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THE Feelgoods 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.
While most of their pub
rock contemporaries were laid-back, amiable and grooving, the Feelgoods
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. |
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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 Feelgoods turned out to be both popular and durable. "Stupidity", a
1976 live album, went to number one, and they survived what many had
predicted would be the fatal departure of Johnson, scoring a Top 5 hit as
late as 1979 with "Milk & Alcohol". Sadly there are no
original members of the original line up playing and Lee Brilleaux
sadly passed away in 1994.
It's worth remembering that they kicked open a lot of the
doors that the later punk bands would march noisily through. The Feelgoods are legends
and deservedly so. |
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The article above was written by
the Stud Brothers and has been amended slightly |
