A smattering of applause. The cameras moved away. Once Billy was offstage, he was told in no uncertain terms, ‘You will never play in East Berlin again.’ And that was that.
‘Although they didn’t know it at the time, they were right,’ Billy says. ‘Because the next time I came back, there wasn’t an East Berlin to play.
‘But at the time, I felt that I’d failed all those people I’d had contact with. I was yet another thing they weren’t allowed to do.’
Australia and New Zealand saw Cara Tivey back in the saddle: ‘If I can do that, I can do anything,’ she reasoned. George flew to Sydney aged three months. It was good for everybody to have him there, and anyway, as Billy says, ‘Having a baby on the road’s not that different from having a rhythm section.’
After a couple of dates in Japan, Billy, PJ and Sumi went to Shanghai and on to Beijing in China – but as sightseers not a rock’n’roll touring party. ‘It was really groovy,’ Billy enthuses. ‘Shanghai was like a big Dixons, but without the variety.’ History was brewing up the very weekend they were in Beijing: on 15 April, the liberal reformer and former Communist Party head Hu Yaobang died. A week later, on 22 April, his funeral was marked by a 100,000-strong demonstration by students, who unfurled a huge banner saying ‘China’s soul! Forever remember Comrade Hu Yaobang!’ The next two months saw hunger strikes, martial law and the eventual massacre of 2,600 students by the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square.
All Billy, PJ and Sumi knew of it was the difficulty they experienced as they drove to the airport. PJ’s brother, a Sinologist living in Canberra, had sorted out some Chinese contacts for them through the Australian cultural attaché. After Tiananmen Square, every single contact they’d made disappeared.
Billy and PJ had found a stall in Beijing selling cool Chairman Mao badges and bought the lot for $110. It was Mao who had initiated the original Great Leap Forward in 1958, and look where it had got them. It’s not enough to buy badges in days like these.
12. STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF
A bit of business, 1989–1992
It waved above our infant might
When all ahead seemed dark as night
It witnessed many a deed and vow
We must not change its colour now
‘The Red Flag’
PUTTING ROMANCE TO one side, Billy has always been good at friendship. Quite apart from his lifelong pact with Wiggy, he keeps in touch with his cousins and the rest of his family, knows exactly where Ricey and Robert Handley are, has seen Oscar and Fionn O’Lochlainn’s band play live, and maintains a rewarding, occasionally long-distance relationship with Brenda and Joe. In Peter Jenner, he’s had the same manager since 1983, and from the day Tiny Fennimore joined Go! Discs she became a constant ally (she is his personal assistant today, and chuffed to count him as a friend of the family). In 1988, when Andy and Juliet Macdonald had their son, Jamie, they asked Billy to be godfather – not for sentimental reasons, but because he was precisely the sort of bloke who would be there for Jamie. They were spot on. It is not putting him on too much of a pedestal to say that Billy Bragg is a constant in an increasingly unpredictable world. Volkswagen cars look unreliable in comparison.
Which is precisely why he decided it was time to terminate his relationship with Go! Discs after Workers Playtime.
Five years, four albums, five singles, many a deed and vow. It had been a pleasure, but 1988 had been … different. At the end of 1987, Go! Discs’ hard-fought distribution deal with Chrysalis expired, and a much more momentous contract with PolyGram was signed. PolyGram, 75 per cent owned by the Dutch electronics giant Philips, was in the process of becoming one of the biggest record companies in the world (in 1989, they bought A&M for £300 million and Island for £200 million). PolyGram’s deal with Go! was more than just marketing and distribution – they bought 49 per cent of the shares. This provided a welcome influx of cash (hence the staff expansion), and, for Macdonald, more muscle overseas. Looking back, he says it was ‘a deal borne of necessity’. Maybe so, but it seriously queered his pitch with Billy and Jenner.
Up to that point, it had all been fun and games, a contract-without-contracts on Billy and Sincere’s terms: no extortionate advances, just percentage points on sales and the eventual rights. They’d never signed for more than one album at a time, and yet remained loyal. Both sides had made concessions – Macdonald got his singles, Billy got his price ceilings – and, looking at the balance sheets and the press-cuttings file, it had worked in everybody’s favour. But the PolyGram deal moved the goal posts.
Andy Macdonald had given Billy a ten per cent share in Go! Discs early on when, frankly, it wasn’t worth much – it was his well-intentioned way of counting Billy in when there wasn’t a lot of spare cash floating about. Billy had resisted (‘I’m not into stocks and shares’), but was eventually wooed by Macdonald’s commitment to running Go! like a co-operative – everybody gets a piece. At the time, it was no more than a piece of paper to Billy – it didn’t have any meaning. However, when 49 per cent of the company was sold to PolyGram, Billy’s stake became crucial: he had to sell half his shares in order not to stymie the deal. ‘I cashed in my chips,’ he says, ‘and made a tidy sum, the largest amount of money I’d ever got in a single payment, but I didn’t feel like it was my money. I hadn’t earned it.’
Out of the remaining 51 per cent, Andy Macdonald owned 41 per cent, Juliet five per cent, and Billy now had five per cent. This situation furrowed his moral brow – his shares were now the decider in any future dispute: ‘The shares became an issue and I thought it was really out of order dragging me into all this. It turned our friendship into a purely business relationship. It was another thing I didn’t need. I felt that it was the first time commerce had come before art.’
There is no doubt about it, things were never the same again after the shares issue. It left a sour taste in Billy’s mouth; it went against everything he held dear about his relationship with Go! Discs and with Macdonald: ‘It made me realise that Go! Discs was a business, and Andy was a businessman rather than a co-conspirator.’
It was prickly for Pete Jenner too, who’d had his fill of big record companies and had no desire to work for PolyGram again. Plus, with Billy’s interests at heart, he recognised a can of worms when he saw one. Jenner today is outspoken on the matter: ‘We were furious. I told Andy, Don’t give Billy shares! Bigger royalties, fine, but shares have a life of their own. It’s one of those things people do to tie you in. Billy felt Andy had sold him to PolyGram, and furthermore, had assumed Billy would be happy about it provided he gave him enough money, which really insulted him. There were a lot of bad vibes.’
In the event, an unprecedented redistribution of wealth put Billy’s mind at ease. He came up with a plan whereby he donated the rest of his shares to the staff of Go! Discs by way of a trust. That way, he didn’t own them any more, and, should Go! Discs ever be sold off or shut down, anyone who’d worked for the company for two years would benefit when the trust shares were sold. ‘It allowed me to make decisions about my career that weren’t based on my shareholding with the record company I was signed to,’ Billy explains. ‘I know it sounds ungrateful to Andy and Juliet, but it was a conflict of interests.’
Andy Macdonald defends the PolyGram deal: ‘I’d always wanted to set up a record company that would try and operate on honest principles with its artists, pay them the royalty they’re due on the day that it’s due, not infringe upon their creativity, and work with the most intriguing and excellent variety of artists possible. But I wanted our records to be of more importance to people working them overseas, and to build the roster. I wanted to be like Island, Motown, Stax. For that, we needed funding. It was a hard decision.’
Go! Discs retained their autonomy as an A&R entity, signing who they wanted when they wanted (in 1988, The La’s, The Blue Ox Babes, No Man’s Land, money pits to a man), and they still marketed their own records in their own quirky way. ‘The ethic of the com
pany didn’t change,’ insists Macdonald. ‘Maybe the aspirations were higher …’
Asked if he thinks Billy was being naive resisting the shares, his answer is typically diplomatic: ‘Or very wise.’
The rot had set in. But some good came of it: on 25 April 1989, Billy and Jenner launched (or relaunched) Utility as an active, independent label, based in Sincere’s offices and distributed by the Cartel, an independent network. This was all thanks to the ‘few bob’ Billy had made out of selling his Go! Discs shares to PolyGram. (His initial plan had been to give it all to the RSPCA, but Jenner, good manager that he is, said, ‘Let’s be more imaginative.’)
Billy describes Utility, which lasted eighteen months and released ten records, as ‘a wheeze that proved you can’t be on the road and run a record company’. Their releases were attractively colour-coded and designed on the strip-colour Life’s A Riot template, and featured artists like Boston’s The Blake Babies (an early sighting of Evan Dando, later of The Lemonheads and slacker heart-throb), Jungr & Parker, Clive Product and Weddings, Parties, Anything. Billy concludes, ‘Some of it was great, some of it was average, but they were all good bands. I’m surprised we managed to put out as many records as we did, in the end.’
If pushed, he feels he may have let down some of the artists, who signed one-off deals but were expected to organise their own promo – all right for some, not for others. Meanwhile, their label boss was off touring the world, and the money was all outgoing.
Paul Weller, Mick Hucknall, Madonna – successful pop stars start their own labels for a variety of reasons, but they’re largely vanity projects, a chance to play God and create artists in their own image. Utility was a well-meaning folly, best summed up by the Clive Product album title: Financial Suicide.
Billy missed Glastonbury in 1989, but for good reason. More travel, but this time paid for by the BBC. He and Andy Kershaw were asked to make a pilgrimage for the Great Journeys travelogue series, to Bolivia and Chile along the ancient Spanish trade route which used to carry silver across the Andes by llama. Billy got the call while in Shanghai – the Beeb’s first-choice of presenter, classical guitarist John Williams, got vertigo on a three-week fact-finding mission and cried off, so they asked by-now-established broadcaster Kershaw. Jenner engineered the double-act, and off the pair of them went. ‘The BBC has been sending academic intellectuals up the Limpopo for far too long,’ said Billy. ‘It’s about time they let someone else go and have a look.’
The terrain is perilous, the roads are long and winding, the miners chew coca leaves to ‘ward off fatigue’, the rocks underground weep arsenic, and men retire at 35, unsurprisingly buggered. Although slightly off the rock’n’roll track, it wasn’t so strange a trip for Billy: new sights, new sounds, new smells and plenty of opportunities for singing at bemused locals.
Coca leaves were the alternative national dish (an appetite-depressant, they helped the mine workers do longer shifts without food), and the women by the roadside who sold them also did a nice line in sticks of dynamite just like you see in Tom & Jerry cartoons. Kershaw bought half a dozen sticks (three for £1, like disposable lighters outside a tube station). The responsible camera crew declined to film them setting the dynamite off like schoolboys and running away from the deafening blast, but Kershaw made Billy take his photo holding one with the fuse lit. Kershaw was determined to get high on the coca leaves: he boiled them, smoked them, ate them in sandwiches, but got nothing more than a numb gum (‘My cheeks were like hamster’s throughout the entire film if you look closely,’ he recalls).
It was an excellent trip, tear-arsing across the Atacama desert in Toyota landcruisers and staying in Potosi, the highest city in the world (13,350 feet above sea level), where the air is so thin, running up the stairs will make you light headed and a pint of beer knocks you flat on your back. Local customs were suitably rum, particularly watching a llama being sacrificed at the fiesta of San Juan, its throat cut while dopey on coca and the blood thrown over the gables of surrounding houses.
At one tiny village, they all sat round fires while the women cooked sweet potatoes, and the elders played an ancient tune that sounded eerily like ‘The Banana Splits Theme’. In return the Brits led a chorus of ‘Ging Gang Goolie’. (In November, Bolivia would declare a nationwide state of emergency after labour disputes threatened to get out of control. The world continued to turn upside down.)
The Billy Bragg story is punctuated with epiphanies – musical, personal and spiritual – moments of truth that either put paid to nagging doubts or made sense of the situation in which Billy found himself. The Clash at the Rainbow; the blokes kissing at Rock Against Racism; Spandau Ballet on Top Of The Pops; Route 66 with Wiggy; the Women’s Support Group in Sunderland – and now, the flight from Rio to El Alto in Peru on the way out for the BBC trip. Peru is 13,000 feet above sea level, so the plane flies up to 36,000 feet and only comes half-way down. Billy hadn’t been able to sleep since they refuelled in the Brazilian jungle, there was no coffee, everyone was asleep – not a jolly occasion for the nervous flier. Then, surrounded by cloud over the Andes, the plane’s wheels stuck and they had to turn back. Great, Billy thought, putting on his headphones and drowning out the world with a compilation tape. The song was ‘Willing’ by California blues-rockers Little Feat (‘Been stung by the rain, been driven by the snow/I’m drunk, I’m dirty, but don’t you know/I’m willing’). It raised Billy’s spirits:
‘I heard this line and it made me realise that I was there on that plane because this was what I’d always wanted to do. I was scared, I was hungry, but this was what I’d always wanted to do. I wasn’t some poor bastard in a shack with the rain coming in, I wasn’t some poor grunt sitting in a trench. I’d volunteered for this and it’s the best thing to do and I’m getting paid for it.’
On cue, the clouds parted and there below him was Lake Titicaca. ‘This,’ Billy remembered, ‘is the best fucking job in the world!’
But Bolivia with Kershaw had virtually been a holiday, and it was immediately followed by more touring with the old gang. By October, ten countries later, it was the worst fucking job in the world again. ‘Mexico is where it really started to get to me,’ he says, of the seven-day trip between Pachuca and Toluca. ‘I’m going to all these places I’ve never been to before and then I’m going to other places before I’ve really had time to assimilate the fact.’
In the second Billy Bragg songbook, poignantly titled Victim Of Geography from the compilation album of the same name, there is an amusing ‘A To Z Of Life On The Road’, explaining colloquialisms such as Gig Spanner (bottle opener), PMT (Pre-minstrel tension), Shitters (foreign currency) and Normans (punters, from ‘Norman Hunters’). Here we find the entry ‘Xalapa, a bit of a’, meaning a totally pointless gig.
On 19 October, Billy and crew were booked to play a show at the university at Xalapa Enríquez (sometimes spelt Jalapa). This involved a long drive through the mountains with dead dogs on the road and, when they got to the venue, no equipment, no PA and no audience. ‘They didn’t know we were coming,’ says Billy. ‘It was the last straw for me, a low point. It was all too much, I thought, I should be really getting off on this.’ But he wasn’t. Not connecting at all. Unfortunately, there were another six weeks of USA and Canada between Xalapa University and home.
Cara hadn’t made it to Mexico, which was a pity, as the saving grace of 1989’s back-breaking schedule was Cara’s baby George, who’d been touring with them since the Antipodes across Japan, France, Canada, the USA and much of Europe (for his first birthday that December, they bought him a world map). George completely changed Billy’s attitude to kids and babies, and brought home to him how little time he’d been able to spend with his godson Jamie. The men, be it Billy, Wiggy, Showbiz or Jenner, would find themselves literally holding the baby while Cara ate her meals, and the experience was a great leveller: ‘However shit your day was, you’d get on the bus and George was either having a really good day and would cheer you up, or
he was having a much, much worse day and you wouldn’t feel so bad. It made us all think a bit less about being rock’n’rollers.
‘Except maybe Wiggy.’
History continued to unfold around their ears that year. After two days messing about in Athens with R.E.M., the party was late for a supper club gig in Nashville. As they finally bundled in backstage, a steward from the venue sorted them out: ‘There’s your dressing room, there’s your rider, I want you onstage at nine o’clock … and by the way, the Berlin Wall’s come down.’
Just like that. Thousands of Germans from both sides poured through the check-points that night, and many climbed the wall and danced on top of it. It was the collapse of communism as acid house rave, an event few thought they’d see in their lifetime, and a notion so radical only nine months before it had got Billy banned from East Germany. The mayor of West Berlin, Walter Momper, declared, ‘The Germans are the happiest people in the world today’, but Billy and party gave them a good run for their hard currency. Having confirmed the frankly unbelievable truth via the BBC World Service, they led the audience in an evening of celebration – the Americans because they thought they’d won the Cold War, and the Brits toasting the friends they’d made in East Berlin. Après-gig, they all got out of their trolleys watching CNN. The tsars look very different today.
Billy lost his voice in Red Creek, Rochester – hereafter known as Red Croak – and the audience got off on the irony of it, not to mention the sexy upper-register huskiness, passing him honey-laced drinks from the side of the stage (he vividly remembers his fingers sticking to the neck of his guitar). This led, unavoidably, to a rare cancelled gig – apologies to Binghampton in upstate New York.
‘It was a long year.’
Billy saw off the 1980s on stage at the Hackney Empire under a rain of balloons, playing covers of The Skatelites’ ‘Guns Of Navarone’ and The Kinks’ ‘Victoria’. ‘Easing off’ is not a common phrase in the Bragg story, but that’s how he describes his activities of January and February, 1990. There was some recording for his next album, some writing for the Weekend Guardian, and a bit of ‘trying to get my life back’.
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