In August Riff Raff sent a new demo to John Peel, who kindly returned it with a slip saying, ‘Thanks for your tape – trouble is, I can’t play demos on wunnerful Radio One. Any chance that you’ll make another handy record? Glad you enjoyed me on Blankety Blank. Isn’t there only one “t” in “vomiting”? And not a single song about tower-blocks! For shame! John Peel.’
In an unsuccessful small ad for a manager they’d placed in the NME in May, Riff Raff described themselves as ‘talented but disorganised. Track record includes plenty of London gigs + one EP. Current activities mainly gigging in Midlands. More London gigs urgently required, so if you have plenty of drive, ambition, audacity, organisational ability etc. APPLY TODAY. Seriously tho’.’
The occasional London show came up – at the Rock Garden supporting The Merton Parkas (just after they’d done their one Top 40 hit ‘You Need Wheels’ on Top Of The Pops), The Head Boys or Vic & The Vagues; Sore Throat at the Nashville – but it was now a full year since Cosmonaut.
Riff Raff’s next record was a criminal one.
Riff Raff were not villains. They’d been caught in the crossfire of the occasional Oundle–Peterborough skirmish in a pub car park. Billy took a bloke outside at a party in Clopton for dancing with Katy, but so pickled were they in Drambuie and vodka, they ended up not fighting but laughing at each other (‘Although the bloke’s brothers threw me round the car park a few times’). There was the odd Safeway’s pork pie with no receipt. But Wobbling Heights was a den only of hygienic iniquity. (‘They weren’t into cleanliness,’ recounts Brenda.)
This didn’t count for much, for Riff Raff’s reputation preceded them, and in many cases made up stories about them before they even got there. For example, Wobbling Heights’ garden backed on to an old, disused yard, and during the winter, a tramp sleeping there died of hypothermia. It was six months before anyone found his body, but when they did, North Street was instantly full of police cars and ambulances, and cordoned off. Word went round behind the do-not-cross line that Riff Raff had blown their brains out in a suicide pact.
‘Anything that happened was attached to us,’ Billy says. While not exactly under police surveillance, 15, North Street was certainly top of the house-call list if anything unconstitutional went on.
Some sixth-formers at Prince William Comprehensive in Oundle were found in possession of marijuana, which brought the drug squad sniffing round. There was a rumour that cocaine was being refined somewhere in the town (Billy has a good idea where, but it would be improper to reveal) – needless to say, the tenants of Wobbling Heights became prime suspects. Next thing, just like one of those episodes of The Sweeney that Wiggy used to come round to watch with Billy and his dad, the police kicked down Riff Raff’s front door.
It wasn’t just the local drug squad. It was the big guns from Rushden, near Wellingborough – and they had dogs. Before any of Wobbling Heights’ dozing inmates had time to flush the kaolin and morphine down the toilet, the front room was full of uniformed coppers, eight of them. Little Kevin had just been round to the post office, and now he realised why there had been such a large police presence halfway up the driveway of the Anglian Water Board. He, Billy and Robert assumed the position up against the wall – (Wiggy was luckily in London) while all three floors were searched for illicit substances and chaz-manufacturing paraphernalia – and yes, rubber gloves were used on the hapless quartet (‘The same hands that were then used to sift through the tea!’ Billy recalls with horror). A single moment of comic relief came when one officer picked up a tin on the mantelpiece, willing it to be a stashbox but finding instead a mummified mouse’s head (one of the cat’s offerings to Kevin, which they’d morbidly opted to preserve). The officer carefully put the tin back where he’d found it. Ironically enough, the tin itself was stolen property, nicked by a mate from a local curio (i.e. junk) shop. At a later stage, for a wheeze, the lads stealthily and successfully returned the item to the shop – rather sweetly, with the rank mouse head still inside (‘That’s how bored we’d got!’ says Billy).
Although the police didn’t find anything incriminating (‘It was as much as we could do to get enough money together to get drunk,’ Billy says in their drug-free defence), the three lads were, rather dramatically, led away in handcuffs. Because there wasn’t room down the narrow North Street for the squad cars to park, the young offenders were forced to suffer the shame of being paraded up the road, shackled, in front of village onlookers, many of whom already had the punk rock seditionaries tried, convicted and hanged. (Perhaps it wasn’t shame at all, but outlaw pride.) They were questioned and held for four hours, and then bailed by, who else but the kindly Spurrells, who needed no convincing of their innocence.
Riff Raff arrived home to find the front door being screwed back on – although it was never the same again. In fact, they left such a pronounced gap at the bottom, Wobbling Heights’ mail would frequently be sucked out under it in the slipstream of passing lorries, and it was not an uncommon occurrence for letters from the DHSS to be found up the road in a puddle three days later.
‘They thought we were some kind of Satanic cult,’ Billy says of the locals. ‘We did the most outrageous things: we cut our own hair! We didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. There were no blacks in Oundle, no Jewish – we were the “white wogs”.’
That said, after the fruitless drugs swoop, there was a growing feeling around Oundle that Riff Raff had been scapegoats, unfairly victimised, and their new reputation as victims of police zeal gave them what Billy describes as ‘social cachet’.
The Guardian ran a famous TV ad in the 80s in which a skinhead seemingly mugs a commuter type, but it turns out, when shown from a different camera angle, that he’s actually shoving him out of the way of a pallet of falling housebricks. It was about not making up your mind until you’d seen the whole picture, and it illustrates Riff Raff’s dilemma in Oundle (where Guardian readers are outnumbered by Telegraph readers, one would imagine). They wore leather jackets, army surplus and badges. Robert and Wiggy’s hair was too long, Billy and Kevin’s was too short. In August 1979, Billy went under the hairclippers and had his one and only skinhead crop, a fashion decision he soon regretted: three weeks later he fell off a push-bike and split his lip, requiring stitches, and as a result looked so intimidating, one of the Indian kids in Park Avenue actually ran away from him during a home visit (not the required effect).
There was one other incident with the law, and this time, Billy pleaded guilty, even if society was to blame. He broke into the public school.
Even though Joe jokes that ‘breaking into the school is a local tradition’, Billy’s misadventure led to him being charged by the police – though it never went to court. He likes to think that it was a blow struck for Class War, retaliation for the fact that Oundle School pupils would stir it up by throwing pennies out of the windows for ‘the peasants’, and other such provocative nonsense. One Ruddled evening, Billy’s ill-will towards the poshos turned into direct action, thanks to a self-styled local Hell’s Angel calling himself Killer. He was one of the ever-increasing circle of locals who would kip on the floor at Wobbling Heights, usually without official invitation. Obsessed with Otis Redding and Northern Soul (not exactly typical biker fuel), he wore leathers, rode a bike and carried a knife. ‘He was intent on murder that night!’ remembers Joe.
In an act whose political motivation was soon mislaid, Billy and Killer broke into the school refectory and lifted a sack of potatoes and some cups. Unsurprisingly, and before the two Robin Hoods could redistribute their spoils to the poor, they were stopped by the police in the centre of Oundle. It’s difficult to imagine how Billy and Killer lugging their bag of spuds could’ve looked more conspicuous. Collars were felt, and it was recorded not as a misguided attempt to redress the vegetable balance between the haves and the have-nots, but simply as a ‘misdemeanour’.
During the discontented winter of 1979 and after the End Of The World (mistaken but prophe
tic), Wobbling Heights, they decided, was no longer fit for living. Wiggy, who was getting a relationship together with Jackie O’Lochlainn (she’d split up from Ruan), had had enough of East Northants.
‘We have to go to London! That’s where it’s all happening!’ was his rallying cry, but the others were too far down in their sleeping bags to listen. Taking the ailing bull by its horns, Wiggy tried to rustle up some more exciting gigs in the Smoke, hawking a Riff Raff tape around, and spending way too much time travelling up and down to London on a coach. ‘I was really crap at self-promotion,’ he says. ‘But somebody had to do it.’
Kevin, meanwhile, was getting seriously ill. He had a recurring heart condition, and was forced to return to his parents’ home in Barking. Two years later, on Billy’s 25th birthday, Kevin died of a heart attack, but he is remembered with true affection by those who were around him during Riff Raff. ‘Not very musical but a really great guy,’ says Billy. ‘A proto-Morrissey.’
With Wiggy and Kevin gone, Robert took a day job running an industrial Hoover over the concrete foundations of a supermarket that hadn’t been built, and Billy found a night job washing up in a restaurant in Oundle, which at least meant the two of them ate well. He remembers bringing home a pint of caramel custard which they drank like beer.
In December, they gave up Wobbling Heights and the stuffed badger and the dodgy cooker and the over-ventilated front door, and Billy went home to London, leaving only the resolute Robert, who moved out to Stoke Doyle – the house where Brenda and Joe now live – and opted to extend his Northamptonshire visa. But what Billy describes as ‘the retreat from Moscow’ – bedraggled, beaten, undernourished – was an inevitability.
‘It wasn’t going anywhere. We were just existing,’ he says. ‘No laughs. So we said, “OK, we’ve done this, we’ll have to do something else or we’ll just disintegrate.”’
Things seemed mighty quiet around Oundle after three-quarters of Riff Raff had left, and Robert had withdrawn into the upstairs half of the house at Stoke Doyle. Jackie O’Lochlainn divorced Ruan, reverted to her maiden name of Mackay, and went to London with Wiggy. Ruan died in 1988 of lung cancer. Their two children, Fionn and Oscar, are these days in a rock band in London called Headspace, so Ruan’s legacy lives on (Wiggy thinks they’ll ‘go far’, and indeed, in March 1998, Riff Raff reunited to attend a Headspace gig at Kensington’s Orange club. It was a hoot).
Brenda and Joe came to Oundle in 1981, attempted to shake up the moribund local Labour Party, and got thrown out after twelve months. (‘They had about forty members, eight of whom turned up to meetings,’ says Joe. ‘They’d have a raffle, make six pounds and send it off to one of the mining villages.’) In 1983, when the Air Force base at Molesworth became a launchpad for American Cruise missiles, Billy would come up to visit. Like-minded CND types would gather at Brenda and Joe’s, play Clash records to vibe themselves up, and then tramp off to the peace camp at Molesworth to shout at the police, get covered in mud, and have ‘a whale of a time’. (To get an idea of how popular the protesters were in the area, Clopton Church turned the standpipe off in their graveyard so that those living at the peace camp couldn’t get fresh water.)
Andrew Spurrell, no longer with Carol, moved into a bigger surgery. Katy Spurrell moved to London to be with Billy.
Robert eventually enrolled at Manchester University, becoming the only one of Billy’s Barking contemporaries to join the traffic-cone-collecting classes. He still has a beard. Ricey left Ford’s and now writes off cars at an Essex insurance company; he lives on Mersea Island, near Clacton. For old time’s sake, he joined Billy onstage at the Hackney Empire one New Year’s Eve, and sang ‘A13 Trunk Road To The Sea’ (Billy introduced him as the winner of some competition). ‘He just took the mic off me. It was like going back to The Flying Tigers,’ says Billy. ‘Ricey had the spirit of rock’n’roll in him but he never managed to channel it in a way that would make professional sense. He would’ve made a great front man for a real rock band.’
There is a prevailing sense of ‘would’ve’ about Riff Raff: would’ve and could’ve and should’ve. But in Oundle at least, they did. Although they lived on after quitting East Northamptonshire, it was here that they made most sense, and where they gave rock’n’roll the best years of their life.
5. I VOW TO THEE MY COUNTRY
The army, 1980–1981
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I must master my life. Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless.
Marine Corps prayer, Full Metal Jacket (1987)
ELVIS WAS CALLED up to join the army on the day that Billy Bragg was born. Many say the king of rock’n’roll was never the same again.
In 1980, a change was precisely what the retiring Riff Raffer needed. First though, he had a rest, playing the prodigal son back at his mum’s house in Park Avenue, where he hungrily caught up on telly, warmth, toast, Marmite and all those other pleasures denied him at the University of Life. ‘He actually got quite tubby for a while,’ recalls Joe. But despite the checklist of comforts exclusive to home, Billy was a broken reed:
‘I felt that it had all come to naught, everything I’d achieved, all my status. I meant something in Oundle.’
There was no irony in this. He and the band had made a mark in Oundle as the first gang in town, but it’s like changing schools or leaving college to start work – you lose your Big Fish credentials when you change ponds. It is, as Pulp would later sing, funny how it all falls away. Big in East Northamptonshire, nobody in Barking.
‘And I was 22. All the dynamic and energy had disappeared from punk, all the political energy had dissipated, changing the world didn’t mean anything. Really depressing.’
Riff Raff soldiered on into 1980 from their new base in Barking, and briefly recruited another drummer to replace Robert. His name was Eddie, and he was straight out of the back of the Melody Maker:
‘Drummer, handsome, modest, seeks rock band with gigs, future. Own drums, feet, hands etc. No dabblers, druggies or skankers please. Into new music, Ultravox, Tubes, Hot Rods.’
As evinced by Eddie’s musical likes, around this time the synthesiser had really started to rear its ugly head (‘We were playing the wrong kind of music in the wrong kind of places,’ Billy reckons). 1980 was the year of the new romantics, a movement sometimes provincially known as futurism – pop’s reflex reaction to the spit and sawdust of punk’s wild years. Though on the face of it, this preening, synthetic trend seemed violently different from punk, it took a similar cue from King’s Road fashion and was correspondingly London based, but eschewed ripped cotton and stencilled slogans for tartan wraps and pirate frills. It was a chance for those who dressed down for the Jubilee to dress up for the new decade.
Gigs turned back into ‘events’. (Who can honestly say they weren’t at Spandau Ballet, HMS Belfast, 26 July?) Guitars turned into Roland synths. Drummers turned into machines. And boys turned into girls. (Even in Essex! Basildon natives Depeche Mode were making their name around Southend and Rayleigh in 1980, looking not as other men.)
‘I felt completely becalmed,’ says Billy. ‘I’d lost my edge. I started getting obsessed with my youth, sitting around mournfully listening to my old Jackson Browne records. I needed a kick up the arse.’
There was always the so-called black economy. Those run-ins with the law in Oundle had marked Billy’s card, but the step from pinching pies to a life of crime is very like the leap from marijuana to Class A drugs – natural enough but inherently avoidable.
‘I didn’t really want to go down that route,’ he claims. ‘There’s a grey area between duckin’ and divin’ and being a real villain, and I was never a real villain.’
Billy’s mum made him sign on, chiefly to generate some housekeeping money, but also to prevent the returning hero from developing sofa sores. There was pressure on him to do something, especially with younger brother Da
vid now building a dependable trade in bricklaying. ‘David had his own life, and his own mates,’ says Billy, who didn’t even claim a functioning social life in Barking.
He started working the late shift in an all-night garage, first in Earls Court, then in Ilford. For Billy, it was the proverbial Worst Job I Ever Had, due to the unsociable hours and the fact that he seemed to spend all of his waking hours either working or travelling to and from work (‘I was working so I could work – going nowhere fast’). Second division West Ham won the FA Cup that year, which offered some respite (1–0 against Arsenal). Billy started signing on again.
Since the retreat, Wiggy and Jackie had set up AVM, Audio Visual Movies, combining his affinity for gadgets (‘He’d always have the back off and have a twiddle about,’ says Billy) with hers for the photographic arts. Between them they started producing slide and video presentations, eventually for firms such as British Rail, Barratt Homes and the Financial Times.
Wiggy, ever the humble servant to understatement, says they ‘made a bit of a living for a couple of years. It gave me the chance to muck about with lots of toys’; but it was AVM who endowed Riff Raff with what was to be their last stand.
‘There are people out there with video cameras and, good grief, they’re using them to make films,’ gasped Music & Video magazine in September 1980. It’s hard to credit the fuss now, but at the time, video was a relatively new tool in the music business.
America’s 24-hour-a-day music video channel, MTV, wasn’t even launched until August 1981 (at which point the pop promo turned marketing crowbar, and record company accountants never looked back) and although films were often purpose-shot to accompany singles, they were far from the money-shredding phenomena they became in the ensuing decade. Egghead synth-duo Buggles seemed to be predicting the end of the world in their 1979 hit ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ (men with great faces for radio, ironically enough). So when Riff Raff announced that they were releasing four singles and a long-form video simultaneously, the media almost sat up and took notice – after a cry of ‘Are they still going?’
Billy Bragg Page 9
