It may be the end of the line for the river Bourne as it meanders into a culvert in the lower gardens and empties into the sea east of the pier, but it’s more a drain than a delta. With its pristine beaches and neatly manicured gardens, Bournemouth is a far cry from the bleak landscape envisaged by the former Feelgoods guitarist. However, the same can’t be said of the place where our own blues disciple, Peter Andrew Fernbach, was born on 27 th March 1948. At night, as flames spit from its flare stacks in the distance, it could be mistaken for some godforsaken one horse oil town in southern Louisiana on the mouth of the Mississippi river.
Feelgood fame spent an entire career creating a blues mythology around his hometown of Canvey Island, a flat windy marshland in the Thames estuary overlooking the Shell Haven oil refinery.
