It’s evident if you listen to one of the songs that Brilleaux plays harmonica on, such as their cover of Boom Boom. Though Johnson was the Feelgoods’ songwriter and is recognised as the band’s true musical original for his choppy guitar technique, it’s the fist-pumping, beer-sweating, groin-thrusting Brilleaux who forged Dr Feelgood’s character. The name sums up the man: a ludicrous concoction plucked out of thin air but faithfully played out with total conviction. When he died he left behind three Brilleauxs, his wife Shirley and their two children Kelly and Nick. He lived the persona, having it changed by deed poll. But it wasn’t just a moniker he slipped on when he took to the stage. Brilleaux’s came from him likening his matted, post-gig hair to a Brillo pad, adding a French-style spelling for an extra layer of mystery. All the band had stage-names, partly to avoid confusion (Wilko, Figure and Sparko were all christened John). Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarrett, Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner and Brighton Rock’s Pinky Brown all fed into it. Much talk of Brilleaux often centres around the construction of his persona: a persona he pieced together from the detritus of pop culture. “There was nothing more important than cheering people up and taking them out of their life and just for a few hours giving them a bit of escapism.” “He said fans should be respected and be given a good show,” Howe says. It is as if in leaving behind a life of drudgery, he felt beholden to perform for those still stuck in the nine-to-five.
Dr Feelgood songs were about “sod’s law and bad luck,” he said. Lee gave up his job serving writs as a solicitor’s clerk, Johnson packed in teaching and they went out on the road. As the band played local pubs, graduating from Canvey to Southend and the London circuit, the group’s obsession with R&B and blues grew.
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By this time Brilleaux was a full blues obsessive, having “nicked” his style from Howlin Wolf after seeing him perform wearing a tatty mohair suit in the function room of a Romford pub. In 1971, after Johnson had graduated from university and got a job as a teacher, they formed Dr Feelgood with two local friends, bassist John B “Sparko” Sparks and drummer John “The Big Figure” Martin. “Lee, even then, seemed so self-possessed and obviously clever,” he says today. Johnson first clapped eyes on him while he performed in the band. He started a jug band with Chris Fenwick, who would later manage the Feelgoods, and other friends, playing pubs such as the Canvey Club and fetes around the island.
(He later would comment he could only really get into “black music”.) When his family moved back to England to avoid his indoctrination into the pro-apartheid education system, the young Lee would make trips from their London home to see his nan who lived on Canvey Island – so often that the Collinsons decided to move there, upping sticks from cramped London for the big sky dreaming of the Thames estuary.Īt school, he filled exercise books with surrealist poetry and the rules of imaginary clubs that he made real among his gang, with trips across the Thames to Kent and hand-drawn pirate maps. It’s as if her son soaked up the anguish of the oppressed – maybe that’s why the blues resonated with him to such a degree and why he articulated them in such a tightly wrought anger. His mother Joan used to cajole shop owners to serve the black South Africans they ignored and would refuse to go before them. They just did what they wanted to do and the fact that it was such a hit was almost by accident.”īrilleaux was born Lee Collinson in Durban in 1952. There was a punk attitude in him, and I think that was the secret to the success of the band. He used to strut around dressed as a dandy on Canvey Island. “He did not care about what anyone else thought. Howe paints Brilleaux as a fascinating, readymade myth: someone aware of his own character to such a degree he wouldn’t budge. Zoe Howe’s new biography, Lee Brilleaux: Rock’n’Roll Gentleman, is shining the spotlight back towards the Feelgoods frontman. At times it was easy to forget that Dr Feelgood had a singer at all. Brilleaux died of lymphoma, but Johnson’s own recent battle with cancer (which he miraculously recovered from) served to make him a chat-show fixture. The unexpected star of the piece was Wilko Johnson, whose mugging to camera in front of now-defunct oil refineries on the Thames Estuary got him a gig as an executioner in Game of Thrones. Since the release of Julien Temple’s brilliant documentary Oil City Confidential in 2010, there has been a re-evaluation of Canvey island’s premier proponents of supermarket tailoring and severe hair.
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