Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  He and Margaret had six children (two boys, four girls), and, according to Juliet, ‘a turbulent marriage’. The family moved around a lot, and Juliet was born in 1959 in the Shell hospital, Trinidad, where Dad was working. They moved back to Bristol in 1963, which is where Juliet did most of her growing up. The trappings were middle class – convent school for the girls, Christian Brothers for the boys – but, she insists, ‘it was all front’ (four cars parked out front, no housekeeping money in the tin).

  Juliet won a place at grammar school, and seemed to be on-track for a decent education. Then, one year later, her dad returned from a two-year contract in Saudi Arabia, and the family moved to Whitburn, a small ex-mining village between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Here she and her sisters got nothing but grief at the local school for being English and ‘posh’, and Margaret was dubbed a witch because she wore kaftans and a vast, purple, hooded cloak (she’d become more of a rebellious, liberal soul during the rise of women’s lib in the 60s). ‘To survive in Whitburn you had to deny huge chunks of yourself,’ Juliet says. ‘Your background, your aspirations, in fact any awareness of life and values beyond the village boundaries.’ You also needed a big sister who could fight (luckily, Juliet had one of those) – and the ‘happening’ fashion accessory for girls was a metal comb with the end filed down to a lethal point. From bohemian Bristol to a cultural black hole, the contradictions kept on piling up.

  Needless to say, Juliet’s education effectively ground to a halt. When her parents finally split for good, her mum moved to London – well, Penge anyway, which is virtually in Kent – where Juliet briefly joined her after her O Levels (taken at fifteen in Scotland, but, swot that she was, she took them a year early). She never quite managed to re-enrol at school down South. Following her creative instincts at sixteen she got a place on an art course at Kingsway College in King’s Cross. It was 1975, and she fell in with a music crowd, in particular a former Swedish porn star who was now booking bands on the London pub circuit. Helping her out, and staying up late, Juliet began missing college (she dropped out after a year when ‘an urgent need to support myself prevailed’).

  Punk rock was Juliet’s University of Life, from a Saturday job at Rock On, the record shop in Camden, onwards. While Billy was up in Oundle living in authentic squalor and sneering at public schoolboys, Juliet was living even rougher and developing her own loathing of students. She was squatting through sheer necessity in Hornsey, ‘scared, broke, and not happy’, with nowhere else to go, surrounded by middle-class, art-stude poseurs living the same way for a laugh and taking their washing home to Mummy at weekends. Although a clean and tidy individual (she always had a spider plant up in whichever hell-hole she was squatting), Juliet discovered what it was like to be regarded as scum, seeing her belongings thrown out of the window into the road by council heavies on more than one occasion.

  The people she’d met within the music industry became her support system. She even shared her sister’s council flat (although not biblically) with numero uno punk photographer Ray Stevenson, who, incidentally, ruined the toilet by pouring developing fluid down it. Still, Juliet found herself in all the right places at all the right times.

  Miles Copeland, son of a CIA boss and manager of then-unknown new-wavers The Police, had started his own label Step Forward Records, and Juliet drifted into a full-time job there assisting the press officer. This was at the deep end of the punk underground: the roster included Squeeze plus such punk almost-rans as The Cortinas, The Models and Chelsea, and Copeland also subsidised Mark Perry’s seminal fanzine Sniffin’ Glue from the same office. She did early press for The Police, when they were struggling against the dual stigma of a jazz/prog-rock past and a 35-year-old guitarist – not ideal punk credentials. Thus began what Juliet calls her ‘lost years’ – staying up all night, and tracing the never-ending gig-crawl (Vortex, Roxy, 100 Club, Marquee) – ‘You just couldn’t go home, there was too much to see.’

  Juliet’s accidental career in record company promotion and whatever-else-needed-doing took her to Chiswick Records (she was working there when Riff Raff’s Cosmonaut EP came out, but against all odds, she and Billy never crossed paths – happily, their names are mentioned on the same page of the booklet that later accompanied the Chiswick Story box set). She managed to get outrageous New York transsexual Wayne/Jayne County on the cover of Sounds in a negligee. Then, as part of a small independent press company, Trigger, Juliet pushed Toyah when she was on the tiny label Safari. These were not easy acts to peddle, and the experience drew out the natural hustler in Juliet.

  Then in 1979 it all went off. A seven-piece ska band from Coventry, The Special AKA, borrowed £700 to cut a single called ‘Gangsters’, a wired little number that they’d put out on their own label 2-Tone through pre-eminent London indie Rough Trade. The black-and-white graphic of the artwork, and the multiracial nature of band and musical lineage proved irresistible in the post-punk malaise, and Chrysalis picked up single, band and label (plus The Selecter, who were on the B-side), sending ‘Gangsters’ to a deserved Number Six in the national charts. Seemingly overnight, 2-Tone fever gripped the nation, and Juliet – having dabbled in rock journalism as ‘Holly Golightly’ in Superpop magazine – found herself right in the middle of a mediaquake. Her partner in Trigger, Rick Rogers, was managing The Specials (as they were soon known) and by October, the two of them were booking the 2-Tone Revue tour, with ska revivalist labelmates Madness and The Selecter.

  Madness entered the Top Twenty with their first single ‘The Prince’ (and were duly poached by Stiff, never to peak outside the Top Twenty until 1985), The Selecter went Top Ten with their debut, ‘On My Radio’, and The Specials had a Number One in January 1980 (‘Too Much Too Young’). Britain’s youth donned tight suits, loafers, pork pie hats and tonic dresses, and a previously obscure musical form from Jamaica was everywhere. The monochrome madness lasted two years. Juliet and Rick Rogers booked six-week US tours for both The Specials and The Selecter by what tailors are calling the seat of their pants (‘We were running on pure adrenaline,’ she says). They had no time to enjoy the fact that they were a crucial part of history in the making.

  Juliet, a former junior ‘rude girl’ herself from Saturday afternoons spent at the Bristol Locarno, managed The Selecter (she and Rogers had managed The Damned in late 1978 from the time when they were called The Doomed for legal reasons), and sharpened up another side of her act. These hectic, pick-it-up-as-you-go-along years would later serve her well at Go! Discs, which was a well-oiled operation by comparison.

  Sadly, 2-Tone was doomed to fail. For all of its apparent racial har-mo-nee, the audience attracted by the ska/bluebeat revival was fraught with contradictions – as it had been the first time around in the 1960s. Madness, especially (the only all-white group among the crop) drew a lot of skinhead fans who, again, missed the multi-cultural point, moonstomping to the black-influenced sounds and sieg-heiling in between. There is no getting inside the minds of such people, and they were never courted by Madness themselves, but this constituency, Juliet reckons, probably presented a ‘truer picture of 2-Tone’, or at least the paradox the label was trying to shake off. (By the summer of 1981, when The Specials topped the charts with urban hymn ‘Ghost Town’, the inner cities were torn apart by riots.)

  Before it all fell apart, at Christmas 1980, The Selecter afforded Juliet her first contact with Pete Jenner, a minor managerial summit that would imbue their later professional dealings with an in-built mutual respect. He was managing Ian Dury & The Blockheads, whose Soft As A Baby’s Bottom tour ended with two nights at the Michael Sobell Sports Centre in North London. The Selecter, who had just returned from a hellish Scandinavian tour, were booked to support. In the finest tradition of Support Band Paranoia, they complained about the space they’d been granted for their merchandising stall, and Juliet was forced to argue the toss in the foyer with Pete Jenner. ‘To his credit he was very accommodating, he bent over backwards,’ she remembers.


  However, the band’s conspiracy theory spread to the lights and the PA, and they were so peeved, they refused to do the second night – even after Jenner had coerced Ian Dury into phoning them personally with assurances that no acts of sabotage were afoot. This was what management was all about: The Selecter were actually on the slide (their last single ‘The Whisper’ hadn’t even made the Top 30), and yet they were acting the prima donna. Juliet had met a lot of prima donnas – which is probably why Billy Bragg came as such a pleasant surprise when they started working together in 1984. After The Selecter, Juliet continued managing their singer Pauline Black – with whom she is still good friends – and endured record company grief when Chrysalis insisted they should market her as a black diva. This did not suit. No wonder the anti-marketing marketing of Go! Discs appealed …

  Juliet had met Andy Macdonald at Radio 1 in October 1983 – they were both chaperoning artists appearing on Mike Read’s Pop Quiz: he, Stiff artist Kirsty MacColl (also his girlfriend at the time) and she, Pauline Black. Before romance blossomed, Macdonald gave Juliet a copy of Life’s A Riot (‘I put it on every morning,’ she recalls – it really was that sort of record). As she was working with Black, who was still signed to Chrysalis, and had contacts there, she actually tried to stoke the Go! Discs label deal from within. After a full two months of being knocked back for one reason or another, a besotted Macdonald finally talked Juliet into going out with him. He drove her up to a Billy Bragg gig at Manchester Poly on 28 January 1984 (the first time she and Billy met). He apparently pledged to Billy at the end of the night, ‘I’m going to marry her.’ He proposed three days later at Billy’s Kingston Poly date. She said yes.

  The most important player in Billy Bragg’s life was now well and truly in the story.

  In July, Billy started recording his second album Brewing Up With Billy Bragg at Berry Street Studio in Clerkenwell with Peel Session engineer Ted De Bono in the producer’s chair. Billy would later work with John Porter, also a Maida Vale man, who produced the first Smiths album. Billy’s theory is that bands on smaller labels (The Smiths were on Rough Trade) don’t get the pick of all the expensive ‘name’ producers, and so instead go for the first ones they meet – invariably BBC stalwarts.

  Brewing Up, technically, was not so far away from the utilitarian approach of Life’s A Riot (give or take a toot on the trumpet by Dave Woodhead and a touch of organ by Kenny Craddock) and was soon finished, earmarked for an October release. There would, Billy insisted, be no single. Why? ‘Because I was a fucking punk rocker, that’s why,’ Billy explains carefully. ‘Singles were for Spandau Ballet.’ This decision led to the first proper row of his professional career, with his label boss and his manager. But Billy was adamant, and Jenner let it drop. ‘He’s very good at not bearing grudges or allowing arguments to spill over into the next day,’ says Billy. Macdonald was simply outnumbered.

  It’s too easy to take for granted Billy’s initial hostility towards singles, and indeed, the willingness of those around him to honour his integrity. Pop law tells us that it’s commercial suicide not to release singles, as they are a quick, if pricey, route to radio play and act as convenient flyers for bedrock album sales. Led Zeppelin’s refusal to release singles in the 70s – interestingly enough, a manager-led stance – denied them a good deal of TV and radio exposure. As it happens, it didn’t matter: it increased the potency of their legend, made gigs all the more exciting, and caused buyers of their albums to feel intellectually superior to the hit-parade herd. (Anyway, they put out singles in the States, which is a far more lucrative market, so maybe they weren’t so principled after all.) With Billy’s first album doing so well on the back of minimal advertising, it would be a dishonest record-label boss who didn’t wonder to himself just how many more albums he could sell with a hit single upfront. It was not to be.

  In August, with Brewing Up in the can (or in the pot), Billy was invited on his very first American tour.

  Echo & The Bunnymen were a Liverpudlian raincoat band whose morose, Doors-influenced psychedelia had notched up three hit albums (Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here and Porcupine) and, more surprisingly to die-hard fans, a Top Ten hit single in February 1983, ‘The Cutter’. The alternative pin-up status of luscious-lipped singer Ian McCulloch didn’t harm their mainstream pop progress. In April 1984, their fourth album Ocean Rain, their gentlest affair yet, was a predictable Number Four hit in the UK, but reached a tantalising 84 in the American Billboard charts. A full US tour to consolidate was essential. Along with main support act The Fleshtones, the Bunnymen invited Billy Bragg to join them across America. It was his third and final rock’n’roll ambition.

  In a letter to Billy, Andy Macdonald wrote, ‘Looking forward to the American jaunt where we should GO! and liven the bastards up a bit.’

  Due to Whistle Test preparations, Kershaw didn’t go, but it was a blessing in disguise: Billy did what seemed to be the natural thing and rang Wiggy (whose audio-visual venture had by then folded). ‘This is it!’ Billy enthused to his oldest friend. ‘The American tour! This is what we always dreamt about. I might never do this again, and it will mean so much to me if you’ll come with me.’ Wiggy was planning a conventional holiday after the demise of AVM, but this sounded better. ‘I’ve never had a proper holiday,’ he moans. ‘What should’ve been a holiday in Butlin’s ended up being Bearshanks, and what should’ve been a holiday after my video thing ended up being a tour of America.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without Wiggy,’ says Billy. ‘I’d have felt dreadful writing him postcards telling him all about it, it would’ve been really, really sad.’

  Billy and Wiggy would hook up with Echo & The Bunnymen in Washington DC on 16 August, but before that, Jenner organised a week of self-promotion in New York. The second week in August happened to be the week of the annual New Music Seminar, an industry talking shop where every bigwig and smallwig from every record company in America would descend – a great place for getting noticed, and yet a bloody difficult one. ‘We didn’t have anything but a good record,’ Jenner recalls. ‘No corporate clout. And the only point of going there is to be noticed. How do you get noticed? Make a noise. Someone playing music is bound to cause a stir.’

  Between them, Billy and Jenner cooked up the idea of the Portastack. They simply took the mobile-musician angle to its logical conclusion, and asked Kenny Jones, engineer on Brewing Up, to assemble a PA system that a man could literally wear on his back and carry around – if he were foolhardy enough. It cost £500, was seven-feet-six-inches high, weighed about 35 lbs and it worked. The image of Billy Bragg strapped into this space-age harness with two speakers above him like deelyboppers and a microphone snaking round to his mouth is now an archetypal one: the world’s first electric one-man band, built by madmen, driven by lust for glory. (‘He looks like a busker from outer space,’ noted NME writer Paul Du Noyer.)

  ‘It was a blatant rip-off of Elvis!’ Jenner confesses. (Costello had busked outside the London Hilton in July 1977 during a CBS sales conference in order to scare up a US deal. He was arrested and fined £5 for obstruction. Hats off to Stiff records, then.)

  Billy was not arrested, but then, at biz schmooze-ins like the NMS, selling your own wares is par for the course, and Billy’s Portastack made quite an impact. (Actually, he was at one stage escorted outside the New York Hilton by security and he continued to play on Sixth Avenue, but, as Du Noyer pointed out, he couldn’t get arrested there!) It took some bottle to do it, but Billy had played the Tunnel and breathed in CS gas. He played four consecutive nights on the roof of the Danceteria club, which faced the Empire State Building and afforded a stunning view at night, and his support act was, poetically enough, Seething Wells, whose memory of the run involves ‘screaming abuse at the yanks and generally being booed off stage before Billy came on and won them over’.

  Between gigs and biz-busking, Billy and Wiggy behaved, understandably, like ‘classic tourists’, wandering about, looking up (a dead givea
way in New York) and pointing like idiots at fire hydrants, pretzel vendors and the steam coming out of the manholes. It’s just like Kojak, you know.

  After eight days in New York, suitably acclimatised to being in the mythical big country, the Barking boys joined the Bunnymen for four weeks that shook their world. ‘If you want to see the whole of the United States,’ Billy enthuses, ‘this is the route: Washington, Boston, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Houston, Austin, Salt Lake City, California. Playing 30 minutes a night, for $50 dollars in your hand.’

  Wiggy concurs: ‘It was wow after wow after wow.’

  Echo & The Bunnymen were good to the support act – which is by no means a given on rock tours – Wiggy and Billy instantly clicked with guitarist Will Sergeant, ‘who always knew where the shops were’. Every time they reached a new hotel in a new town, Sergeant would go into his room and empty his entire bag out on the floor like Roy Neary in Close Encounters, then, when they left, scoop it up and put it all back in again.

  ‘Mac [McCulloch] was just … Mac,’ Wiggy remembers. In other words, absolutely icebox cool, sunglasses after dark, and oozing Scouse sarcasm. Mac’s favourite joke was asking, ‘Can I have a ciggy, Wiggy?’

  When offered their first Budweiser from the tour bus fridge, Wiggy and Billy politely refused, then later politely gave in. Wiggy admits he developed his taste for the old rock’n’roll mouthwash on that tour, namely Jack Daniel’s whiskey (‘Not a letdown’).