Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  At the closing gig of the Berlin festival, during soundcheck, Billy saw a young man in a tracksuit with a walkie talkie, clearly a secret policeman. He was there to see Wolter, who was obliged by his position to pass on what the Western visitors in jeans had talked about with the pastor. ‘Jorg was very straightforward with us,’ Billy explains. ‘He put his livelihood on the line by making it perfectly clear that he had an ambiguous relationship with his employers, the State.’

  The atmosphere was wary, tense and polite, and you could cut it with a knife – and that was precisely what Billy and PJ wished to do. Even casual contact was State-corralled into so-called friendship meetings. But Billy desperately wanted to meet these people who were apparently intent on massacring everybody in Britain and Western Europe – he wanted to see the reds of their eyes. At a friendship meeting with some Actual Russians, a woman from their delegation stood up and sang a beautiful gypsy song. Billy replied with a rendition of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (a Last Night Of The Proms staple that he is ever keen to reclaim as a socialist anthem – don’t get him started on it). Formalities over, they were entitled to go and have a beer, which Billy found fascinating. The 27th Congress of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union had just happened, and Mikhail Gorbachev, a Kinnock-like whippersnapper (54) in the leader’s chair, had mentioned perestroika and glasnost for the first time. (These buzzwords were not popular with East German leader Erich Honecker, a crooked fellow who came to represent the old communist regime as progress began its unstoppable march through the latter 1980s.)

  After the festival, a tour comprising the ‘best of the fest’ took off around other parts of East Germany. Billy was honoured if bemused to be selected, along with Leytonstone’s honorary Irishman John Faulkner, some polite East German middle-aged musos (more Lennon than Lenin: the highlight of their set was ‘Imagine’) and Amandla, an energetic African National Congress dance troupe. Hoyerswerda, Magdeburg, Potsdam, Neubrandenburg, Rostok, Leipzig … at each gig, the Soviet Army would file in at the back, one officer and twenty conscripts who were bored shitless with East Germany (no money, no vodka). These were the very individuals who, if second-hand American propaganda was to be believed, were going to invade our country. Useful contact was near impossible, but Wolter spoke a little Russian, and Billy managed to hand out some pre-recorded tapes to the squaddies (donated by Roy Carr, who coordinated NME’s cassette series, and the Rough Trade shop).

  It was the strangest trip of Billy’s life, but one he felt privileged to have made. He and PJ had made some rum contacts, they’d seen Bertolt Brecht’s grave, hung out with punks, and been shown back to one university lecturer’s flat who hid the works of Leon Trotsky in his ‘poison cabinet’.

  * * *

  The GLC, equally poisonous to the Tories, said farewell on 31 March, with a suitably expansive, lively, free concert. There were speeches, fireworks and three stages: Billy Bragg, Eddy Grant, Latin Quarter, Bernie Grant and a shower of glitter over a massed chant of ‘Maggie out!’ Ken Livingstone promised, ‘We’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to do it again’, and, as I write, it’s a very real possibility …

  While Billy was busy recording his difficult third LP at North London’s Livingston Studios behind Wood Green shopping centre, April’s Folk Roots magazine published its annual Readers Poll. If anyone needed proof that ‘Between The Wars’ had opened up Billy’s appeal, there it was. Number Two Best Songwriter (behind only the godfather, Richard Thompson); Number One Best Single Of 1985; Number One Best New Song; and Number Four Best New Arrangement (for ‘The World Turned Upside Down’).

  If this unprecedented folk acceptance saw Billy move away from NME dependence, the album he was recording with Smiths producer John Porter would help establish him as more than just a live phenomenon. ‘It was my first properly realised album,’ he says. Without throwing the baby out with the bath water, he made concessions to musicality, with additional musicians on some tracks (organ, percussion, bass, slide guitar, mandolin) and a much longer recording time. Plus, the new songs had all been written post-fame, and were affected by the fallout of the miners’ strike (witness the blunt message of ‘There Is Power In A Union’).

  The tube ride was lengthy enough for Billy to read John Irving’s The World According To Garp from cover to cover during the recording.

  On 3 June, Billy found himself under the curtain again, this time in the USSR itself. It seemed like such an impossible feat, but it’s all about contacts – and not the ones you make through the record company promotions departments. Billy was playing a couple of gigs in Helsinki, and, by talking to the right people in the Finnish Communist Party, found himself on the train to Leningrad’s Finland Station (the same route Lenin took when he returned to Russia in 1917). To his disappointment, there was no committee at the other end, just Art Troitsky, the venerable dean of Russian rock critics. If you leave rock’n’roll’s beaten track, you mustn’t expect too high a degree of organisation.

  For Billy, it was like his first day in New York (Jenner was pretty knocked out, too). Troitsky became their guide and interpreter for the day, during which they met Afrika, a punk artist who, out of necessity, used plastic tablecloths for canvasses, and whose studio was behind the secret police headquarters (‘It would be better if you don’t speak English now,’ Troitsky advised them, as they went inside, mindful of attracting the wrong kind of attention).

  The gig took place in a lecture theatre, with Billy standing behind a lecturn and, inevitably, taking questions from the floor afterwards. One middle-aged man, obviously a plant, asked, ‘What do you think of perestroika?’ Billy expressed his guarded enthusiasm. Troitsky translated. Billy was the centre of attention – until, that is, they discovered that Jenner had managed Pink Floyd: ‘That was it, no one wanted to talk to me any more. I was knocked over in the rush.’

  All told, it whetted Billy’s appetite for later Russian invasions.

  In July, Go! Discs released ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ as a single (in return for ‘Days Like These’ at Christmas). It went to 29, which, although lower than ‘Between The Wars’, did wonders for preconceptions about Billy Bragg. It is a wonderfully sad song that Billy remembers playing on the first Red Wedge tour – Weller said to him, ‘Is that about Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops? I thought you were a folk musician!’ (Billy often elicited reactions like this from Weller, who saw Billy only in black and white – i.e. mostly white.)

  No. 1 magazine called Billy ‘The Reluctant Pop Star’. Record Mirror recognised him as ‘just an old soul boy from Barking’ and headlined their cover story ‘Socialists Cry As Well’. This was the impact of ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’, written on a cross-channel ferry to stop Kershaw talking to him (‘That’s why the second verse is four bars longer than the first, because I didn’t have my guitar with me’).

  On 22 September, Billy consolidated this new image as a sensitive soul with a whole album of the stuff – or so it seemed. Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, named after a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, went on sale for the astronomical sum of £4.49, and this time, having been trailed like normal albums by a single (and advertised heavily by Go! Discs), it entered the chart in the Top Ten. If convention had crept into the marketing, the record itself still sounded like a fanfare from an uncommon man.

  It opens emblematically with a beautiful love song, ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’, characterised by Johnny Marr’s shimmering guitarwash, and definitely improved by guitar overdubs and backing vocals by Kirsty MacColl. At its heart, it is pure Old Billy (troubled relationship, resistance to domestic convention, football joke). Elsewhere, trumpet and flugelhorn from Dave Woodhead double the melancholy of ‘The Marriage’, cockney piano from Kenny Craddock jangles through ‘Honey, I’m A Big Boy Now’, and – gasp! – ‘assorted percussion’ and something fast approaching a full band turn ‘The Warmest Room’ from a kitchen-sink drama into an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drama. The overtly political songs, ‘There Is Power In A Union’ an
d ‘Ideology’ are executed in more utilitarian stand-up style. There are people who still consider Taxman to be Billy Bragg’s greatest work, the author of this book included. It is an ‘ideological cuddle’, to lift a phrase from ‘Greetings’.

  Critically, Taxman received many happy returns. Lucy O’Brien declared it ‘prosaic and compact’ in the NME, calculating that it only cost 37.4p a song; Paul Du Noyer, in the first issue of adult-oriented Q magazine, put him on a pedestal with Elvis Costello, awarding him four out of five Q stars (‘He was worth building the A13 for’); and the ubiquitous Colin Irwin in Melody Maker summed up, ‘He can make you laugh. He can make you cry. He can make you choke with rage. Billy Bragg, the complete song and dance man.’ Which was nice.

  In October, off the back of another tour of West Germany – Cologne, Hamburg, Bochum, now as familiar to Billy as Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester – he nipped back over to the USSR to take part in the snappily titled Festival Of Song In The Struggle For Peace at Kiev. It had been six months since the world’s worst peacetime nuclear disaster at nearby Chernobyl, but Glasgow Rangers FC had recently played there and they looked all right. Billy reassured himself that to get irradiated you’d have to get into the food chain. They took their own Marmite.

  Getting back from Kiev for a show in West Berlin turned into one of those Days That Go On For Ever: no direct flight to East Berlin; 6 a.m. connecting flight to Moscow on the day of the gig; all passengers and their luggage put on a weighbridge before boarding the world’s shakiest aircraft; ‘two hours of Aeroflot hell’ with Wiggy in a draught next to the emergency exit; the pilot clearing chunks of ice out of the frozen wing-flaps when back on the ground; friendship meeting in Moscow; whirlwind tour of the city; another huge airport; surrendering their rubles and thus being unable to eat at the deserted airport restaurant; finding a coffee bar that takes dollars with a working cappuccino machine but no coffee to put in it; being rounded up by a bloke with a clipboard (‘You must come now!’) and led through the also-deserted terminal to a plane, mysteriously full of people; PJ being aggravatingly moved from his seat by the cabin crew during take-off; arriving just outside East Berlin where the West German promoter is supposed to pick them up in a van and take them to the venue, but because the airport is outside East Berlin, he can’t get to it; taxi to Checkpoint Charlie with just two hours to showtime, but they are unable to pass through due to a lack of relevant documentation; Jorg Wolter, who met them at the airport, pulls some bureaucratic strings at the Cultural Ministry; one phone call later and the guard stamps their papers … the three men then push the amp through Checkpoint Charlie and hail the final taxi. They made the gig. ‘It was a day and a half,’ recalls Billy, exhausted at the memory. ‘And it’s still going on somewhere.’

  Whenever things went wrong on tour, Wiggy would say that ‘it’s all gone a bit Soviet’.

  Don’t sit on the fence. Cut it!

  Snowball Campaign slogan

  Snowball was an East Anglian anti-nuclear organisation that demanded that the British government voted in favour of multilateral disarmament in the UN, regardless of how the USA voted. Optimism was in no short supply among those who believed we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Billy lent his celebrity support to their CND-endorsed ‘mass non-violent open civil disobedience’ on 2 November in Norwich, where the plan was to cut the fence surrounding a nuclear bunker at Bawburgh.

  It got him arrested again. He later pleaded not guilty to criminal damage but was charged anyway. Wasn’t this the bloke who now wrote love songs?

  At the end of 1986, The Housemartins reached Number One with an a cappella version of the Isley Brothers’ ‘Caravan Of Love’, provoking a tabloid feeding frenzy, mostly from the Sun (the band were outspoken in their condemnation of Rupert Murdoch’s union-busting News International empire). In January ’87, the Sun ‘revealed’ that two of The Housemartins were gay (still very much a tabloid crime in those dark days), and only one of them was working class and born in Hull. The first count was simply untrue (The Housemartins were heterosexual but pro-gay rights, though the story distressed their families), the second irrelevant. But the whole sorry episode, which set the self-destruct timer for The Housemartins, taught Billy some first-hand lessons about the price of fame. He remembers sitting in reception at Harlech Television in Cardiff while the commissionaire read the Sun’s gay exposé – vindicated, he said, ‘There always was something a bit strange about them.’ It put Billy off singles even more.

  1987 was Election Year, and a big one for Red Wedge. Although the pragmatic Neil Spencer admits today, ‘I never ever thought we could win’, Labour and its supporters rode high on a wave of hope.

  In Wales, on a small Welsh tour – Wrexham, Aberdare, Swansea, Barry, Newport – Billy saw the downside of Labour in power, the ‘dead hand of old-style committee-based municipal socialism’ making it impossible for the local youth to express themselves via clubs or gigs. It was a frustrating week, with a lot of friction between the young punters and local MPs and councillors.

  Like a walking embodiment of his own Taxman album, Billy was half-politics, half-romance throughout 1987, having fallen ‘stupidly, madly, obsessively in love’ with a girl called Mary Bollingbroke from Clapham. Talk to Jenner or Tiny or Porky or the Macdonalds about 1987, and they don’t say ‘election year’, they swallow hard and roll their eyes and say ‘Mary’.

  As a brief aside, on 1 February, Billy played the brilliantly named Cheese Pavilion at Bath & Wells Showground in Shepton Mallet. Worth noting, as it’s referred to in his 1988 anthem ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards’ (‘In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear/Is the sound of people stacking chairs/And mopping up spilt beer’) – and not a lot of people know that it’s a real place. Back to the heartache …

  Dunedin in New Zealand is geographically the furthest gig in the world – there is only really one more town of note, Invercargill, before you find yourself on a boat to the South Pole, and there’s no gig in Invercargill. It’s so far south, it looks like the North of Scotland. Hence, being in Dunedin when you’re head over heels with a girl called Mary is wrong – even when your album’s Top Five in New Zealand. ‘I was feeling a long, long, long, long way from everybody I cared about,’ Billy remembers. ‘I could feel the whole of Africa and Eurasia between me and my loved ones. That was a tour memorable for the size of its telephone bill.’

  Billy met Mary in November ’86. They ran away together for his court appearance in Norwich after the Snowball arrest. From then on, it was no peace, lots of love, and misunderstanding all the way: shouting matches, depression, Mary joining Billy on tour only to disappear, ‘playing dreadful games with each other – love-me-hate-me games’. A whole swathe of songs would come out of the rocky relationship, but Billy sums it up best for those of us who weren’t there with a line in ‘Life With The Lions’: ‘I hate the arsehole I become every time I’m with you.’

  Virtually every song on Billy’s next album Workers Playtime (recorded later that year) concerned his and Mary’s stormy relationship. ‘It was like being on a switchback ride,’ he says. ‘At one point of total madness, we accidentally got engaged. I bought her a ring, and she thought I was asking her to marry me. We went to Norwich to stay with her brother, and by the time we got there, we were engaged. Once word got out to our mums, that was it. We both knew it was mad.’

  It would have been a fractious affair anyway, but with Billy away almost all the time, the angles became more acute, the problems less resolved, and every crisis turned into a drama. Billy knows what a pain he must’ve become to those around him, so used to dealing with Easygoing Bill (‘It was a pain in the arse for everybody’) – suddenly, he didn’t relish being away, he felt sorry for himself.

  With the luxury of hindsight, Billy identifies the possible root cause of all the madness: in December ’87, he was going to turn 30. Whether Mary really was a symptom of Billy’s pre-mid-life paranoia, or a frantic need to find continuity in
his rootless lifestyle, it threatened to take his eye off the ball, in much the same way that Kim had innocently wrecked his O Levels. And there was a general election coming. His country needed him!

  Red Wedge had mobilised themselves. They’d produced a suitably cool-looking manifesto, Move On Up! (all woodcuts and Style Council typography, with a foreword by Kinnock, drawing on Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’: ‘To be young should be very heaven. Too often for too many, it’s very hell’), and organised a national tour to climax on election night, 11 June. Billy dutifully cancelled some Japanese dates and hopped aboard. All the gang were there, plus Lloyd Cole, The The, Captain Sensible and The Blow Monkeys, who’d released an album full of well-dressed, anti-Thatcher funk in April called She Was Only A Grocer’s Daughter. Their song titles mirrored The Style Council’s for sloganising: ‘How Long Can A Bad Thing Last’, ‘Checking Out’ and ‘(Celebrate) The Day After You’ – which, as a single, was banned from Radio 1 during the election run-up. It proves just how threatening a group of men in white trousers could be in 1987.

  The Red Wedge Comedy Tour crossed the country concurrently, exploiting the left-wing stand-up boom with performers like Ben Elton, Lenny Henry, Harry Enfield and Mark Miwurdz. Billy, naturally enough, joined the bill on some nights. Comedian Jenny Lecoat recalls that Billy seemed much happier hanging out with them than the musicians. Less comparing of loafers, presumably. True Colours, a Red Wedge visual Arts Show, ran at the Citizens Gallery in Woolwich.