It's a Dr Feelgood day today apparently, so here's my Dr F Youtube mixtape for you. What a feckin band by the way, more punk than punk and kicking out the amphetamine-fuelled jams well before any London fashionista poof ever put a safety pin through his nose. Certainly the best thing to come out of Canvey Island since liquified natural gas.
Wilko Johnson deserves some sort of medal for being such a top mentalist and all-round blistering funk rhythm guitarist. And as for Lee Brilleaux - the voice, dirty white suit, raw harmonica... that's some sleazy shit right there.
Top notch my friend. What a great band.
ReplyDeleteFantastic and it just never ages..brilliant...
ReplyDeleteMy old man always says that Dr Feelgood was one of the best live acts he ever saw, they didn't even pause for breath, no gap betewwn tracks, no talking to the audience beyond the 'one two three four' at the very start, just straight ahead high volume rock and roll powered by pills and brown ale. Fuckin brilliant. Give us a time machine man, talk me to the Appollo on Renfeild street in 1975 and I'll be a happy man.
ReplyDeleteWilko Johnson should get more credit don't you think? That chunky, stabbing stuttering style was way ahead of it's time when he started playing it in the early seventies - when devo and gang of four and all them started playing like that years afterwards they were hailed as innovators. I think Dr Feelgood just weren't seen as very cool in the punk era because they wore flares and looked like sleazy sex offender drunken uncles at a wedding, but really punk and post punk owe them a lot musically . . . .
Big flares and intense stares - absolutely fucking brilliant. Lee Brilleaux and Wilko Johnson have to be some the most full on frontmen for any band ever. Amazing particularly when you think of all the prog rock shite that was doing the rounds in the early to mid 70s.
ReplyDeleteWilko doing his chopppy guitar thing and skittering about the stage like a fucked up spinning top. Lee has something in his eyes that's just gone wrong: too many midnight runners and too much Double Diamond.
They're an interesting pair n'all. Wilko was a very smart lad, got an English degree from Newcastle before travelling overland to India. Came back to Canvey a few years later and met up with the rest of the band who were a few years younger. Lee was born in South Africa and moved to Canvey when he was a teenager. Not your typical Essex boys, and Canvey is a fucking weird place in itself anyway. Massive industrial oil works all over the place, cut off from the mainland, and a skyline like something out of Bladerunner/Middlesbrough.
Get hold of this documentary by the way, it's been doing the rounds on BBC4 this year - well worth a watch: http://www.oilcityconfidential.co.uk/
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ReplyDeleteI watched the stiff records doc (which is brilliant) and apparently what became known as "pub rock" was far too uncool for the punks. Although how anyone who would call themselves 'the Bromly contingent' have any sort of sway on whats cool, i dunno.
ReplyDeleteThey are defo underrated. Prob just a matter of timing and that they sort of exist between the genres of the time.
Pub rock was good shit man, Ian Dury - what a legend. Tom Robinson band, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, Eddie and the Hot Rods, it'a all good honest working class fun, canny fault it. I think that the likes of the sex pistols wanted to distance themselves from pub rock to mask the fact that musically they weren't doing anything new.
ReplyDeleteWhen compared to other albums that came out in 77 like wire's pink flag, television's marquee moon and talking heads' 77, the music of the sex pistols was way behind the times. They looked radical but they sounded boring. I reckon it was part of the very British thing of making music tribal, even when the styles are very similar. Like the mods and rockers, I'll never understand it man - if you listened to Chuck Berry you were a rocker, but if you listened to the who covering a Chuck Berry song, you were a mod.
Too right, by '77 the 'Bromley Contingent' (heh) could/should have been doing something a damn sight more radical than ripping up their trousers and then CONTINUING TO WEAR THEM REGARDLESS... An-ar-mother-fucking-chy.
ReplyDeleteThat said, Vi Westwood was, and is, a top bird. Damn how I want a Westwood suit. And in all fairness, PIL are fucking great. Was very amused to hear that the current reunion tour was almost entirely funded by a certain series of butter advertisements.
Anyhoo, over to Chris and Cosey at Throbbing Gristle's Death Factory, a right bunch of nutters who didn't feel the need to gob on anyone:
"We were never punk, we're not punk, we're industrial. An industrial experimental music band."
youtube.com/watch?v=hpH-8Exq5oE
PS Tribalism in British music scenes is worthy of a post in its own right. The first thought that springs to mind is that it's more homogeneous these days, perhaps ever since the whole Britpop Blur/Oasis thing - I can't think of anything which was so prominent or divisive in the 00s. Or maybe I just didn't notice cos I was no longer a teenager, which is kind of a fundamental part of the whole thing. Kids seem more open to all sorts of music these days, which must be a good thing.
Maybe grime vs dubstep counts though. Basically the same shit, except one's for Landan bwadbwoys to nice up the dance, and the other's for middle class students to do the frowning head nod to.
Discuss.
Yeah, your right, I should always add that Pil were brilliant whenever I go on an anti Johnny Rotten rant, it's only fair.
ReplyDeleteI reckon tribalism is still going strong for the kids today, with the main difference being that the internet makes it possible to identify with as many different groups as you like, and without having to physically do anything. Back in the day, if you wanted to be a skin head or a teddy boy or whatever, you had to dress in one way, go to a certain place with certain folk and and it was geographically limiting, there had to be a 'scene' for what you were into in your town. Nowadays kids can identify with any minority style from anywhere in the world and they can do it anonymously.