Dr. Feelgood y Eddie and the Hot Rods

Dr. Feelgood is a very underrated rock band (and a very overrated Motley Crue song) that has been tearing up the live scene since the 1970s. Catching a recent show of theirs only last year, it’s apparent that the band hasn’t lost anything.

Their music is typical late ‘60s rock, mixed with a little blues. If you could take the Stones and Zeppelin and roll them into one, while shaving ZZ Top’s beards, you’d have Dr. Feelgood, and their name is truly apt, as that’s exactly how you feel while at their show: Good.

Many of today’s shows have fire and smoke and flickering lights, but Dr. Feelgood’s live set is just a few stage lights highlighting the band members, and all four members playing the same music they’ve been playing for decades. Though with new band members over the years, even the same songs aren’t the “same.”

They’re classified as “pub rock,” but they have much more of a bluesy look and feel when they play. They have the energy of a legit hard rock band, and that certainly carries over to the audience. If anything’s “pub” about a Dr. Feelgood show at all, it’s that the atmosphere is usually that up-close and personal. They don’t play many huge arenas. You can find them doing smaller concert halls with tracks that fill up the space well, such as “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Going Back Home.”

Let’s discuss Eddie and the Hot Rods, who have been a band for many years, almost forty to be precise. They are from a place called Essex in London, and they wear it on their sleeves. Their genre has been described as “Pub rock”, they sound like they have had a significant influence on bands such as Kasabian, The Twang and more. They open with their biggest song, “Do Anything You Wanna Do” another song that really works live is their song “Teenage Depression”, which despite the morbid title is quite a hit amongst the punters this afternoon at this huge festival where people have been waiting to watch Eddie and the Hot Rods for a couple of hours. “Quit This Town” is their finisher. Every one is singing along in their best “Lad” voice, jumping up and down, with beer being the ammunition for a water fight. It’s a shame that this band took such a long hiatus, as they could have definitely written some more songs based on their formulaic genre.