It was an education. ‘All my politics I’ve had to learn,’ Billy says. From race in Barking, through class in the army, to sexism in later life – which he identifies as ‘the hardest lesson to learn for a working-class boy. Nobody’s born politically correct. When do you pick it up? When you leave school? No. I was anti-racist when I left school but at the same time I was quite nationalistic. I had yet to learn the politics and language of multiculturalism – and I learnt it listening to music.’
Billy didn’t vote in the May 1979 general election because, even though he’d never liked the Heath government (all those power cuts), he found himself enamoured with neither party when it came to putting his first cross in the box. In mitigation, he was also living in Oundle at the time, about as far away from the barricades as you could get, but nonetheless he couldn’t see any difference between Labour leader Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher: ‘I believed that any party that supported or didn’t dismantle the welfare state must be by definition socialist, or give tacit approval to socialism. Quite visionary, I suppose. In 1979 I thought of myself as an anarchist with a small “a”.’
By the time of the miners’ strike, Billy detected ‘a drift back to the Dark Ages’, and in an instant, was passive no more. ‘I was in the right place at the right time.’
Britain’s trade unions did not have a good 1980s, their membership falling from thirteen million in 1980 to nine million by 1987. But the miners’ strike was not just about union rights, it was about civil liberties, peaceful protest and the dignity of labour. After RAR, the ANL and CND, the NUM became a worthy cause for the NME, which, as Billy puts it, ‘was trying to be a bit more than a music journal under Spencer’.
Neil Spencer says, of the miners’ strike, ‘It didn’t just energise the NME, it energised the entire music industry. And I don’t think for a moment you could’ve had Live Aid if you hadn’t first had the more hardcore political battles.’
With its fistful of SWP-influenced journalists, the NME came into its own in 1984, truly coming out of its ‘head-up-its-own-arsehole period’ (Billy’s allusion to the florid, situationist prose sculpted by writers like Ian Penman, Paul Morley and Barney Hoskyns who characterised the arty new romantic years). Suddenly, it was all Billy Bragg, The Redskins, Easterhouse and Paul Weller. ‘It was up to us to turn out and do stuff,’ Billy says. ‘And the NME really helped to promote and create an atmosphere in which to talk about politics.’
On 9 October, Billy played a miners’ benefit approximately 10,000 light years away from the coal-face, at the trendy Wag Club in London’s Wardour Street. It was an ad hoc affair, with Billy performing on a stage made from a row of plastic seats, his amp on the seat beside, wobbling throughout. Rather than bring it all back home, it took the strike far away from home, but every penny counts. The struggle continued, but so did the unstoppable march of commerce. Billy had a second album coming out. In October, he embarked upon his first ever headlining tour with The Hank Wangford Band and crazed Japanese cabaret-pop troupe The Frank Chickens. On 12 October 1984, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg was released.
Incidentally, Steven Wells believes he gave Billy the album title: ‘He’s never thanked me for it. It was my idea. Brewing up is not only a familiar-sounding British teamaking thing, it’s also a reference to tanks. When a tank is hit by an anti-tank missile, blows up, and cooks the crew alive, the tank is said to be “brewing up”.’
Recorded in just ten days, it featured all the songs that didn’t make it on to Life’s A Riot, which is why it forms such a neat companion to the first album, and why it bears no reflection of the miners’ strike. ‘Between The Wars’, Billy’s definitive paean to union rights, had already been written when Brewing Up was recorded, but he didn’t have the confidence to put it on. His recent experience at the pits vindicated the song’s sentiment and style, where, played live, it had very strong resonance.
The most politically charged tracks on Brewing Up are ‘Island Of No Return’ and ‘Like Soldiers Do’, his response to the Falklands War and his time in the army, while ‘It Says Here’ attacks the Tory press (‘where politics mix with bingo and tits in a money and numbers game’). The rest are love songs, typically forlorn and gloomy in sentiment, like ‘Love Gets Dangerous’ (‘Lust is a cancer, love is a vice’) and ‘St Swithin’s Day’ (‘And the times that we all hoped would last/Like a train they have gone by so fast’), but sung over sweet, melancholy tunes. ‘The Myth Of Trust’ contains the disturbing image of ‘dancing disgusting and flushing our babies down the drain’, showing that Billy Bragg was not afraid to talk about sex either.
In the NME’s review, an erudite Danny Kelly astutely picked up on Billy’s ‘ability as a chronicler of the heart’s troubled voyage’, noting that Brewing Up was split equally between ‘overtly political outbursts and excruciatingly personal (and no less political) love songs’. He compared Billy favourably to Elvis Costello and The Jam (‘circa “David Watts”’), and correctly identified ‘The Saturday Boy’ as his best song to date (‘Sheer genius,’ concurred Bill Black in his four-and-a-half star review in Sounds).
‘The Saturday Boy’ abides today as one of Billy Bragg’s most popular tunes. It is autobiographical, simple, heart tugging, funny and, on record, expertly embellished with a medieval-sounding trumpet part by Dave Woodhead that takes it to a new place. With double the conventional number of instruments, it’s virtually a production number in the context of Brewing Up, but it’s the poetic sentiment that fixes it in people’s hearts:
I’ll never forget the first day I met her
That September morning was clear and fresh
The way she spoke and laughed at my jokes
And the way she rubbed herself against the edge of my desk
It is the story of Kim, who helped Billy fail his O Levels, and the very act of writing a song about a schoolboy romance once again separated Billy from the mid-80s pop crowd, who were, at that time, singing about wild boys sticking together, careless whispers, smooth operators, and war being stupid. There is nothing morally superior in singing the line ‘And we’d sit together in double History twice a week’ as opposed to ‘We’ll always be together, together in electric dreams’ – indeed, the Giorgio Moroder & Phil Oakey song from which the second line is taken is a cracking electro-pop singalong – but Billy’s honesty was certainly refreshing. His best lyrics could happily be read as poems, and the occasional line could have been uttered by Oscar Wilde: ‘Some people say love is blind, but I think that’s just a bit short-sighted.’ References to Kipling, ‘Elizabethan girls’ and the Battle of Agincourt add to the sophistication. The line in ‘The Saturday Boy’, ‘And la la la la la la means I love you’ is a reference to The Delfonics song ‘La La Means I Love You’. All this from a performer best known, critics of his singing might say, for going round barking.
Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin was more critical of Brewing Up, mentioning ‘the odd makeweight track’ and ‘forgettable nonsense’, suggesting that the government should make it illegal for Billy to fall in love (‘Slush doesn’t become him’). It entered the chart at Number Sixteen and stuck around for a total of 21 weeks. Not bad for a record unfanfared by singles and unlubricated by a big showbiz launch party (Go! Discs sent out a 15p Luncheon Voucher with press copies of the album as a Launch The LP In The Privacy Of Your Own Home Kit: ‘Simply take the voucher to your local cafe, trade it in for a cup of tea, take the cuppa home and put the album on the deck!’).
Meanwhile, out there in the world of retail, trouble was brewing. In line with Billy and PJ’s commando raid on capitalism, and appropriate to Go! Discs’ cheap’n’cheerful family image, Brewing Up had ‘Pay no more than £3.99’ printed on its sleeve. This did not make record shops very happy, a gripe personified by a letter to Chrysalis, who distributed the album, from a director of Our Price plc in London:
‘The industry decided some time ago to abolish recommended retail prices and to let the marketplace decide on pricing albums. It is not p
ossible to have your cake and eat it. There either is a recommended retail price or there is not, and it is a dangerous game for an artist to insist along the lines that Billy Bragg is trying to do. I have to inform you that it is likely that as soon as the album drops out of the Our Price chart we will delete it from our shops and will not stock it until the offending price printed on the sleeve is removed.
‘I think progress has been made in educating customers that £4.49–£4.99 is good value for chart albums. It is doing nobody any favours for customers to start seeing £3.99 chart albums being displayed.’
An enlightening plea, and one that strengthened Billy and PJ’s resolve. It is evident from the letter that Billy’s built-in price-cut ploy is only a problem because it is a chart album (i.e. one that Our Price would be mad not to stock), and that made his position even more precious. Here was a chart act kicking up dust in the world of record retail, not some obscure anarchist selling singles off a trestle table in a church hall. The Our Price letter claims that £3.99-an-album is ‘doing nobody any favours’ – what about the record buyer who has been so successfully ‘educated’ to pay a fiver for a chart album?
To his great satisfaction, Billy was playing ‘a dangerous game’.
Bête noire of Britain’s vinyl emporia he may have been, but the so-called ‘Hanks’n’Franks’ tour whipped up a lot of praise from the press. In the Guardian, William Leith spoke of Billy’s ‘economy of movement and precision timing. He knows exactly how to tell a story or deliver a one-liner, neither gauchely self-important nor embarrassed.’ One Jimmy Mack in Sounds joked, ‘Gone are the days when Billy Bragg used to outnumber his audience!’ Although the evening’s entertainment involved the Wangford Band accompanying Billy for a hoedown of ‘A13’, and all three acts congregating on stage for a ropey dance routine to the Franks’ rendition of ‘Fujiama Mama’, most reviewers saw this as proof that, as Melody Maker’s Ted Mico stated, ‘Billy Bragg is better off solo.’ So there.
In December, he was back out on his own, a month-long campaign through Europe with Kershaw/PJ in the driving seat, talking politics and singing out loud: Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, and on into Scandinavia. A classic example of the Billy Bragg work-work-work ethic came in France between Metz and Paris, where, on a supposed day off, Billy and Kershaw travelled back to Berlin for a radio appearance.
There’s no airport in Metz, so a geezer they’d met from a puppet theatre gave them a lift over the border into Germany to the nearest airport for an 8 a.m. flight (the puppeteer had never been to Germany before, but there’s a first time for everything and being around Billy Bragg usually makes it happen – it was the first time they’d been driven by a puppeteer). Billy and Kershaw boarded a worryingly tiny plane on what turned out to be the fortieth anniversary of Glenn Miller’s death (‘That cheered me up no end,’ recalls the frequent flyer). They were scheduled to change planes at Frankfurt, but it was fogbound, which meant flying round and round in circles for a bit, making them late for their connection. They ran between terminals and made the flight, only to discover that their bags and the guitars hadn’t arrived in Berlin. Kershaw agreed to stay at the airport and wait, while Billy flew ahead to Berlin, where he did the gig at the radio station on borrowed equipment (‘One song! One take! That’s it. I don’t even know if it was ever broadcast’).
Reunited with Kershaw in Berlin, they bumped into the Leeds band Serious Drinking, accompanied by fanzine writer James Brown (years later he became the editor of Loaded and then GQ). They were on the guest list at the Serious Drinking gig, and, aptly enough, drowned their sorrows – not an act conducive with getting up the next morning at the crack of dawn in order to get back to Paris. They flew back to Frankfurt, circled around it a few times because it was still fogbound, and when they finally got back to Paris, the gear was missing again. This is a pretty standard slice of on-the-road madness that illustrates the relentless nature of the Billy Bragg touring-promotion treadmill and, when it came to the crunch, just how adaptable and patient he was. (It would’ve been perfectly acceptable to cancel the Berlin radio slot due to unforeseen circumstances, but that was neither the Bragg nor the Jenner ethos.) In the frustrating event, Billy almost threw a tantrum – he certainly stomped back to the hotel to sulk, and describes he and Kershaw being ‘at each other’s throats’ by the end of it (‘He accused me of being a pop star, which hurt me the most’). Jenner, with the advantage of having only just arrived from London, kept his cool, mediated, and went off to find the equipment.
The money was coming in. (Billy later happily admitted to Smash Hits that he was now earning the same in one night as he was per annum at Overseas Containers Ltd, ‘an achievement to be proud of’.) Among all the other worthy causes, there had to be, as he put it, ‘a few Billy Bragg benefits’. At the end of 1983, Billy describes his position as ‘scraping by. By the end of 1984, I was laughing. I had a career, I had a job.’
Money, money everywhere, but nothing much to spend it on. Touring costs barely registered on a calculator. They weren’t buying food or drink, and accommodation, however spartan, was laid on. And as we have seen, Billy’s rock’n’roll appetite was modest, to say the least. ‘Money, to me, is secondary to health and well-being,’ he explains, in reference to his dad’s death. ‘That is the thing to focus on and worry about. As such, I’ve never been inspired to do things for money. I’m happy to see it in the bank. I wouldn’t give it all away, but I’m happy with the bit I’ve got. If we do really well on a tour, everybody should get a little squirt. I never have to look at the bottom line, Pete does that – even when I was first going out. I’ve been very, very privileged in that sense.’
Back at Go! Mansions, affairs were being put in order, thanks to new director Juliet Macdonald. To Andy’s irrepressible enthusiasm, Juliet brought a wealth of hard-bitten experience from the shitty end of the music-biz stick. Chiswick, Step Forward, Wayne County, Toyah, 2-Tone, she’d done her time, and became what Billy and PJ saw as a stabilising influence. She earned the nickname Mrs Money-Trousers, which stuck.
‘Finally, there was somebody at Go! Discs who knew how to run a record company,’ says Billy. ‘Andy was making it up as he went along. Juliet was a realist, she knew you had to pay VAT bills, and she had some great connections. She’d toured America while I was still farting about with Riff Raff! Andy’s a hirer, but not much of a firer. She cut away the dead wood. He had the energy and vision, she had the tools.
‘For instance, we’d sold a lot of copies of Spy Vs Spy, but fuck knows how or why. Juliet knew how or why.’
At the end of 1984, Brewing Up came sixth in NME’s Vinyl Finals (a chart that actually did justice to the overused description ‘eclectic’: Bobby Womack’s Poet II came first, followed by Bruce Springsteen, Special AKA, Womack & Womack and Scott Walker). It was picked as one of the year’s best albums by the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times.
Including weddings, but not Portastack work, Billy had logged a staggering 156 gigs that year, some of which had amassed money for people less fortunate than himself.
The country spent New Year singing along to Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, raising cash for the Ethiopian famine victims. The charity record was born. It seemed that, in pop music, everybody was waiving royalties and putting money in collection tins in a huge wave of guilt for spending all that cash on making videos on yachts. (Even the record shops donated their profits from Band Aid – in a year when Billy Bragg had robbed them of so much!) Billy looks back on 1984 as His Year, and sees 1985 as one long ‘knock-on effect’.
In January, Kirsty MacColl took Billy’s ‘A New England’ into the Top Ten. Produced by her husband Steve Lilywhite with full band backing, it showed just how versatile and populist a song it was. It was the first time he’d been covered by another artist. And, as he was fond of pointing out, very few of the 200,000-odd people who bought ‘A New England’ knew or cared that it was a Billy Bragg original – they just dug Kirtsy’s pleasing, f
olksy lilt. It was a good moment for Billy, as he saw Kirsty as a like-minded soul (she’d been on Chiswick when Riff Raff were), and the two would collaborate properly later. One misguided ingrate going by the pseudonym of Tippex from Cardiff, wrote to the NME to vent his/her spleen: ‘Ironic isn’t it? That to get played on daytime Radio Uno you have to write a brilliant song and get it absolutely ruined by some pregnant, middle-aged, middle of the road pop singer.’ That week’s letters editor, David Swift, sent Tippex away with a flea in his/her ear: ‘Go away clothears, we rate it, as Billy does, a great version.’ There will always be purists, and they will always try to ruin the party.
In February, Billy went back to the States and did his first headline dates at various collegiate venues, racking up quite a bit of local press along the way, and bringing home about 60 vinyl albums (mostly folk, blues and gospel) to add to the 50 or so he’d purchased on the Bunnymen trip. Travel was broadening his record collection.
On 3 March 1985, the miners’ strike finally ended. Delegates of the NUM voted 98 to 91 to call it off, having watched thousands of miners drift back into work. By February, only 51 per cent remained on the picket lines. Mrs Thatcher called it ‘a famous victory’. A year later, 36 collieries had been closed, as if to catch up on the lost year. It was a depressing outcome, but, as Seumas Milne concludes in his book The Enemy Within: ‘For those who actually took part, along with millions of their supporters in Britain and abroad, it was a principled – even heroic – stand, which directly confronted the Thatcher administration and its battery of anti-democratic trade union legislation in a way that no other force in the country was prepared or able to do.’
Billy Bragg Page 20
