Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Although Billy was anything but a Lycra-clad chorus boy, the message of Fame was for him. That summer, Katy went away for six months to Australia and Thailand during her year out before starting University College London. This was, on the face of it, a bummer, but having her on the other side of the world gave Billy the space and time he needed to reinvent himself.

  It also gave him the freedom to go up to Oundle and get Brenda to peroxide his hair without the boyfriend–girlfriend discussion. ‘I wanted to be another person,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to be Stephen Bragg anymore, I wanted to be Billy Bragg.’

  In actual fact, he became Spy Vs Spy, his first stage name. It was taken from a long-running comic strip of the same name by Antonio Prohias in the American humour magazine Mad, a hotbed for anti-establishment, hippy satire in the 70s and a valuable cross-section of the US counterculture, but robbed of its bite in the 80s when the UK-licensed edition was hamfistedly ‘adapted’ for the British audience. Spy Vs Spy was a black-and-white, wordless cartoon that followed the incessant, violent feud between two bird-like secret agents, one in black, the other in white (although neither was obviously good or bad).

  Billy admits that, on paper, the name Spy Vs Spy was ‘a bit new romantic-sounding’, but relished the notion that ‘people wouldn’t know what they were getting’. Plus, it sounded like a band’s name, and he knew that he wasn’t going to get gigs as a solo performer, as solo performer meant folk music – hardly an alluring concept in the post-punk circles Billy intended to move in.

  The British folk circuit had quietly boomed ever since Dylan. As Patrick Humphries notes in his Richard Thompson biography, plenty of singer-songwriters ‘slipped under the door named “folk” simply because they played the acoustic guitar’ – but it would be some time before Billy Bragg ventured into that arcane world, despite the audible tinge of folkiness in his style. It took Bob Dylan three years to ‘go electric’ (he was booed by purists at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965); Billy intended to be plugged in from the start.

  This conceit of bastardising the stand-up folkie tradition by swapping the acoustic guitar for an electric one was fairly radical at the time. During punk, John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett had defied their folk-club roots and brought electric minimalism to Top Of The Pops in 1977 with ‘Really Free’, but this was very much a one-off, and hardly a statement of intent. The so-called ‘punk poet’, Patrick Fitzgerald, used an acoustic, and Billy had seen him bottled off for this crime at a Rock Against Racism gig in 1978. (Billy ended up on the same bill as Fitzgerald in Switzerland some years later.)

  So plugging folk into an amplifier was Billy’s inadvertent gimmick, if you like. Not much of one at a time when bands were as famous for what they wore as what they played – Dexy’s Midnight Runners (gypsy chic), ABC (gold lamé suits), Bow Wow Wow (pirate costumes, and, in singer Annabella Lwin’s case, nothing) – but it would certainly mark him out from the endless stream of keyboard-prodders and raincoat-rockers.

  Billy’s songs were more punk than folk (he has often described his earliest incarnation as ‘a one-man Clash’), and the chugging ghost of Riff Raff still stalked songs like ‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’ and ‘To Have And To Have Not’, but there was more to Spy Vs Spy than choppy guitar and uncosmeticised cockney vowels. For one thing, there was humour in the words or, if not belly laughs, certainly an easy, lyrical dexterity in couplets such as ‘Just because I dress like this/Doesn’t mean I’m a Communist’ and ‘I am the milkman of human kindness/I will leave an extra pint’.

  Although in 1982 Billy had yet to hone his performing style and between-song banter, the raw materials with which he was about to step out into the spotlight were impressive indeed. The capital’s spit’n’sawdust pub circuit had never heard the like – and that was precisely where Billy Bragg intended to go public. Billed as a band and dressed as himself, the sound of two musical traditions colliding.

  Back in October, Billy had written to the Melody Maker, not a letter for publication but a heartfelt plea to writer Adam Sweeting, nowadays a respected journalist and TV critic at the Guardian, then very possibly an angel sent from heaven as far as Billy was concerned. He’d identified with a piece Sweeting had written called ‘The Clash And The Cocktail Culture’: ‘It is the story of my life,’ Billy wrote. ‘The music industry is wallpapering over the cracks in our society … For the first time in two years I’ve found someone writing what I am feeling 24 hours a day. You are the voice in my darkness.’

  Having pinpointed a sympathetic soul, Billy asked Sweeting to come and see him play live, as his debut was approaching. Proving himself a bit of a maverick in rock journalist terms, Sweeting did just that, on the strength of one hand-written letter from a self-confessed ‘whining bastard’. After an aborted first shot at the City Of London Poly in November – and an agonising five-month gestation – Spy Vs Spy finally supported The Sensible Jerseys at a North London Poly sociology disco in Highbury Grove in March 1982, and Sweeting came along. (Jerseys bassist Steve Ives had played in the very last incarnation of Riff Raff, a sixth-former at Oundle’s Prince William Comprehensive.) With a real, live music hack in attendance, Billy’s nerves were in ribbons, and, unusually for him, he downed three pints before he went on.

  He was using the drum machine for one song, ‘The Cloth’. It was operated by a foot pedal, but when the song was over he couldn’t get it to switch off, and was forced to turn the volume down to prevent it from tip-tap-tip-tapping throughout the rest of the set – an early omen that technology and Billy Bragg were not natural bedfellows. Mercifully, there was no review, but Billy had planted a seed.

  He met Sweeting for a chat at the Hospital Tavern in the East End, just by London Hospital. On the way in, Billy noticed that the licensee’s name was Jack Ruby, which he took as a good omen – though he’s not sure exactly why. (Jack Ruby had not brought much luck to Lee Harvey Oswald, but he did run a nightclub, which was pretty showbiz, and he was famous. Who says an omen has to bear up to cross-examination?) Without fully realising it, Billy was laying important foundations for the near future.

  Notwithstanding a further support with the Jerseys at legendary Soho jazz club Ronnie Scott’s (in the small upstairs room, mind) in May, what Billy describes as Spy Vs Spy’s very first ‘proper’ gig took place at the Rock Garden (where Riff Raff had played so many times) on 6 June 1982. With not a single dark root showing, and wearing a home-made T-shirt with Spy Vs Spy painted on the chest in fabric dye, Billy officially presented himself to the world: one man and his guitar. And his drum machine.

  A fortnight earlier he’d won the first heat of a live talent contest at the Bridge House in Canning Town, a landmark boozer venue in the East London area that had initially defied the punk rock boom by booking heavy metal acts and Rory Gallagher. It’s just beside the flyover as the beloved A13 segues from East India Dock Road into Newham Way. Billy also came first in the second heat on 10 July and reached the final on 24 July, up against such hopefuls as Hiss The Villain, The Boobies, Raw Recruit and On His Own. With roots starting to appear in his banana-blond crop, this time Billy wore a T-shirt bearing the logo of 2000AD comic and its rozzer figurehead Judge Dredd (‘He brings law to the cursed Earth’). He wore it again at the final, and came second. The prize was £50.

  Billy Bragg was suddenly in the game.

  Steve Goldstein, who was the manager at Low Price Records and lived with his mum, owned a Portastudio. In non-professional rock terms, this is even better than knowing someone who owns a van.

  The chance was too good to pass up. It was time for Billy Bragg to commit himself to tape. Over one weekend, Billy recorded six songs from his live set at Mrs Goldstein’s, with Steve at the controls. (The block of flats is called Gilmour House, and it’s still there, off Commercial Road, on the left as you travel east on the A13, should anyone ever set up the Billy Bragg Rock Tour Of London. It’s certainly a crucial marker flag on the journey from obscurity to ubiquity.)

  Played ‘as li
ve’ – not such a surprise bearing in mind the economical nature of Billy’s act – he satisfactorily entrusted the following numbers to tape: ‘A New England’ (written after seeing two satellites flying alongside each other in the clear Northants sky), ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’, ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’, ‘Strange Things Happen’, ‘The Cloth’ and ‘To Have And To Have Not’. Only one (‘The Cloth’) failed to make it into Billy Bragg’s professionally recorded canon. The others defined what he was all about. Some might say that ‘A New England’ still most succinctly demonstrates what makes Billy Bragg such a durable, widely loved performer. It’s essentially a love song, but one that packs a subtle political punch, and joins the dots between personal, ideological and lyrical.

  I was 21 years when I wrote this song

  I’m 22 now, but I won’t be for long

  People ask me when will you grow up to be a man

  But all the girls I loved at school

  Are already pushing prams

  I don’t want to change the world

  I’m not looking for a new England

  I’m just looking for another girl

  The central conceit of the song lies in the claim that the singer doesn’t want to change the world, merely get a shag. It is not hard to hear the irony. Billy is desperate for some romantic inspiration, but the two shooting stars in his song turn out to be satellites. ‘Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?’ he asks. No, seems to be the adaptable answer. Here is a poet trapped in the modern world, so besotted with a girl he does not yet know, he is prepared to cast all broader ideals aside in favour of a domestic utopia. When Kirsty MacColl recorded ‘A New England’ in 1985 and took it into the Top Ten, the paradox of the chorus was rinsed out by a pop arrangement and a sweet voice, but the way Billy plays it, with the lone Duane Eddy guitar and that plaintive quality to the vocal, says it all.

  Many of Billy’s early songs disclose a failure in love, a sense of having been left behind. In ‘Richard’, a song written in Riff Raff days, the rhapsody ‘There will be parties/There will be fun/There will be prizes for everyone’ implicitly counts Billy out. There is more of Morrissey in Billy Bragg than many critics give him credit for – the difference between the two men as lyricists (there are plenty of differences between them as men) lies in the desire to fit in. Morrissey revels in his outsider status; Billy’s banging on the door of acceptance.

  Of the Gilmour House set, it is ‘To Have And To Have Not’ that ploughs the most purely political furrow. There is punk rhetoric in blunt graffiti-like observations such as ‘The factories are closing and the army is full’, but it is the repeated mantra ‘Just because you’re better than me, doesn’t mean I’m lazy’ that unlocks the song’s power. Here is a young man who has been failed by the education system, defeated on the day, but isn’t griping at the system, he’s pleading at society not to judge him on his one O Level. Punk was a howl of disapproval, but it sought no answers from the state. Billy Bragg is frustrated but not crushed. He shall overcome.

  Although rough and ready, this first Spy Vs Spy demo had plenty going on behind the punk rock electric guitar and the Essex delivery. He became famous for his non-singsong voice, and yet ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ finds him delivering a disarmingly tender lament to an unfaithful partner, give or take ‘the fings you’ve done’. The tape was duly mailed to anyone in the record industry who might cock a sympathetic ear, from Rough Trade to EMI. All was quiet.

  Until, that is, the Melody Maker dated 16 October 1982.

  In line with the paper’s sympathies with musicians, they actually reviewed demo tapes. (They still do, in fact, a featurette that’s survived umpteen makeovers.) Billy remembers the column being called ‘Shit Demos’. It was, as he well knows, called Playback, and it provided the post-Riff Raff Billy with his very first words of endorsement. Having spent years worshipping the NME, and the equivalent time treating Melody Maker as a classified ad-sheet and Sounds as the last resort in an ill-stocked newsagent, it would prove educational for Billy that the ‘other two’ picked up on him first.

  Playback was written by – who else? – Adam Sweeting. Referring to the man behind Spy Vs Spy as Bill Bragg, he raved thus: ‘His demo tape is a small goldmine of strong, simple tunes which he uses as scaffolding for some of the sharpest and funniest lyrics I’ve heard in years. Bragg, with his rough, hoarse voice, sings about working girls, the dole and how to cope with frustration. Meanwhile, he’s able to view love with a child’s sense of wonder.

  ‘Already, Bill Bragg possesses a view of the world which is simultaneously knowing and naked, appallingly vulnerable, but strong enough to look at the fact without flinching. Consequently his songs are both uncomfortably perceptive and reassuring, small rubber dinghies on a stormy sea. The wit and wisdom of Bragg’s songs puts to shame most of the people who go around calling themselves songwriters, and regardless of whether or not there is any justice in the world, you’ll hear more from him soon.’

  Quite a review, and one that Bill Bragg would soon be able to recite from memory. The music papers, traditionally in the shops on Wednesday, are available a day early in Central London, which, in 1982, was where Billy’s girlfriend Katy worked. She picked up the papers, discovered the heaven-sent Playback column, and immediately rang Billy up at the record shop to read the ‘fucking brilliant review’ down the phone to him. ‘Are you sitting down?’ she asked. He was.

  Fortunately, the shop was empty, as Billy was overcome with emotion, and would’ve been in no fit state to work out anybody’s change. ‘It was such a relief,’ he recalls. ‘Here was a possibility that I might be able to do this. Here was someone, a music writer in a music paper, saying the songs I’d written were really good. That filled me with real confidence.’

  On the same page in the Maker was a review of a demo by some jokers calling themselves Nux Vomica, which, in contrast to Spy Vs Spy, Sweeting trashed: ‘facetious ditties with horrible singing and a truly repulsive guitar sound’. Nux Vomica was Billy Bragg and the brothers Wigg posing as Ian Moody, Graham Moody and Andy Anonymous, playing ‘naff pop songs’ that they’d taped a year earlier, and sent in as a control experiment – a very scientific coup indeed, and one that worked. Sweeting was no fool. He knew a good demo from a rotten demo. (Nux Vomica were named after a medicinal compound in a bell-jar Billy remembers seeing in Andrew Spurrell’s surgery – but few people were ever going to ask them where they got their crazy name.)

  Billy never did tell Sweeting who Nux Vomica actually were.

  Around this time began Billy’s solo apprenticeship. There are baptisms by fire, and there are baptisms by beer. The Tunnel club specialised in the latter, and provided Billy with his first residency, playing Tuesday nights, opening for anybody, £5 a night (he was later granted 60 per cent of the door takings). The Tunnel, later a venue that was synonymous with alternative comedians and the appalling treatment thereof, was housed at a pub called the Mitre on the Greenwich side of London’s notorious Blackwall Tunnel. Driven down there either by Wiggy’s brother Alan, Katy, or even his mum, Billy set about paying his dues. Up north, you do the working men’s clubs; this was worse, a talking men’s club. Despite the cavalcade of live entertainment on offer, they were only here for the beer.

  Warming up may be too showbiz a term for it, but Billy attempted to distract the Tunnel’s pathologically ungrateful punters before the main act came on, be it a heavy metal band like Blood & Roses, former-Groundhog Tony McPhee, The Gymslips, Doll By Doll, Doctor & The Medics or crowd-pleasing striptease outfit True Life Confessions. If anyone broke a string at a Riff Raff gig, Billy would keep the audience amused by singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, and it was this blitz spirit that saw him through the Tunnel. He would play his songs, obviously – thrashing away at his customised ‘Route 66’, ‘A13 Trunk Road To The Sea’, for five minutes ‘until someone took a blind bit of notice’ – but he would also talk to the audience, and wind them up (‘this really sharpened up my patter’
). The dreaded video juke box, fast becoming a pub fixture in this age of ‘fun’, was rarely turned off during Billy’s act, and spying opportunity under every hurdle, he turned it to his advantage.

  Tears For Fears, then very much a raincoat band, were having their fist hit with ‘Mad World’ in October ’82, and if the video came on, Billy would make a facetious comment about their silly student dance. The audience would laugh, and, having snared their sympathy, he’d riff off it for a while. (This trick has remained in his arsenal: on his first trip to New York in 1984, in order to find some valuable common ground with the Americans, he sparred with them about what was on MTV.)

  Also noteworthy in the Billy Bragg set at this time was a brave cover of Cliff Richard’s ‘A Voice In The Wilderness’ (a ballad from the 1959 beat movie Expresso Bongo), which, for attention-grabbing purposes, he reworked as ‘The Voice Of The Wildebeest’ (‘My wife and the wildebeest left hoof marks on me’). It’s fitting that the Tunnel later became semi-legendary for its high body count of dying comedians. It was here that Billy Bragg became a stand-up.

  He’d turned out funny.

  Meanwhile, over in Marble Arch, a man called Jeff Chegwin at the music publishers Chappell (yes, he is Keith Chegwin’s brother), was about to make Billy’s day. He’d phoned him in October after the Playback review had caught his eye in Melody Maker and requested a copy of the tape. ‘This was equally astounding,’ Billy recalls. ‘The first industry person who’d shown interest.’ It turned out to be more than interest.

  Chegwin loved the tape, but didn’t have the available money or in-house support to sign him to a concrete publishing deal. But the enthusiasm was there, so he gave Billy a list of contacts to send the tape on to, and touted it around himself, in the hope that a record company might provide the cash for Billy and Chappell to do something.