Lee Brilleaux Read online

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Zoë Howe’s books include Barbed Wire Kisses – The Jesus and Mary Chain Story, Stevie Nicks – Visions, Dreams and Rumours, Typical Girls? The Story of the Slits and ‘How’s Your Dad?’: Living in the Shadow of a Rock Star Parent. She co-authored and collated Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson’s memoir Looking Back at Me (Cadiz Music, 2012) and was a contributing author to the Eel Pie Island book British Beat Explosion: Rock’n’Roll Island (Aurora Metro, 2013).

  Zoë’s journalism has appeared in The Quietus, Company Magazine, Notion, BBC Music, Holy Moly, Classic Rock and NME, and she has made music radio series for stations including Resonance FM. Zoë can be heard talking about rock’n’roll from time to time on BBC 6 Music, BBC London, Absolute Radio, E4 and Planet Rock. She lives in Leigh on Sea with her husband Dylan and cat Marzipan.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015

  by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Zoë Howe 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 335 2

  eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 264 1

  All rights reserved.

  All efforts have been made to trace copyright holders.

  If any omissions have been made, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Journey to the Centre of Canvey Island

  The Odyssey (to North Kent) – and a Big Bad Wolf

  Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Heinz Burt

  Red Hot in (the) Alex

  They Lived by Night

  The Case of the Rockfield Studio Irregulars

  The Man in the Dirty White Suit

  Angry Young Men

  Sealed with a KISS

  From Lew Lewis to Louisiana, with Love

  Oil City Blues

  And Then There Were Three. Briefly

  The Band that Came in from the Cold

  Extraordinary Voyages: Return to the US

  The Call of the Wild (Party)

  Leaving Canvey Island – and the Lady Vanishes

  The Talented Mr Brilleaux

  Brilleaux’s Last Stand

  The Long Goodbye

  FINAL WORDS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SECONDARY SOURCE MATERIAL

  PROLOGUE

  A ‘prologue’ written by the teenage Lee Collinson in one of the school exercise books he transformed with his friends into a ‘Crollie Art Book’ (more on these later). It seemed oddly fitting for this book in that, unwittingly, Lee has somehow provided the prologue to his own biography.

  What is a rock’n’roll gentleman, and how does one become one?

  There aren’t many bona fide examples to look to for inspiration. Some have tried to become one, only to fail. Some don’t try at all, proudly going to the other extreme. Some wear the costume and assume this to be sufficient. It is not.

  The true rock’n’roll gentleman is hard to find. The process of becoming one is equally challenging and time-consuming. He is one who takes pride in how he lives, works, plays and dresses; one who greets his days and nights with energy and commitment; listens rather than talks, buys a round (and expects you to as well), makes mistakes and owns them. A self-educated, self-made individual capable of doing, at times, utterly ungentlemanly things in an utterly gentlemanly manner. Most of the time anyway. It is worth remembering that this particular example is also someone who, as the poet Hugo Williams observed, had a remarkable flair for conjuring obscenity out of mundanity. If you were hoping to read the tale of a saint, now would be an excellent time to go elsewhere.

  But in these dark times of the reality show, the middle-class pop monopoly, the auto-tuned monstrosity, the self-aggrandising Facebook addiction and the brash cruelty of tabloid culture, there remains a figure we can look to, a man whose combination of qualities, honed and cultivated throughout decades, endures beyond trends, beyond the machinations of the music business, beyond even music, and ultimately beyond death itself. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lee Brilleaux. No angel, but a rare and extraordinary cove, certainly. This vibrant, multi-faceted character, often left in the margins, lived by his wits, was addicted to ‘the road’ and survived show business by refusing to take it too seriously.

  Ask anyone about Brilleaux and the word ‘gentleman’ will usually be uttered within the first sentence. That defining word had to be in the title of this book, arguably before even ‘Dr Feelgood’. Brilleaux was, of course, the mercurial frontman of this underrated British rhythm & blues group, a band that roared out of the Thames Estuary in 1974, ripped into London’s pub rock scene, booted the hippy past well out of the picture and kickstarted punk in turn, frightening, thrilling and motivating as they went.

  There were, initially, two great frontmen in Dr Feelgood: Brilleaux was one half of an incendiary double act with guitarist Wilko Johnson; two great friends and mutual admirers who would eventually end up ‘hating’ each other. But there’s a sense that some etheric version of Wilko and Lee will always exist in a way – in the belligerent rhythmic interplay between Lee’s voice and Wilko’s guitar, and the fearsome chemical reaction that seemed to occur whenever they interacted (or didn’t) on stage. That energy was so intense it probably still hasn’t dissipated.

  Brilleaux, alongside Feelgood manager Chris ‘Whitey’ Fenwick, would take the band into the 1980s and 1990s after not just Wilko’s departure, but that of original rhythm section Big Figure (drums, glowering) and Sparko (bass, pelvic thrusts) as well. Indeed, they propelled the group beyond even Brilleaux’s own demise in 1994, at the age of just forty-one. Despite his erstwhile bandmates’ initial reluctance, Lee Brilleaux insisted that ‘no one is indispensable’, insisted they carried on bringing good-time R&B to the faithful.

  I’ve wanted to write about Lee since I first saw Julien Temple’s Dr Feelgood film Oil City Confidential. Watching it with Wilko at London’s ICA in 2010, this documentary, crammed with as much archive footage as Temple could find and edited (by Caroline Richards) in a choppy, high-octane style, absolutely befitted the Feelgoods. It’s hard to convey the real magic and energy of a live performance on screen, but Oil City comes close – just seeing them on the screen like that gave me a physical rush.

  Wilko and I knew each other, and were soon to start working on Looking Back at Me, the book that would become Wilko’s ‘memoir’ of sorts, but in the back of my mind there was always the intention to write about Lee one day too – even if it was just a compendium of memories and anecdotes that would principally be for his family.

  This book was originally to have ‘Roadrunner’ in the title, an early suggestion of Lee’s wife Shirley, being as it was Lee’s favourite song (the Junior Walker version). The song says a lot about him, not least because of his obsessive touring schedule and lifelong love of a good wander, the freewheeling life of the map, the suitcase, the tour bus, the next venue, the next town, the next country, and the next, and the next.

  Even as a teenager, Lee Collinson (Brilleaux is, unsurprisingly, a pseudonym, the origins of which we will explore later) would go on epic treks, some of which would go on for days. Even as a youngster living in Ealing in the late 1950s, he would take himself off on the train, alone, to Canvey Island in Essex where his grandparents lived, a place infinitely more interesting and exotic to a little boy (mud, marshes, the beach, the boats, the shacks, the wildlife, the
sunsets) than a built-up suburb of West London.1 ‘In the end it got so bad,’ Lee’s mother Joan lamented, ‘we never saw the boy … ’ And so the Collinson family packed up and moved east to Canvey, where Lee’s life would truly start. Lawless, eccentric, a little fierce, Canvey had its own thing going on. Rather like Lee. You can see how the two were magnetised to each other.

  Even from an early age, the fast-moving, fast-talking Lee was a roadrunner to his very bones, thanks to his peripatetic parents; after the restriction of the war years, the Collinsons wanted to see the world, and they’d take a very young Lee to Egypt, Italy, Switzerland – ‘he was so excited to see the snow for the first time,’ said Joan.

  And so, as appropriate as ‘Roadrunner’ would have been, eventually it was agreed something broader was needed for the title of this book, something that wouldn’t only attract the attention of those who already know about Brilleaux and his travelling-man image. There seemed so much to put across simply on the cover that the title was getting longer and longer … But the essence of ‘Roadrunner’ is still at its core. As well as being a celebration of a life, this book will explore different aspects of Lee: what was important to him, his interests, hidden gifts, quirks and flights of fancy. Sometimes the biography will turn into a handbook; sometimes the handbook will turn into a surreal trip into Lee’s imagination, a place from which Edward Lear-esque poems, Heath Robinson-style illustrations and stories hilarious, dark and peculiar would often emerge. Amid the main text you’ll find wisdom, asides, hangover cures and a few morsels of the unexpected.

  There are many who knew and continue to love Lee who still ask themselves, ‘what would Brilleaux do?’ in times of conflict. His take (or presumed take) remains a benchmark of ethics, quality, style and class, whether cogitating over which record to buy or during a moment of indecision at the bar. So, to return to the original question, ‘what is a rock’n’roll gentleman, and how does one become one?’, your advised course of action is to read on and learn from the best.

  Z.H.

  November 2015

  Family snaps from Lee’s early years in Durban, South Africa, and the UK. Top right: Lee masters two wheels outside the family home in Ealing, West London, after moving back to the UK. Lee’s mother Joan Collinson was adamant he would not be educated in apartheid-torn South Africa. Images are from Joan Collinson’s private collection.

  1.JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF CANVEY ISLAND

  Even as a boy he had a fearlessness and sense of adventure.

  Joan Collinson, Lee’s mother.

  Canvey Island, Essex, 1965. A regular Saturday night at the Collinsons’ bungalow. TV on. A skinny, intense, preternaturally aware thirteen-year-old boy stares at the flickering screen. His father Arthur, known to all as ‘Collie’, equally intense, glances sharply between the black and white of the television and the black and white of his book. Joan, the boy’s mother, is engrossed in needlework, only occasionally lifting her eyes to the television set, chuckling at the sarcastic commentary given by her only son. All there with the acid drops, that one.

  Something is about to change.

  ‘And here they are – The Rolling Stones …’

  All eyes to the screen. Collie and Joan see five sneering, long-haired reprobates, they hear a god-awful racket. Lee sees, and hears, the future: his future. He sits up, he takes them in, he’s hooked. The fact that his parents are purportedly ‘horrified by them, their hair’ – merely adds to their raw appeal. Beyond the defiant fringes, the scowls, the challenging eyes and general air of unpredictability, there is intelligence, frustration and subversion – qualities not alien to Lee’s own character. There is also rhythm and blues. The Bo Diddley beat of ‘Not Fade Away’. The neurotic, tremulous slide of ‘Little Red Rooster’, contrasting with Mick Jagger’s lazy, insolent vocal. In a moment, the twee, chirpy pop of the 1960s falls away and exposes something dark, exciting, promising treasures Lee had hitherto been oblivious to.

  ‘I thought they were great,’ said Lee. ‘I always liked pop music, but it wasn’t until I heard blues via people like the Stones that I really started to become obsessive about it. There was something about that music which a thirteen-year-old schoolboy from Canvey Island just fell in love with. First time I saw Muddy Waters on TV, I just couldn’t believe it.’

  The television, above and beyond the record player at this stage, was the most powerful initial conduit of the music that would take over Lee’s life. To suddenly be exposed to black American blues – and to be able to see the people who made it – was revelatory. Another equally vital connector was a charismatic older boy called John Wilkinson, later known as Wilko Johnson, who played skiffle and blues with his brother Malcolm and their friends around Canvey. We’ll come to him later.

  Lee might have been described frequently as a Canvey boy, but his background was a little more exotic than that. Lee’s parents were ‘bored’, as Joan put it, after the long war. ‘We just wanted to get away.’ Arthur, a lathe operator (and an impressive flyweight boxer, which goes some way to explain Lee’s ability with his fists), moved himself and Joan, a legal secretary, from Ealing to South Africa in response to a call-out for skilled contractors. Lee Collinson would be born in Durban on 10 May 1952. As a toddler, Lee would pick up a few words of Zulu from his nanny Rosie allegedly before he could even speak English, but Joan was adamant their son should not be educated in South Africa.

  ‘The system was so bad,’ she said. ‘They’d just indoctrinate him with all these terrible [beliefs] … apartheid, shocking it was. I was always in trouble because I’d go in a shop and they served all the whites, no matter how long a poor black man stood there. When I could see it was his turn and they were going to serve me, I’d say, “No, he was here before me.” I became very unpopular. I expect I’d have got thrown out of South Africa eventually.’

  By the winter of 1955, the Collinsons had moved back to London, with Lee attending Oaklands Primary School in Hanwell, and eventually, after passing the 11-plus, Ealing Grammar.2 Lee was clever, but he wasn’t just book smart. He was perceptive and creative, a voracious reader, an observer and a questioner, hungry for discovery and fuel for his imagination. Luckily for him, holidays would be spent with his grandparents on Canvey. In comparison to smashed-up postwar London, this peculiar place in the Thames Estuary was a haven of wildlife, mystery and Huckleberry Finn possibilities. ‘He liked it so much that on Fridays, I’d get home from work and there’d be a note on the table – “Dear Mum, gone to Nan’s, see you Sunday.” And that was it. He’d be gone for the weekend. It was easy from Ealing Broadway, you could pick up the Barking train.’

  Lee was a sociable boy, and it didn’t take long for him to build up a social circle on Canvey. There were always other children around, mudlarks beckoning Lee to join them. The most significant of these kids was Chris White (aka Chris Fenwick), who would introduce Lee to his own friends, including Geoff Shaw and John B (‘Sparko’) Sparkes. The boys would spend hours meandering about the Island and engaging in all manner of covert piratical shenanigans from their HQ ‘The Hut’ on the Long Horse Island sandbank in Benfleet Creek.

  Chris Fenwick

  Lee and I were friends since I was eleven years old. He was a great and colourful friend to have at that age. We did a lot of adventuring together when we were kids. We both had an interest in boats, and built a camp on Long Horse Island in the marshes off Canvey. We went on a barge trip to the Dutch canals when I was thirteen and then the next year we hitchhiked to the Rhine valley in Germany. Those were big things for such young guys.

  Lee was a very clever and intelligent guy, and introduced me to literature, blues music and many other things. He was the main man in our earliest group, the Southside Jug Band, playing slide guitar and banjo. I was allowed to play the jug and the washboard, but the thing that I was best at was taking the hat around. I guess that’s why I fell into management.

  Initially, Lee Collinson was known to Chris’s wider circle of friends simply as ‘the bo
y from London’, a title that radiated a certain intrigue in itself, but his growing enthusiasm for visiting Canvey independently of his parents meant that the Collinsons themselves would soon install themselves on the Island, building a house near the Whites’ on Kellington Road, if only to guarantee they could actually spend some time with their roving son.

  ‘We lived right on the sea wall facing Hadleigh Castle,’ explained Joan. ‘Lee and his friends would go out in the boat, and every hour I’d go upstairs with my binoculars to check they were [all right]. He and Chris would row, pick up people from the camp two at a time, charge them sixpence each, and take them out to Two Tree Island. Lee would make up all these stories about monsters and things … They were such buddies. This boat, he called it The Corsair, he put up the skull and crossbones on a black flag and there he was, Pirate Lee! All summer was spent like that, it was a child’s dream, really.’

  ‘Canvey was a rural community in lots of ways,’ Lee told the writer Christopher Somerville. ‘We knew about tides, about birds and shellfish, alongside the bookies and the boozers.’

  There would be plenty of Boy’s Own-style adventures on the mudflats, including one in which the intrepid and ever curious Lee took himself off in his little dinghy and tried to row against the cross-currents over the shipping channel to North Kent, a trip that culminated in him having to be rescued by the lifeboat. ‘They’d put him in a boiler suit,’ remembers Joan. ‘He was in big trouble when he got back.’