Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  At the end of January, Billy and Jenner engineered another residency at a new venue called the Captain’s Cabin, in London’s Haymarket, on a night they specifically tailored for solo performers. It ran throughout February and March, and was more salubrious than the Tunnel (Billy was known to busk for the people in the Cabin queue before his own shows). On 10 February, having ticked off BBC1 (That’s Life) and Channel 4 (The Tube), Billy made his BBC2 debut on The Old Grey Whistle Test – then in its last series before being spruced up for the 80s by dumping bearded presenter Bob Harris, dropping the Old and Grey – for obvious demographic reasons – and having it taken over by men who looked like groovy schoolteachers, Mark Ellen and David Hepworth (actually, they were music journalists, but Hepworth used to teach – nowadays, they are part-time VJs on the adult MTV, VH-1 and magazine publishing moguls). It was, at the time, a prime TV slot, as bands played live, and there were no balloons.

  Looking back on Whistle Test now (Old Grey version and New Paisley-print), it’s charmingly amateurish, with much looking at scripts and many a bungled handover, but it did its bit for new talent. Perhaps more importantly than Billy’s TV exposure, the booking brought Andy Kershaw to the attention of OGWT producer Trevor Dann, who, after bumping into him a couple more times, was so impressed with his vim and bluff Northern good humour that he later hired him for October’s revamp as a co-presenter. (This, in turn, would lead to his own world music show on Radio 1, which is still on the air.)

  Also in February, Go! Discs went upmarket and had a nice new logo designed by Barney Bubbles, which soon graced notepaper, comp slip and record sleeve alike – a dotted arrow pointing at the centre-hole of a record, forming the letters G and O, with the Stiff-influenced motto beneath: ‘Giving the green light to the young lions.’ Go! Mansions, christened this as a joke, was an upstairs room in Wendell Road, South Acton, but Macdonald had signed a licensing deal with Chrysalis records, which meant that, while Go! maintained artistic control of its output, the major would distribute the records. Macdonald claimed he sealed the deal with Chrysalis MD Doug D’Arcy at an Arsenal home game, but it had been touch-and-go, chiefly because Billy, the label’s pivotal act, was signed for only one album. (Macdonald’s relationship with his star name was based on trust, and ‘trust’ is a very difficult concept for major record company lawyers to grasp.) Chrysalis were also unsure if Billy’s appeal would travel, internationally.

  By now, Macdonald had signed The Boothill Foot Tappers, a seven-piece good-time country revival outfit, A Thousand Miles Of Sunshine, a pop six-piece with two seventeen-year-old girl singers, and Chakk, a Sheffield electro-funk group. As luck would have it, the Boothills got a Sounds front cover just when the Chrysalis deal looked like it might fall through, and a copy dropped on Doug D’Arcy’s desk did the trick.

  The sales and the profile of Life’s A Riot had given Go! Discs life. Billy Bragg was taking off, but ‘semi-obscurity’ wasn’t going to spoil him. Eschewing the unpredictable rail network, he was now occasionally driven to gigs. Macdonald would sometimes drive, at least until the office started to get too busy, and he is still effusive about what he sees as that ‘golden period. Some of those gigs were probably the best gigs I had ever seen, and probably will see. The directness, the way he really charmed an audience, very thought provoking. Seeing those songs work with audiences, seeing them pick up on it for the first time, it was a really fresh experience.’

  Necessity even saw Billy soften his view on students – after all, they did form a large slice of his growing audience. ‘After a while, you have to stop thinking of people as students,’ he reasons.

  On 29 February, he played his first gig abroad, at the Paris Forum Des Halles with The Opposition (very much their patch, remember, and a country that never really took to Billy Bragg). Although an inauspicious start, this was the beginning of the world domination enterprise, in which Billy’s outward mobility really came into its own.

  ‘He was very cheap to run,’ confirms Peter Jenner. ‘We had this rule right from the start: we’ll do any gig providing it doesn’t cost him any money. Providing we had enough to pay his fares, and a meal, and to put him up – and in the early days he was very easy on what all that meant, he was very obliging, he’d sleep on someone’s floor.

  ‘And then when we started doing reasonably well, we’d be in a car, and that was it. We never even hired cars, we used mine.’

  Jenner’s car was a beaten-up black Volvo estate, registration PLF 343R, and it quickly became iconic to anyone involved in the Billy Bragg story. (It would even later appear on 1985’s Billy Bragg South Bank Show.) It was a bit of a dad’s car, and because Billy couldn’t drive, he always needed a dad to drive it, usually Kershaw, sometimes Ian Richards, often Jenner himself – not just hands-on, this was foot-down management.

  Jenner was keen to muck in – after all, this was refreshingly unlike touring with a band and their road crew. ‘With Billy, you weren’t stuck with a fucking entourage,’ he enthuses. ‘It was always a very personal relationship he had with people. I’d spent a lot of time with Roy Harper. I learnt that if you’re good at being a solo artist, be happy to be a good solo artist. Don’t trade that in to become a second-rate rock star – that was always my advice to Billy.’

  So Billy stayed small, as he got bigger. In terms of pop, he adhered to the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …’ He managed to keep his feet on the ground and his mind on the job, never allowing his improving status or new-found financial solvency to turn his head. Quite how he turned out so incorruptible is a mystery, although the loss of his father had placed health way ahead of wealth in his priority list early on in his life, and as such the traditional excesses enjoyed by working-class musicians with new money never held that much allure for him.

  ‘He’s always been incredibly low on normal rock star consumption,’ Jenner confirms. ‘He’s not a big drinker and not a big drugger. He drinks a tiny bit, and drugs are very rare. He never collected expensive cars – nor expensive road accidents – he always travelled by tube, and we always made money at gigs.’

  Life on the road was made far more bearable by the company, and by the compact nature of the non-stop operation. Kershaw describes his role as ‘Jeeves to Billy’s Wooster’, and says, ‘We had an absolute whale of a time.’ They would swap specialist music – folk for country and western, The Watersons for Hank Williams – or play a double Willie Nelson live album while driving south out of Calais, belting out the words to gypsy song ‘Thirty Foot Trailer’ on a Dutch motorway. (‘It was a long way from what I imagine the NME thought we were listening to,’ laughs Kershaw.)

  If it was Billy and Jenner in the Bragg Battlebus, they would put the world to rights: ‘You have to know about the political history of the world if Pete’s driving,’ says Billy. ‘It’s Star Trek or Thunderbirds if you want to have a conversation with Wiggy.’ Jenner combined a love of driving with a short temper when lost and a temptation to become more interested in his passenger’s newspaper than the road ahead. Billy would map-read (his speciality), and get flashbacks of being on military exercise.

  Billy and Kershaw did a four-date tour of Holland, and the two of them fell in love with the place. Billy explains why: ‘We liked the gigs, we liked the women, we liked the dope, we liked the beer, we liked the chips with mayonnaise.’

  Kershaw concurs: ‘We loved the whole free-wheeling, easygoing liberalism of Holland. Of course, the dope thing was especially attractive to me, even though Billy still had that strong East End, working-class suspicion of that type of thing. But in those days, if the British authorities saw you having fun they would introduce legislation to stop you! The Dutch were the complete opposite.’

  In rock’n’roll, the road goes on for ever; services 15 m.

  Please print this, the voice of the probably silent majority: as a social poet and as a songwriter, Roy Harper pisses all over Billy Bragg and his fashionable ilk
/>   anonymous letter, Sounds

  March put Billy Bragg into some of the largest venues he’d ever played, thanks to a full-tour support slot with The Style Council (Paul Weller’s grand, funk solution to splitting up The Jam): Newcastle City Hall, Birmingham Odeon, Glasgow Apollo and two Dominion Theatre shows in London. This was the band’s first UK tour, the gigs labelled ‘Council Meetings’. On a smaller scale, but equally educational, Billy played with The Redskins in places like Queen’s University, Belfast and the Trade Union Hall in Watford. Both Weller and The Redskins were political animals – the latter more affiliated and active – and between them and Billy, they were inadvertently spearheading a new awareness in music, of which more later.

  On 31 March, Billy trod the boards at Dublin’s National Stadium. An incongruous setting and an incongruous connection: he was supporting Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, touring his second solo album About Face. Jenner, whose handiwork this was, actually stopped managing the Floyd very soon after Gilmour joined in ’68, but he wasn’t one to leave an old contact unexploited, and it led to three gigs, including two nights at Hammersmith Odeon. As if to ease the middle-aged audience into Billy’s rough-and-ready style, tour promoter Harvey Goldsmith personally went on to introduce him as ‘a great friend of Dave Gilmour’s’. Billy remembers seeing a strange, long-haired bloke in the wings at Hammersmith wearing a suit and tie. Was he Gilmour’s accountant? No. He introduced himself to Billy as Roy Harper, the eccentric folkie once managed by Jenner and famously referred to by Led Zeppelin as ‘Harpic’ because he was clean round the bend. (Jenner saw some fundamental parallels between Billy and Harper: they were both single-minded solo singer-songwriters, although only one of them was notorious for cancelling a tour after catching something off a sheep he’d tried to resuscitate, mouth to mouth.)

  Since 1981, London had been governed by the conspicuously Labour-controlled Greater London Council. By 1985, PM Margaret Thatcher would set about shutting it down (in his book Thatcher And Thatcherism, Eric J Evans likens this to her grasping a ‘significant nettle’). In 1984, the GLC, under leader Ken Livingstone, set about promoting itself in time-honoured GLC fashion: by putting on concerts and events. In April, Billy played a number of GLC shows as part of the London Against Racism campaign, at Ilford Town Hall, Camden’s bijou Shaw Theatre and Acklam Hall in Notting Hill. He also played a NUPE gig at Watford Trade Union Hall, in aid of saving school dinners (‘Don’t let spam fritters become a thing of the past!’ went the poster) and a GLC show at Bishop Douglas School in East Finchley (he would play many a GLC gig during ’84, ’85 and ’86). The date was memorable for being in a gym. While Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah was on, Billy Bragg and the other support act John Hegley and the Popticians could be seen distractingly swinging on ropes. (‘We took our shoes off,’ Billy assures any Bishop Douglas staff who may be reading.)

  Politically, Billy Bragg was hotting up. On 20 May 1984 he played his first show for the Labour Party at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Eurofest, a Festival for a Socialist Europe, was intended to drum up support for 14 June’s Euro-elections (Larry Adler, The Panorama Steel Band and Dad’s Army’s Clive Dunn also appeared, and Billy recalls he and Kershaw ‘blowing up balloons for socialism’). This was the first time Billy met Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who proved that his toast was buttered on the right side by picking up a guitar and singing, ‘Take the ribbon from your hair …’ (‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ would prove a poignant plea for Kinnock before the decade was out).

  At the end of the evening’s entertainment, all concerned joined in a community singsong of ‘The Red Flag’. As if to illustrate the tentative nature of Billy’s first steps into partydom, he admits he didn’t know the words (‘I wasn’t sufficiently Labour’), so he tore out the page from the programme with them printed on and surreptitiously stuck it on MP Gerald Kaufman’s back. (Six years later, Billy would record ‘The Red Flag’ on his album The Internationale, to its original 1889 tune, not the ‘funeral dirge’ sung by the Labour Party.)

  In June, Billy and Kershaw hit the Scottish Highlands, by way of gigs in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. They drove the whole way in the Volvo from Leeds for a show at the Albert Hotel, Kirkwell, Orkney, often overlooked by myopic rock promoters. To get there from Aberdeen, they motored up the A96 all night, making the most of the bright light up there, listening to Radio 4, whose Shipping Forecast has long romanticised place names like Cromarty from that coast. The two day-trippers stopped off at Dornoch and ran around like fools on the beach; they drove up a hill and watched an early-morning trawler coming in with seagulls around it like bees; they saw rabbits warming themselves on the deserted tarmac of the A9. It wasn’t rock’n’roll but they liked it.

  In order to get over the Pentland Firth to Kirkwall, there’s a tiny ferry – too small for a Volvo at any rate, so Billy and Kershaw left it at John O’Groats and took the amps and equipment on board. En route, they were soaked by a big wave, much to the merriment of the local passengers, who knew precisely where to sit to avoid such a soaking. Billy describes Kirkwall as ‘a one-tree town, pretty basic’ (the Rough Guide To Scotland says ‘a bustling metropolis, by Orkney standards’), but the gig was a cracker, playing punk songs and precipitating bursts of country dancing. Between songs, the punters would politely retreat to the walls.

  They drove back the next day to Inverness for a less captivating show at Pharaohs Disco. (‘Dreadful,’ Billy recalls. ‘The PA gave up, there was no stage and very few beers.’) The night was saved by a friend of theirs called Tam Kenny, who talked them into joining him for a moonlight yomp to Culloden Moor. Fuelled by Tartan bitter, the three of them scared themselves to death on the site of the 1746 massacre, spooked by the thought of the 1,200 Jacobites who perished at the hands of the better-equipped government troops (‘The wind that day was so strong that the clansmen were blinded by their own gunsmoke, and when they finally charged they did so in ragged fashion,’ notes Tom Steel in Scotland’s Story). This was not the first time Billy would be touched by history.

  Having already played a handful of GLC-organised gigs, on 10 June Billy joined The Smiths at a GLC one called Jobs For A Change, in Jubilee Gardens next to County Hall on the South Bank, with Hank Wangford, The Redskins, reggae stars Misty In Roots and bee-hived popstress Mari Wilson – a typical GLC line-up, you might say. It was not a perfect day, as a fascist element in the crowd physically attacked both The Redskins and Wangford’s band. Rather less sensationally, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce of The Smiths threw some flowers out of a dressing-room window and twenty fans dented the roof of a parked car scrambling for them.

  Coincidentally, the vehicle belonged to one of the catering staff who would be working backstage at the forthcoming Glastonbury Festival, which gave the Smiths’ tour manager a headache, as the Smiths were playing it. So was Billy Bragg. The three-day, open-air Glastonbury, as an annual event, was very much a 70s throwback that had revitalised itself in the Thatcher years by farmer Michael Eavis’s affiliation with CND (it quickly became the campaign’s biggest single fundraiser, netting £100,000 by 1984). The line-ups were getting stronger by the year, from Hawkwind and Aswad in 1981, and Van Morrison and Jackson Browne in 1982, to a veritable cornucopia in 1984: jazz-funk (Weather Report), reggae (Black Uhuru), folk (Fairport Convention, Joan Baez), blues (Dr John), ska (General Public) and pop (Elvis Costello & The Attractions).

  Up on the emblematic Pyramid Stage, underneath the country’s biggest CND badge, Billy provided the campers’ wake-up call on the Friday. He and Kershaw kipped in the Volvo. It was turning into quite a summer.

  In his time, Billy had played garden parties, street parties, birthday parties, Christmas parties, anything. On 6 July 1984, he did his first wedding. Andy Macdonald was marrying Juliet de Valero Wills. It was a happy occasion for Billy, as they asked him to be their best man, and it afforded the first Riff Raff reunion (he, Wiggy and Robert did a nuptially-biased set of covers including ‘Going To The Chap
el’, ‘Shotgun Wedding’ and ‘Jump The Broomstick’). The Boothill Foot Tappers also played, as if to underline the fact that Go! Discs was Macdonald’s life. In effect, it was a Go! Discs bash, its 250 guests made up of staff, bands, producers, hacks, lawyers, agents, Chrysalis people and only a smattering of relatives. Juliet was marrying the company.

  Juliet’s role in the Billy Bragg story cannot be underestimated. She became one of those women in his life who give him so much strength – and, although this is not a romantic allusion as far as the Go! Discs years are concerned, the fact that, after 1992, she turned out to be exactly the life-partner he’d been looking for lends a retrospective crackle and significance to her and Billy’s professional relationship.

  Quite unlike her romance with Macdonald, which was the textbook whirlwind kind (met in October, proposed in January, wed in July), her eventual union with Billy was based on years of friendship. It wasn’t until later that they realised quite how much they had in common.

  Born two years after Billy, Juliet comes from a Spanish-Catholic background, as opposed to Billy’s Italian-Catholic, and both saw their fathers die young. But unlike Billy’s fairly steady, traditional childhood, Juliet’s upbringing was a mass of contradictions. Her father, Michael de Valero Wills, was born against a backdrop of impoverished Spanish aristocracy, right-wing, pro-Franco landowners who lost everything in the Spanish Civil War and had an attitude best described as hidalgo. They were cash-poor, but carried themselves like noblemen. Michael and his Spanish mother moved to England to escape the Civil War, where, thanks to a bursary, he enrolled at King’s College and then St George’s in Hyde Park (two of the ‘Big Five’ London medical schools), and eventually qualified as a doctor. Here, he met and married Juliet’s mother, Margaret Pountain, an English nurse from ‘an impossibly complicated social background’ in Derbyshire. Michael had started with nothing but an attitude and his degree in medicine (surrounded by doctors’ sons and public school stock) was no mean achievement. An outsider by dint of being foreign and on a grant, Michael had to work twice as hard to be accepted.