After documentaries on the Sex Pistols and Joe Strummer, filmmaker Julien Temple has picked an unlikely subject for the third instalment of his trilogy on British music in the 70s: R&B rockers Dr Feelgood. Charting the band’s rise and fall on the London pub rock scene and beyond, the film also delves into the history of Canvey Island in Essex, where the Feelgoods grew up. Home to an oil refinery, the band christened this reclaimed land ‘oil city,’ fronting themselves as bluesmen from the ‘Thames Delta'. 

We spoke to Julien about how the Feelgoods’ Cockney spirit influenced London’s nascent punk scene, the special musical event planned for the documentaries' UK launch, and how he’s charting a “rebel map of British cultural history”, one film at a time.

Dazed Digital: I’m sure a lot of people have asked you this but… why Dr Feelgood?
Julien Temple: By rights this film shouldn’t even exist. But I like doing things that people think you can't do, such as a documentary about a band that has probably been forgotten. I also wanted to show what it was like in London just before punk happened, and how the Feelgoods fed into that scene.

DD: Your films about The Sex Pistols and Joe Strummer were very personal. You were part of the punk scene and knew the people involved. What was your connection to Dr Feelgood?
JT: They had a big impact on me in the early 70s – as they did on the whole of London. There’s a long history of British bands trying to play the blues and somehow, Dr Feelgood made it their own; the energy and rawness is still exciting now. Back then, everything great about the 60s had started putrefying. The Feelgoods came in like Reservoir Dogs – there was a great sense of shock and danger when you saw them in a pub. Their gigs were packed out with bemused old hippies, Roxy Music types, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and the Pistols saw them. When the punk thing broke I recognised a lot of people from Feelgood gigs.

DD: So would you say they had a big influence on punk?
JT: Without a doubt. The look and the attitude, the stripped down simplicity and the energy was all moving towards that explosion, though their sound was still in a blues, R&B rock idiom. They weren't really writing about how mad things got in England by the late 70s, which is what lit the punk thing up.

DD: The film anchors itself around the band’s kinetic guitarist, Wilko. How was it to work with him?
JT: I had no idea how eccentric, well-read and funny he was, so that was a real bonus. We had to put a wide angle lens on him so we wouldn’t lose him out of shot! He kept moving around like he does with his guitar – his synapses going all over the place.

DD: The film is as much about Canvey Island as Dr Feelgood. How were they shaped by their upbringing?
JT: When the Feelgoods were growing up on Canvey, kids were allowed to explore their imaginations in a way that perhaps they can’t in big cities, and certainly the time was more open to letting kids go on adventures. And although it wasn’t overt, their music embodies the oppositional feeling of working class culture: the sense that you know you’re being fucked over on some level.

DD: How did it affect the band when they didn’t make it in the States?
JT: I think it’s the reason the original line-up imploded, which is the only line-up for me. They were a more traditional band in the way they were managed, and the horizons given to them were not the same as for punk, which was about destroying the whole fucking thing, really. The big fame eluded them, but I like that it was a bit of a chimera that they couldn't grab; there's melancholy in the story.

DD: What’s planned for the film’s opening night?
JT: After people watch the film at one of 40 cinemas across the UK, a live concert with Wilko and friends will be beamed in from Koko nightclub in London. Independent film is in total crisis so it’s good to explore ways of delivering films to people in an exciting way, to compete with Hollywood’s mega spend.

DD: How does Oil City fit with your other music films?
JT: The element of free will and thinking for yourself which was such a part of the punk statement is being crushed. In a small way, making films about history from the bottom up, about where culture comes from, rather than looking down on it from a great height, is of use. I don't see any of these as music films really, they’re social history: stories about people, not guitars.