Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Billy’s affable personality, vital PR tool that it undeniably is, is no more manufactured than his Essex accent, but it has served him well down the years, especially in an industry where historically artists feel obliged to maintain a mask of cool.

  It would be unkind to tar all rock musicians with the same brush, but, for the most part, when they are pushed into situations that involve contact with anyone outside their own cabal, protection of image becomes paramount. Up goes the shield of aloofness, ignorance or disdain. As a rule, the rocking’n’rolling classes are only erudite and forthcoming in song, if at all. Like star footballers who can talk only in handed-down television clichés, or politicians who are incapable of answering a yes-no question, it’s a prerequisite of the job. If you’re a rock star, you need only have opinions about yourself and other bands. If the generalisation sounds harsh, you have to work in the music press for a short time only to understand why Morrissey, Mark E Smith of The Fall and Black Grape’s Shaun Ryder are such evergreen favourites with journalists – they can string a sentence together.

  Billy Bragg falls into the same category. He’s what’s known in the trade as ‘good for a quote’, and if that sounds trivial, it usually is. Judge Pickles and Bernard Manning are good for a quote. But if you can cultivate a reputation in the media for being quoteworthy, they’ll ask you back. And visibility is everything.

  So Billy’s fairly rapid ascent was down to a fine product and a friendly face. These were the raw materials, but, as the link with Peter Jenner had already proved, the perfect pop package needs delivering, and that’s where the record company comes in.

  Be it a monolithic, multinational conglomerate, a cottage outfit based in a bedroom, or the latter bankrolled by the former, the record company ensures that The Product is available in The Shops. Otherwise you’re whistling in the dark.

  Back in July, Billy had been photographed for Sounds, by snapper Virginia Turbett. It took place at Turbett’s house, against a white wall for studio-style effect, and Billy was coerced into wearing some daft wraparound shades. At the shoot, Billy was doing his usual bit, vibing everyone up, giving it some patter while the photographer changed films; the equivalent of singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ to fill in the gaps. One of Turbett’s friends was there, Alison Macdonald, who came away with a copy of Life’s A Riot on cassette, touched by the hand of gawd-blimey.

  It so happened that Alison’s brother Andy, aged 25 and two years her junior, had started his own independent record label in January, Go! Discs, based in one room in his Shepherd’s Bush flat. She requested a copy of Billy’s album for Go!, and sure enough, it arrived on the mat the next day. Macdonald remembers his sister enthusing about Billy: ‘She was quite lit up by him, saying, You have to meet this character, there’s an aura about him. She was obviously very affected by him.’

  Macdonald played Side 1 of Life’s A Riot six times in a row and was knocked out by it: ‘My mind was made up. I definitely wanted to work with him.’

  An Arsenal fan with a law degree, Macdonald hails from Redruth in Cornwall. He worked as an English teacher in Southampton, lived in Sheffield for a while where he compiled crosswords, then came to London to work for Stiff records as a press officer. Stiff, founded in 1976 by two pub-rock managers Jake Riviera (who handled Nick Lowe) and Dave Robinson (Graham Parker), had risen from new wave curiosity shop to home-of-the-hits status thanks to Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Madness, Jona Lewie and Lene Lovich, but it had peaked commercially in 1981, when turnover exceeded £3 million. Macdonald was in the PR seat in 1982, by which time it was all Tracey Ullman and The Belle Stars. The age-old company slogan ‘If it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck’ was losing credibility.

  At the end of 1982, after eleven months at Stiff, a couple of Macdonald’s mates from Sheffield who’d been in unsuccessful gloom-rock band Clock DVA, formed a new group called The Box, and they wanted somebody to put their first single out. Macdonald, in his own words, ‘took a flyer’, and used his £750 savings to set up Go! Discs. He knew about press and marketing, and setting up your own label is a very speedy way of finding out about distribution and manufacturing. He soon signed another band, a duo from West London called The Bic (in fact, he signed only acts beginning with B in the first year). Neither act had Number One hits, but they brushed past the indie charts, nabbed a bit of press (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the boss’s previous job) and an early label history, written by Macdonald, declared that The Box’s first three releases ‘showed a healthy profit, which was immediately ploughed back into developing other acts’, and The Bic’s ‘Musica Pop’ single made ‘a few bob thanks to good export sales on the twelve-inch’. Macdonald’s pioneer spirit was not about to desert him.

  In August 1983, he’d heard the artist he wanted, and set about procuring him. Pete Jenner’s first memory of Andy Macdonald is of ‘a mouthy geezer who kept knocking on my door’. This is not as damning as it sounds, for Macdonald was nothing if not persistent. When he wants something, people say, he gets it. He even travelled up to the Edinburgh Festival and continued his pestering campaign.

  ‘Edinburgh was the first time we realised he was a fucking nuisance and wasn’t going to go away,’ Jenner recalls, in the nicest possible way. This coincided with rejection for Billy Bragg from just about every major record company, and some minor ones, so he went to see Macdonald in his tiny ‘office’. Macdonald got friends to phone in while Jenner was there, to simulate the busy hum of commerce.

  ‘Pete had a lot more experience in the music biz than I had,’ Macdonald admits, but nevertheless the puppy dog and the wise old owl entered into a ‘mutual understanding’ that they would do something together, however trivial.

  After Edinburgh, unable to go back to Katy and the warmest room in Wimbledon, Billy went to stay with Wiggy in his new Barratt home in Beardsley Way, Acton. He was never much of an imposition as, by now, touring had become Billy Bragg’s middle name.

  Life’s A Riot was very much at the bottom of Charisma’s priority list (Charisma would cease to exist by November), so Andy Macdonald set about trying to relieve them of it. Meanwhile, Billy continued to gig, and in doing so, finally caught the desired attention of the NME. They hadn’t reviewed the LP even in August, but in September, they compensated. Billy’s first notice was for a gig at a club called New Merlin’s Cave in London’s seedy King’s Cross. The writer, who went by the nom de punk of X Moore, but was called Chris Dean, admitted in his piece that he’d ‘stumbled across Billy Bragg’. This was no PR coup, but an NME enthusiast getting blown away by a new artist. Dean marvelled that Billy played for 105 minutes (the main act hadn’t turned up and he did every song he knew to fill the time). He called him ‘a man worth having infringe pop’s sacred airspace’.

  They do say that if you can’t do, teach, and if you can’t teach, teach gym. It’s the same in music. If you can’t do, form a band. If you can’t make it in a band, write about those who can. As a rule, rock journalists are failed musicians. (This is such a truism that not having been in a crap band carries quite a cachet among hacks.) X Moore was different, in that his band weren’t failed. They were The Redskins, quite a talking point in the mid-80s for their fierce mod-rock-soul and immovable Socialist Worker Party views. They signed to PolyGram’s Decca label in 1984, and had a Number 33 hit with ‘Bring It Down (This Insane Thing)’, which, compared with the SWP’s mainstream political impact, was akin to storming Whitehall. Although Billy Bragg’s pure socialism would never tally with The Redskins’ hardline hard-left stance, they formed a vague alliance in the benefit years to follow.

  It was another SWP tub-thumper who picked up the Billy baton at the NME – Steven Wells, better known as ‘Swells’, also writing under a pseudonym (Susan Williams), and a performer by night (Seething Wells, a stand-up poet). This was a boom time for the so-called ‘ranting poets’, an inevitable by-product of punk’s get-up-and-do-it ethic. They were angry youngish men playing at being Doctor Marten’s own town crie
rs and – like Billy – proving a cheap-and-cheerful booking for pub and student promoters. Swells, a hot-headed Swindon intellectual who’d cultivated a spotless prole accent in Leeds, was Billy’s next supporter.

  Swells recalls his first meeting: ‘I was on a Right To Work march. This stiff-spined young chap came up to me and said, “Er, this is a tape of my music, I thought you might want to listen to it.” He gave me this tape of Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy. I took it home to Leeds, and, like you do when you get loads of tapes from people, I stuck it in the machine, listened to two seconds and thought, Fuck this! It’s some Cockney whining over an acoustic guitar! I taped over it almost immediately with something good off the radio, probably John Peel.’

  Swells had only just started writing for the NME in August, but has no idea how Billy knew this, as his girly pseudonym had been designed to put detractors off his scent while he/she wrote positive reviews of Seething Wells. ‘So they commissioned me as the NME’s first secret transvestite writer to review the Leeds Futurama.’

  Futurama was an annual two-day alternative music festival in Swells’ adopted Leeds. The 1983 line-up, held at the Queens Hall on 17–18 September, included such rising art-rockers as The Comsat Angels, The Armoury Show and The Chameleons, plus the unknown Smiths, gothic monstrosities like Death Cult and Killing Joke, and, as an ironic flourish, The Bay City Rollers. Billy Bragg was very low down on Saturday’s bill under ‘special guests’, next to another whining poet John Cooper Clarke. It was, as Swells noted, ‘hairdressers’ hell’. He arrived, not in the best frame of mind:

  ‘I’d just had the shit kicked out of me by the NF who stormed out of the Scarborough pub and beat the crap out of me and Little Brother, another poet.

  ‘There were lots of Scottish bands and it was just dreadful – the early 1980s equivalent of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. And then, onstage, is this git, this Cockney geezer with a huge nose. He moved like a Thunderbirds puppet and talked in short, clipped, army-like sentences, and he just thrashed the shit out of his guitar and sang his fucking heart out. It was totally punk rock! The stark minimalism gave me an immediate stiffy, I just fell in love with the bloke. I scrawled all these words of sycophantic lust in my notebook.’

  These words were honed into a review in the next week’s NME: ‘Salvation! Solo electronic guitarist Billy Bragg tears asunder the guffy, grey clouds of doom and despondency with low slung, highly strung screaming riff backed tales of lost love, manic wimp whinery and political mistrust. A marbles-intact urban surfboy, a blistering volcano of passion, wit and style, he packed more light, shade and aggression into his twenty-minute set than all of tonight’s posing Jack Dullards combined.’

  Faithful Adam Sweeting was also at the Queens Hall, and concurred in Melody Maker, remarking that only Billy Bragg and The Armoury Show’s Richard Jobson, formerly of The Skids, later a TV presenter, were ‘big enough to wrench the perspective of the day out of the dead hand of passive acceptance and to mould it in his own image’.

  It seems that the greyer his surroundings, the more Billy Bragg shone out like a beacon of England.

  Meanwhile, over at the restructured Charisma, they’d installed a replacement for Peter Jenner, who was making it difficult for Andy Macdonald to extricate Billy’s album from a label that couldn’t care less about him. On the contrary, said the new A&R, ‘He’s a Charisma artist, we’ve got a lot of faith in him. We think he’s got a great future.’

  Macdonald offered them £1,500.

  ‘That’ll do nicely.’

  And with that, Billy Bragg was transferred like a footballer from the cash-rich Premier League club to the up-and-coming Beazer Homes League side. (Football fans may wish to adjust the analogy to fit.)

  * * *

  It was Armistice Day, and the peace was about to be shattered. Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy was re-released but this time through Utility/Go! Discs on 11 November 1983, again for £2.99. The initial pressing was 5,000 copies.

  At Charisma, it had almost been an unofficial release. At Go!, it was what they’d all been waiting for (‘all’ being Macdonald and his very first member of staff, Lesley Symons). Go! Discs had considerably less muscle than the major record companies – and indeed, less than most of the better-established indies – but it had a lot more heart and, as Woody Allen said, ‘the heart is a resilient little muscle.’ What happened next was a success story that would put Go! Discs on the map, and Billy Bragg all over it.

  ‘Billy worked his nuts off,’ recalls Macdonald. ‘He made the record a hit. He was grafting like crazy, all over the country. The ultimate mobile musician.’

  The label may have been short staffed, but they had a roster of just three acts, and could throw every drop of their support behind one record, while bigger outfits have to prioritise. An extensive 21-date tour was announced (Billy’s first properly organised nationwide live assault), and press coverage was generous. There were more album reviews – ‘Buy it’ said Johnny Waller in No. 1; ‘It’s a classic!’ said Zig Zag; ‘Will sell well’ predicted trade mag Music Week – the Sounds feature ran, and Billy was booked to appear on the first edition of The Tube’s second, 25-week series.

  Wearing a Clash-style cut-off shirt, he played surrounded by Newcastle’s young dispossessed on 28 October. On the same show were The Eurythmics, Public Image Limited (giving Billy the chance to rub shoulders in the green room with John Lydon, former Sex Pistol), Paul Young and metal-bashers SPK. From there, he went off on tour, supporting either The Icicle Works, New Model Army or Richard Thompson, depending on what day of the week it was.

  At that time Andy Kershaw lost his job at Radio Aire after a ‘rethink’ of the station’s format. ‘It was the same with all those commercial stations,’ he says. ‘When they were set up they all made grand promises to the IBA about the breadth of music they would cover, and when the financial reality hit them, they suddenly realised that me playing Television Personalities EPs wasn’t going to get them a huge audience, nor was me and a pile of old Muddy Waters records. So I was radically downsized.’

  Ever resourceful, Kershaw duplicated a letter asking for a job, and sent out about 250 to everybody he could think of in the music business. At the bottom of the letter was a tear-off coupon bearing a passport photo of Kershaw’s face (‘like they have on the side of buses when somebody’s won the pools’) and two boxes to tick: one saying ‘Yes! I would like to learn more about this exciting youth’, the other saying ‘No! We have no employment opportunities at the moment.’ He got one reply, from Sincere management.

  Having identified Kershaw as a kindred spirit, Jenner phoned him (‘Can you drive, dear boy?’) and he was duly hired to come down to London and help out in the Sincere office, and, when needed, act as road manager, driver and pal for Billy. They couldn’t afford to pay him, but Pete and Sumi offered to put him up in their box room and feed him, which Kershaw saw as a generous offer. He would start in January.

  Meanwhile, in a year bulging with firsts, the two-pronged support tour gave Billy his first ride in an aeroplane, not something he’d been looking forward to. It is one of the over-riding ironies of the Billy Bragg Travels The World story: he’s afraid of flying. This is God playing his joker.

  It’s like a heroin addict being afraid of needles. Here is a man whose very career is founded on gigging, yet one who imagines he is going to die in a hot metal tube every time he leaves the ground. It’s not a rare affliction among musicians – legend has it that Robert Smith of stadium goths The Cure takes the QE2 to America now that he’s famous enough to call the shots, and Paul Heaton of The Beautiful South adheres to a rigorous regime of lucky charm stroking whenever he taxis down a runway – but it does seem a cruel twist. On 3 November, Billy didn’t even know how scared he was of flying as he boarded a short flight to Glasgow to play the Henry Africas club with The Icicle Works: ‘I thought, I’d better find out if I can do this.’

  Looking back, he wishes he’d gone with someone, who might’ve reassured him that
the plane wasn’t about to drop out of the sky when it got bumpy, and that was what it was supposed to sound like when the landing gear came down. On his own, Billy allowed his fertile artist’s imagination to spill over, and looked on in terror as his coffee acted as a spirit level. He locked himself in the toilet, and read the Swells interview with him in that week’s NME over and over again. Whatever gets you through the flight is all right.

  Billy had supported a parade of almost-rans in his short career, but the October–November tour pitched him up against ‘names’ (Icicle Works were weeks away from the first Top Twenty hit, New Model Army were developing a loyal live following with their hob-nailed anthems and Thompson was a British folk legend since the 60s, heyday of Fairport Convention).

  ‘I never really clicked with New Model Army,’ Billy recalls. ‘At the time, they were very much a clique. It was like touring with a coven. And they did goth it a bit.’ At the Tiffany’s club in Leeds, he shared a dressing room with the trio, and the vintage vampire film Nosferatu was on the television – NMA insisted that all the lights go out while they watched it. Billy kept his neck covered up.

  There was a typically Braggian mix-up in Manchester, when, booked to play the University with another ubiquitous shouty poet Attila The Stockbroker, he mistakenly turned up at the Polytechnic. Never one to miss an opportunity to plug in, he blagged a gig at the Poly, dashed over to the Uni to honour his original booking, then dashed back to the Poly to support Death Cult. All in a night’s work. (Bottom of the bill at the Poly were a local band called The Frantic Elevators – lead singer: Mick Hucknall, later of Simply Red and the international jet set.) Macdonald was present at many of these gigs, as if to prove how unlike a record company boss he was.