They Did It Right

Being a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I never really understood - and to be honest, still don't understand - the appeal of punk rock as either a musical or a cultural movement. I mean, I understood, at least when I was at college and was expected to have a view on these sort of things, what people were talking about in terms of democratisation of popular music and so-forth. But it aways seemed to me that this was just an excuse for people with little musical ability to be in a band and stand up in front of an audience. And it was clear that it was merely the next in a series of inter-generational cultural conflicts stretching back to the creation of the "teenager" in the mid-1950s.

Part of the problem for me was that there already was an English "back-to-basics" musical genre in existence at this time. This was the pub-rock scene of the mid 1970s, the main exemplar of which was the Canvey Island group "Dr Feelgood". These bands were the musical descendants of sixties bands like the Animals and the early Rolling Stones. I love the cover of their 1974 album "Down by the Jetty" which captures perfectly the feeling of grey, dreary, hardness of recession-hit mid-70s Britain.

Here they are performing probably their best track (although you could also argue for "Roxette"), "She does it right". In terms of sheer energy, this leaves the like of the Sex Pistols looking distinctly underpowered. Despite the decidedly-dodgy TotP environment and mid-70s fashion of the audience, they dominate the stage.

There's another link here to another, may be better, version in which Lee Brilleaux is wearing his trademark white jacket.

The sheer prowling menace of both Lee Brilleaux's vocals and Wilco Johnson's guitar-playing remain a testament to the vibrancy of that era of popular culture. It wasn't a musical wasteland populated by the excesses of prog- and glam-rock and banal, mindless pop. There was real passion and danger in the music. And it was about the music, not some superficial attempt at rebellion that all-too-soon became swallowed up by the very machine that they were trying to fight against.

Lee Brilleaux died of cancer in 1994 and I heard an interview with Wilco on the Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago in which he described his feelings at his own recent diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer. He said that his overwhelming feeling on hearing the news was of being "vividly alive".