Dr. Feelgood

Dr. Feelgood were pub rock’s killer elite. Tough, brawling and urgent, they tore into the London pub rock circuit from the industrial wastes of Canvey Island like an R&B hurricane, tails ablaze. At a time when the dreaded prog-rock was mounting ever more spectacular pantomimes and sinking deeper and deeper into farcical mysticism and idiot meanderings, the Feelgoods stripped their music to the bone, played raw, muscular blues, fireball R&B and mad-dog rock ‘n’ roll, fuelled by Wilko Johnson’s hysterical guitar broadsides and Lee Brilleaux’s barking vocals.

Their early start was as backing band to Heinz playing the Rock ‘N’ Roll Show at Wembley Stadium in the summer of 1972 where McLaren & Westwood had a stall. Two things came from this. Wilko loved Wayne Kramer and the MC5 and his stage moves and to some extent copied them and added his own unique twists. He also, like McLaren & Westwood, saw the Teddy Boys bottle Kramer and thought them anchored in the past. From that though playing covers wanted to the band to look forward.

While most of their pub rock contemporaries were laid-back, amiable and grooving, the Dr. Feelgood were fierce, aggressive, played at a volume, speed and dangerous hell-bent skin-’em-alive freneticism that anticipated punk. They had an attitude, too: where most pub rock bands turned up on stage looking like they’d spent the afternoon pottering around in the garden and were mostly in need of a shave and a trim, the Feelgoods looked like spivs, dressed in sharp suits that suggested they’d arrived at places like the Tally-Ho and The Kensington hot-foot from a gangster’s funeral. It’sd also worth noting that Lee Brilleaux lonaed the money to enable Stiff Records to start up and the impact that would have on punk.

They were defiant, had no time for quaint commercial niceties, the bland considerations of the day. Determined to make a point, they recorded their first album (1975’s Down By The Jetty) in mono, put it out in a grimy black and white sleeve, at a time when you usually needed a degree in cardboard engineering to get anywhere near records by Yes and Jethro Tull, whose elaborate packaging conceits were hitting peaks of ridiculousness. The cover shows the band looking like they were suffering from a hangover hunched against a biting cold wind on a Canvey jetty. 

Dr. Feelgood turned out to be both popular and durable.

Live was where they were at. Solid backbeat from the Big Figure and left and right a whirl of activity as Wilko and Sparko went backward and forward in unison like greyhounds on speed with Wilko’s bug-eyed amphetamine psychosis veering off and pulling angular shapes on the guitar. Up front, the menacing brooding presence of Lee Brilleaux dominated centre stage like Jack Thaw from The Sweeney. That Stupidity, their 1976 live album, went to number one was a real kick against the bloated rock acts and sugar pop around at the time.

They also survived what many had predicted would be the fatal departure of Johnson, scoring a Top 5 hit as late as 1979 with Milk & Alcohol with new guitarist Gypsy Mayo Thompson. The

Sadly there are no original members of the original lineup playing and Lee Brilleaux sadly passed away in 1994.

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