You’re Havin’ A Laugh!
Classic quotes and quips.
• Inspired by producer Vic Maile, Sparko would build a studio of his own shortly after the Jetty sessions were complete. The Big Figure describes the Feelgoods’ new recording hub to NME ’s Mick Farren: “It’s a Scotch studio.” “Scotch tapes?” Farren enquires. Not exactly. “He wanders around with a glass of Scotch in one hand wondering where he can plug in the wires,” deadpans Figure.
• The Feelgoods had to share the 1970s with, among other things, a stark wave of electronica. Lee Brilleaux wasn’t a fan. His take on Kraftwerk? “I thought it was a load of icecream vans gone wrong. I’d rather hear some geezer playing a comb and paper. You wanna hear a drum machine? Big Figure, that’s what I call a drum machine!” he barked at NME’s Charles Shaar Murray.
• Wilko Johnson: “When the record company wanted to write ‘mono’ [on the cover], they started talking bollocks about the Trade Descriptions Act. I said, ‘Can you not write “stereo” and then underneath in tiny letters write “monaural mix”? If you write mono on it, I’ll be talking about this for ever more.’ And sure enough, here I am talking about it again.”
• Lee Brilleaux muses on the split between Wilko and the others to Blues Bag in 1990. “What it boiled down to was that Wilko didn’t fit in with the rest of us. Looking back, poor Wilko must have been miserable and depressed.”
• Wilko Johnson: “I look back on Dr. Feelgood sometimes and I would do a lot of things differently. Oh man, I was intolerable. Sometimes I like to imagine I’ve got a time machine and I could whizz back and see myself when I’m 21 or 22. I’d really like to slap him around the head and say, ‘You idiot!’”
• “If he’s going to play that banjo, I’m going to have to have a very large gin.” Lee Brilleaux grimly surveys the support act while in the company of Melody Maker’s Allan Jones.
• Sparko, on being asked by NME ’s Paul Du Noyer in December 1979 what the band had planned for the new decade: “We’re thinking of learning a new chord.”