Dr Feelgood were a rock 'n' roll band from an unusual area of the United Kingdom, Canvey Island, geographically unusual as it represented what one of their members Wilko Johnson described as The Thames Delta, an English counterpart to the Mississippi Delta in the United States of America. He would say that, as his band were very influenced by the blues music from out of that part of the world, and he liked to draw comparisons as the man who wrote most of the songs they performed on stage, generating the reputation as one of the greatest live acts of their era, if not of all time. But they had to start somewhere, and this documentary gets back to their roots to trace their story...
By the stage he had made Oil City Confidential, director Julien Temple had not only become closely linked to the form of bringing music to cinema and television in a series of accounts that used new interviews with plentiful stock footage and a certain number of staged sequences, but he was possibly the best in the world at his time at creating such works. His trick was to allow the participants to speak for themselves, if they had a good story to tell then for heaven's sake let's hear them tell it appeared to be his philosophy, and ever since his film about punk band The Sex Pistols, not the hotchpotch of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle but the decades later record The Filth and the Fury, every time he crafted one of these efforts it was something of an event.
Not among general audiences, but if you had a more specialised ear (or eye) then you would be keen to watch his take on whatever subject he alighted upon, and those music documentaries were regarded as an irresistible treat for fans. It helped here that he was the same age as the members of the band he interviewed, as it spurred him on to render what it was like in this era and place as vividly as he could. Granted, if you were not quite as interested in his subject matter then you may be left cold by an entire movie-length examination, yet the energy and ability to divine the nuggets of information that made it all spring to life were defining elements of his style that were assuredly present in this.
It helped immensely that while he had access to everyone involved in the Dr Feelgood tale who was still alive, with charismatic frontman Lee Brilleaux represented by archive interviews as he had died in 1994, he had a genuine star in the group's ace guitarist Wilko Johnson. There was an almost cartoonish quality about the manner in which the musician presented himself and his reminiscences, his head bobbing, his accent thick and his vocabulary colourful, constantly strapping on his instrument and breaking out into renditions of his tunes. He was the heart and soul of the piece; while his bandmates had valuable contributions to make, in the absence of Brilleaux as a contemporary, it was Johnson we looked forward to Temple's camera returning to which it did as if well aware it was onto a good thing here.
This did assist in masking the fact that we were essentially being told a fairly familiar tale, following the typical arc of a popular rock band's career from early obscurity and finding its influences, to the classic lineup breaking through, then success blessing them, after which it all takes its toll and they fall apart after a fashion, in this case with regrettable acrimony (this band continued with no original members eventually). So if you would not be surprised at what you were told as a loose rule when you pretty much had heard it all before, the trappings of those clips of concert footage and old movies that commented on the action mixed together with a liberal dose of the powerful, rollicking music was a sight to behold, never mind listen to. There were parts that were hilarious, there were parts that were moving, but this did not dwell on either, as if it was so eager to relate the next bit of information, anecdote or joke that it was practically tripping over itself to get to. As the musician celebrities lined up to endorse Dr Feelgood, you would doubtless appreciate their significance as well as their quality.
