Dr Feelgood and the Canvey Delta
Article by Christopher Somerville.
Imagination is a wonderful thing. The special place that the Haworth moors occupy in the heart of a Charlotte Brontë devotee, or the inspiration a lover of John Constable's landscapes imbibes in Dedham Vale - this kind of powerful magic is threaded for me, and for thousands of other music lovers all over the world, through the grey sea walls, the skeletal jetties and windy marshlands of Canvey Island. Fans of ‘the greatest local band in the world', Dr Feelgood, scent romance and adventure here on the windy Essex shore of the Thames Estuary.
It was Wilko Johnson, the Bard of Canvey, who first drew me to Canvey Island back in the early 1970s when he was Dr Feelgood's guitar-slinger supreme. The Feelgoods were Canvey to their boot-heels, a quartet of sharply-dressed R&B belters who burst through the soft underbelly of the jaded post-Beatles music business like an uppercut from a welterweight. Gruff-voiced Lee Brilleaux barked out the 100 mph, three-minutes-maximum songs; John B. Sparks thwacked a bass impassively; the Big Figure thundered away on the drums. Wilko Johnson, meanwhile, played his Fender Telecaster like a stuttering machine-gun and jerked around the stage like a bug-eyed madman. But the guitarist was far more than simply a showman. Wilko was a rock'n'roll poet, a master craftsman of tales and tunes. The songs he wrote presented sharp cameos of cheerful characters down on their luck, citizens of a harsh yet lively town he called ‘Oil City'. Each miniature chronicle came across as pungently and economically as a Raymond Carver short story.
‘Back when we were starting out,' Lee Brilleaux once told me, ‘Canvey had an element of toughness, like most working-class places. But there was a warmth about it as well. People worked hard, and they played hard. The funny thing was, Canvey was really a rural community in lots of ways. Everyone on the island knew us kids, and they'd look out for us. I grew up playing on the creeks, building pirate dens out on the marshes - a country boy's background. We knew about tides, about birds and shellfish, alongside the bookies and the boozers.' Wilko's songs did not detail the real Canvey Island, but they played around with it as a setting and an atmosphere. In Wilko's Oil City, hard-boiled characters watched the refinery towers burning at the break of day as they waited for some red-eyed rendezvous; they went places and stayed too long; they jumped up right out of a dream to find the front door wide open and the rain blowing in from the street.
Through many years and many visits I've come to know the ‘real' Canvey. People still work and play hard there. For me the greatest Canvey pleasure is the 14-mile walk around the perimeter of the island, strolling for hours with only oystercatchers and marsh horses for company before ducking into the Lobster Smack for plaice and chips and a pint. Charles Dickens, that supreme appreciator of lonely marsh country, had Pip and Magwitch hiding out at the Lobster Smack in Great Expectations, and the old pub under the sea wall still retains a strong individual flavour. Wilko and his three Canvey Island compadres parted company long ago. The guitarist tours with his own band these days. Dr Feelgood are still on the road, too, other musicians having slipped into the shoes of the original Feelgoods over the years. I go along to the gigs every so often for the sheer escapist pleasure of hearing those tight, razor-edged Oil City fantasies as their author always intended they should be heard - live and loud.
If you want to walk in the footsteps of Dr Feelgood and visit the places where the group grew up then read the article "In pursuit of the Feelgood factor" by Christopher Somerville.
Oil City Confidential ... Julien Temple's last film in his trilogy on British music of the 1970s. It is a prequel to his landmark films about punk featuring Dr. Feelgood.
The film was released earlier this year. If you want to find out more about Oil City Confidential or want to become a fan why not visit their page on Facebook?
Here are some links of media coverage of Dr Feelgood and Oil City Confidential:
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