Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  In June, having acquired a booking agent, ‘the fabulous’ Nigel Morton, Billy went out on his first support tour with Incantation – as he describes them, ‘musos pretending to be from the Andes’, they were still cashing in on their one hit from December ’82, ‘Cacharpaya’. Though they were ill matched, Billy’s piggyback with the ’Cantation took him to such civic meccas as the Towngate Centre in Basildon, the Hatfield Forum, and the Theatre Royal, Plymouth.

  Being a solo performer was already proving useful. Letting the train take the strain, Billy Bragg was infinitely more mobile than any other support band in the country, requiring no parking space at the venue, just the one microphone, and no roadies. This would become more of a marketing angle in time, but for now, it was sheer economics. Guitar on his back, Roland Cube amplifier in one hand, train ticket in the other, he was the rock’n’roll equivalent of a certain Italian vermouth: anytime, anyplace, anywhere. ‘Woe betide if I broke a string.’

  Peter Jenner describes Billy as ‘quite a solitary person’, which is what he believes made that first flurry of gigs so achievable. ‘He’s very happy to be on his own, sitting in a car, in a hotel room, reading the paper, going for a walk, going shopping – he doesn’t feel the need to have people all around him.’

  He had, incidentally, parted company with the drum machine due to technical differences. There was no love lost between man and box, but Peter Jenner is happy to take credit for splitting them up: ‘That was the one thing I suggested. It was very Spandau Ballet – if you’re going to do a drum machine, do it properly. It was a Mickey Mouse drum machine.’

  But where is it now? (Wiggy’s got it, actually.)

  On 1 July 1983, the wait was over. Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy, the debut long-player by Billy Bragg, was released on Utility/Charisma, with ‘Pay no more than £2.99’ emblazoned on the sleeve. 1,500 copies had been pressed. Jeff Chegwin would handle the plugging (i.e. getting the record into the right hands in radioland), Charisma’s in-house PR Lee Ellen Newman would scare up some press, and Billy himself mucked in with a bit of both. Jenner gave him 25 copies of the album and sent him out to do his own promo.

  The trade magazine Music And Video Week announced the formation of the Utility label, the first act of political union between Billy and the man called PJ. Utility was described as ‘a label for the new age of austerity’. In interview, Jenner made an unusually ideological case for what was just a record company label imprint: ‘It seems obvious that the record industry has to come to terms with the colossal scale of unemployment, especially for young people, and the consequent shortage of readies. The reaction, up to now, has been to brutalise and decimate sales and releases by non-chart artists. At Charisma, we want to fight this. Our philosophy at Utility is that it is the idea, the song, the personality, the talent that matters, not the technology, the hype or the styling.’ One can easily imagine ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ playing in the background to this rousing speech. He finished by saying that the Billy Bragg album, ‘in both price and quality, is a foretaste of lots more to come’.

  It was, as Lou Reed later sang, the beginning of a great adventure.

  Andy Kershaw at Radio Aire in Leeds was the first DJ to write to Charisma and express his interest. The Rochdale-born headmaster’s son was formerly Leeds University’s upstart ents sec (he booked Iron Maiden, Duran Duran, The Clash and UB40 – and failed his degree) and was now hosting a late-night alternative show in John Peel mould called Uneasy Listening, spinning a very similar musical mix to the one he’s now famous for on Radio 1 and the BBC World Service. He also put together his own blues show. ‘I suppose for that station it was pretty radical,’ he says.

  Kershaw actually rescued Life’s A Riot from the station’s reject bin. He was paid so little he couldn’t even afford to go to the pub at lunchtimes, so instead he would sit in the record library and sift through a huge box (the kind washing machines come in). ‘If it wasn’t Elton John or Lionel Ritchie they threw it in there and gave it to charities,’ he recalls. ‘I used to do half my programme from that box.’ The sleeve of Life’s A Riot caught Kershaw’s eye: ‘When I dug around, there were about four copies of this bugger in there. So I picked up the lot and took them home. That night I put the needle on the record and “A New England” came on, and I know it’s a cliché, but I can genuinely say that it changed my life. I would not be sitting here doing what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t even be living in London, if I’d not pulled that record out of the box that afternoon. I just loved the simplicity and directness of it, the attack and the percussive quality of the guitar.’

  Kershaw had run into Pete Jenner when he booked The Clash and Ian Dury at Leeds University, and found him ‘a gentleman in a business of rogues and ill-mannered loudmouths’. He wrote to Charisma not realising that Jenner was involved and declared Life’s A Riot ‘the best record I’ve heard in years’, signing off, ‘more power to your plectrum’. Kershaw and Billy met in London at a café called Sandwich Scene, along with Kershaw’s mate Dave Woodhead who would later play brass on Billy’s records. They clicked. Soon, Kershaw had Billy playing live on his show, and secured him some gigs through promoter John Keenan in Leeds, always offering him floorspace for the night. The bond was immediate.

  Getting airplay on the Peel show was the Holy Grail. And it happened through a delicious mixture of chance and ingenuity. Jeff Chegwin played in the Chappell football team, once a week after work in Hyde Park, and Billy occasionally lent them his good right foot. One Wednesday evening, they were all standing around post-match having cans of beer and listening to Radio 1 on somebody’s car radio with the doors open when John Peel dropped in during David ‘Kid’ Jensen’s show, saying he’d do anything for a mushroom biryani. Chegwin spotted a gold-plated plugging moment. He and Billy drove over to where Radio 1 broadcast from – Egton House in the shadow of Broadcasting House – and took a mushroom biryani they’d just bought on Oxford Street into reception. Peel was an old hand, well aware of plugger’s bullshit, and accustomed to a steady stream of nutters in the lobby, but to his credit, he came down in person and gratefully accepted the vegetable biryani. Billy and Chegwin asked him to listen to their record in return. It’s what’s known as currying favour.

  All concerned tuned in later that night, and were rewarded for their quick-thinking: Peel thanked Billy for the biryani, said he would’ve played the record anyway, and proceeded to spin ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’ at the wrong speed (it was cut at 45 rpm for better sound quality, and sounds a bit like a scary monster at 33). It was clearly time for some bright spark to invent CD.

  This was Billy Bragg’s first ever play on national radio. The biryani scam was even reported in the gossip column of pop magazine No. 1.

  The first reviews came in dribs and drabs. On 21 July, City Limits, the lefty London listings magazine, paired Life’s A Riot with the new album by rockin’ anarcho-syndicalists Crass, Yes Sir, I Will, also underpriced at £2.75 (hence the connection – for a comparison, Paul Young’s No Parlez album came out in the same week and cost £3.99, while Big Country’s The Crossing was £4.79). The review by Dave Hill said that Billy’s album contained ‘simple, poignant, even delightful paeans to various unobtainables’, and that it ought to ‘touch anyone whose blood is warm’.

  Robin Denselow, in the Guardian on the same day, was more cautious: ‘Nothing extraordinary, but this could be an interesting label to watch.’

  A week later, and Sounds became the first of the three music inkies to get a review out, written by Garry Bushell – now a self-styled hate-me tabloid TV critic and homophobe, then a music hack with a stiffy for so-called ‘Oi!’ bands (Cockney skinheads of sometimes questionable politics). He gave the album three and a half stars out of five: ‘Bill’s no maudlin seer; he’s closer to a busking Paul Weller. He ain’t gonna make Top Of The Pops but at three notes for seven songs, his album’s well worth your attention.’ (Bushell would interview Billy for Sounds in October, in which he compared him to an
aforementioned punk poet: ‘Patwick Fitzgewaldkins he ain’t, mate.’)

  Billy was invited to record his first session for John Peel – an important stepping stone for new faces, up there with first NME feature and, if things really took off, first Top Of The Pops. The news came as Billy returned from a gig up North: Katy met him at the train station and told him that Peel personally had been on the phone. ‘This was the Crown Jewels!’ Billy says. He went into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios on 27 July, and taped seven songs. It was such a special occasion, Billy went wild and took a taxi up there. Like any wet-behind-the-ears musician, he was disappointed that John Peel wasn’t actually at the recording session (Maida Vale is miles away from Egton House, miles away from anywhere) and flabbergasted that he also got paid – £150, thank you very much. He wrote Peel a thank-you note, and the session was broadcast on 3 August. He was still signing on at this stage, but not for much longer.

  On 6 August, better late than never, Melody Maker joined the Billy Bragg cuttings file, with a review by Adam Sweeting (now a long-standing fan, he lamented the omission of both ‘The Cloth’ and the drum machine). Record Mirror followed (four stars out of five), then the Sunday Times (‘Paul Weller meets Jilted John!’), and that was it. For now.

  Peter Jenner went on holiday in August. When he returned to work, he ‘got the pink slip’. Charisma were letting him go.

  This was a blessing in disguise – the disguise being a beard and some oversized teeth, for the man behind his career change was the neo-hippy entrepreneur Richard Branson. These days, Branson runs trains, planes and Personal Equity Plans; in the early 80s, it was just his little corner of the record business: mail order, shops, label. The first Virgin record store was opened in 1970, and the label was launched in 1973 off the back of then-nineteen-year-old Mike Oldfield’s magnum opus Tubular Bells (which went on to sell over ten million). Despite the label’s bell-bottomed beginnings it astutely managed to keep its cool during and after punk, signing the Sex Pistols from ‘God Save The Queen’ until the bitter end, then The Skids, The Members and XTC. It is difficult to imagine now, but when Branson paid £15,000 for the Pistols, his was a truly independent label, with no shareholders and no US money. As Jon Savage says in England’s Dreaming, ‘[Malcolm] McLaren now had to deal with a company head younger than him and equally ruthless. Branson’s appearance belied his character. Despite the long hair and the air of woolliness, Branson had never really lived the hippie lifestyle.’

  In 1983, in a puff of cheap incense, Virgin swallowed Charisma, thereby inheriting the bankable Peter Gabriel, the bankable Genesis and the not-yet-bankable Billy Bragg (they’d shifted only a modest one thousand copies of Life’s A Riot). The Charisma name was dissolved and the Mad Hatter logo laid off. Peter Jenner wasn’t chuffed with the takeover – he was no fan of Branson. ‘I’d never liked him. Flash bugger, he didn’t understand music – but you don’t need to understand music, you need to understand marketing, which he does. He’s good at that. He has an instinct for what the people want, which I don’t have.’

  Jenner was seen as a hangover from the label’s PolyGram-linked past (‘I was a PolyGram person, I was the enemy’), and the inevitable ‘restructuring’ saw him out of a job. Billy remembers going in and helping him clear out his office, at which point Jenner made him a logical offer: ‘I can’t be your record company any more, I’d better be your manager.’

  Management was what PJ knew best. He was a fixer, not a desk jockey. So, in September 1983, with his wife Sumi and Ian Richards, he founded Sincere, a management umbrella that would handle Billy Bragg, Hank Wangford the country and western gynaecologist, and The Opposition, a rare band Jenner had signed to Charisma; they were, to borrow a rock biz cliché, big in France (‘They could have been up there with the U2s and Simply Reds, filling up the stadiums,’ Jenner reckons. ‘But their lead guitarist had a problem playing live’).

  Sensing that Utility wasn’t going to last long under the Virgin regime, Jenner started scouting round for another record company to put out Billy’s records. Not a sniff. But his belief in Billy’s music – and in the sound logic of Utility – was rock steady: ‘This was still the early days of Thatcherism. I felt it was becoming clear that there was going to be a fucking huge recession, and while everyone else was doing glamour and glitz, the new romantic bit, I thought that someone going round being a bit Dylanish, doing social-realism would go down well. Cheap, go-anywhere, do-anything. He did it. But I suppose my claim to fame is that I knew there’d be a market for it. I’ve often had these thoughts and I’m usually wrong. On this one I happened to be right.’

  While Jenner hunted around for some new sponsors, Billy continued to put himself about. On 30 August, he trekked down to Penzance to join a frankly bizarre all-star bill containing Meat Loaf, Chuck Berry, Aswad and a kind of almost-10cc (they were minus founders Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, and in fact two months away from splitting completely). The day was called Penwith ’83, ‘Cornwall’s largest ever open-air concert’, and Billy was playing for train fare only – which was £90, as he’d travelled all the way from Edinburgh, where he was scatter-gunning the Fringe Festival. (Scotland–Cornwall–Scotland was a typically impractical itinerary for the furiously available Billy Bragg, and peanuts compared to some of the zigzags he would later pull off in Europe.)

  Sadly, Cornwall’s largest ever open-air gig hadn’t pulled Cornwall’s largest ever crowd: it failed to break even at the gates. After playing his set (and securing Chuck Berry’s autograph), Billy discovered that nobody was getting paid. He begged the deflated organisers to reimburse at least his £90, which they eventually did, cash in hand. He hopped back on the train to Edinburgh and put it all behind him; at least now secure in the knowledge that he and Wiggy could play Chuck Berry better than Chuck Berry.

  Billy’s relationship with Katy ‘had gone pear-shaped’ at this time, and as a result of the ensuing romantic and domestic uproot, it felt as if he never really came back from the Edinburgh Festival. He stayed in ‘a lovely big house’ with a friend called Rose, and from this agreeable base he played virtually anywhere with a bar and a play on, sometimes twice a day, sometimes twice a night (‘I made sure I was in everybody’s face’). On a typical evening, you could see The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist at the Little Lyceum, then catch a Canadian folk outfit called Stringband and Billy Bragg at the Theatre Workshop (bar open till 2 a.m.). There really is no place like it for three weeks.

  Edinburgh ’83 was good to Billy. The Peel Session was coincidentally repeated while he was up there and improved his profile on the spot (‘the power of Peel cannot be overestimated’), he made an awful lot of useful contacts and broke an awful lot of guitar strings. As far as Billy is concerned, from there on, he was a professional musician.

  Billy Bragg was go.

  7. GO!

  Signing off, signing up, 1983

  nipple n. the small conical projection in the centre of each breast

  nirvana n. final release from the cycle of reincarnation attained by extinction

  of all desires and individual existence

  Nissen hut n. a military shelter of semicircular cross section made of

  corrugated steel

  Collins English Dictionary

  THE BILLY BRAGG story-so-far was told, in précis, many times over at the business end of 1983, from Melody Maker, NME and Sounds to Zig Zag, Record Mirror, No. 1 and Time Out. In December he told it to Melody Maker for the second time. This was the way it was going to be, as Billy graduated from nuisance sitting in reception to centre of attention.

  A pop career is like a damp pile of twigs – it sits there for ages, unloved and pathetic, and then suddenly it catches light, turning into a blazing, acrid-smelling bonfire within seconds, spreading warmth and orange light all around. It takes only one bright spark to set it off.

  At the beginning of the year, Billy hadn’t even recorded his debut album. At the end of it, Life’s A Riot was Number One in the indie charts, Nu
mber 44 in the real charts and rising, and Number Three in NME’s esteemed Vinyl Finals, the writers’ albums of the year. How did that happen?

  It goes without saying that the record itself was a contributing factor, but this is pop music, whose roadside is littered with good records; even good records handbuilt by robots. In its favour, regardless of whether it was your cup of tea or not, Life’s A Riot was pure honesty on vinyl; its sheer, unabashed humanity crystallised down for all to hear. As music became ever more technical and ready polished, here was a big lump of wood. The combination of Billy’s original brainwave and Jenner’s marketing foresight put Life’s A Riot in a unique rack. There had been punk rock, there had been folk, there had been folk-rock and folk-pop, and there had been visionary singer-songwriters. There had been delta blues and urban blues, one-man bands and buskers. There had been politically charged music, and there had been love songs, but there had never been anything or anyone like Billy Bragg. Brutal yet tender, old-fashioned yet bang up to date, punky yet poetic – in the fine tradition of all the best innovative art, it was the precise cocktail of existing elements that made it new.

  As such, the record stood apart. But again, plenty of music that has been different has wound up in the same bargain bin. So what was it that catapulted Billy Bragg to the front of the queue?

  Partly, it was the man himself. In the same way that he’d made an instant impression on Peter Jenner, on Andrew Spurrell, on Adam Sweeting and on Lance Corporal Wood, he was not going to pass through the music biz and the media unnoticed. When he was interviewed by the press, he threw himself into the job. When an audience talked among themselves he heckled them. When he met music’s foot soldiers – engineers, promoters, receptionists, PAs, photographer’s assistants, radio producers, even students’ union ents secs – he impressed them with his down-to-earth manner. He was self-effacing and helpful, humorous and talkative. He refused to recognise any hierarchy and treated everyone equally. Calling it a charm offensive makes it sound more planned than it actually was, but it meant that wherever Billy Bragg went, people remembered him.