're going at 3,238 million light-years a second.
That's pretty good, pretty fast.
Defeating time.
An unimaginable distance from everything, everything.
Oh, what a feeling! You are light-years away.
Nobody will ever get that far away.
While we've been talking, we've actually left the universe behind.
When you get right out here, where it's black, right,
there's nothing here, it don't say anything any more,
it just says, ‘Outside time.‘
But it's fairly boring outside of time, as you see,
you've just got this white dot.