Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  In between all the geography, there was still room for a further bit of politics in 1999. It all started when, on Newsnight, historian Amanda Foreman said that all of our traditions are under threat if you take the House of Lords away. ‘That’s such bullshit,’ says Billy. ‘There are so many different traditions in this country, not just one.’ He filmed a ‘reply’ for Newsnight and this was seen by Pam Giddy, Director of Charter 88, a group dedicated to wide-ranging democratic reform (of which Billy was a signatory).

  She invited him along to a public consultation held by Lord Wakeham’s Royal Commission for the House of Lords on 12 May. It was at this point that the issue of Lords reform captured Billy’s imagination: get the composition of the Upper House right and ‘everything flows from that’. His notion – apparently radical – was to take the result of the general election and use all votes cast to proportionally decide who sits in the House. Encouraged by Giddy – and, after a chance meeting at the tube, his Chiswick neighbour, the political commentator Anthony Holden – Billy put his idea down on a sheet of A4 paper and submitted it to the Commission. (Holden wrote in the Express, ‘I am convinced Bragg’s solution is as near as we’re likely to get to a truly representative Upper House.’)

  He then ‘gave evidence’ (as it’s grandly called) at the next public meeting on 27 July. Douglas Hurd, who sat on the Commission, approached him before the hearing: ‘Mr Bragg,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be cross-examining you. I don’t want you to take anything I say personally, because our job is to scrutinise your idea.’ Taken aback, Billy replied, ‘It’s not a problem. I’ve been interviewed by the New Musical Express, I’m sure I can deal with you.’

  ‘The Bragg Method’ was thus scrutinised by Hurd, Bill Morris, Gerald Kaufman, the Bishop of Oxford and the other grandees. Billy held his own.

  At the end of 1999, Wakeham’s report came out. They essentially bottled it, by recommending that the majority of a 550-member house should be appointed. But for a proposed ‘democratic element’ within the house, they acknowledged the workability of Billy’s method, which became the basis of Model A, one of three put forward. The government is committed to debating the contents of the report so, for Billy, the campaign continues. In 2001, he produced a nicely tooled pamphlet (‘A Genuine Expression of the Will of the People’) intended to promote the notion of appointment-free composition. He is gung-ho not because it’s his idea, but because he believes it works.

  ‘Trying to make it sexy is impossible,’ he admits. ‘And writing songs about it – forget it!’

  Billy’s other big concern of the new millennium – and one which is far better suited to songwriting – is what he calls ‘the crisis in Englishness’: the parlous state of national identity, especially in the face of Welsh and Scottish devolution. Billy believes passionately in, well, a new England: ‘The place I want to get to is where you see a St George sticker on the back of a van, and you don’t immediately think fascist.’

  He’d been filling up notebooks for over two years – all of a sudden, everything fed into his new obsession. The Euro. Hooligans at Euro 2000. Asylum seekers. Race riots. The BNP. The myopic, right-wing thinking found in books like Nor Shall My Sword by Simon Heffer and England: An Elegy by Roger Scruton.

  Here’s Scruton: ‘Grammar schools, the old House of Lords, the Prayer Book and the English Bible, English weights and measures, English currency, local regiments, the Royal Tournament – every practice in which the spirit of England can still be discerned seems fated now to arouse contempt.’

  Billy appreciates that Englishness is an abstract (‘it means different things to different people’), but that’s what makes it such an inspiring subject for songs.

  Billy Bragg began the 21st century as fired up as he had been when Thatcher was re-elected in 1983. The battle lines might not have been so clearly drawn under Labour, but even from down there on the beach at West Bexington, Dorset, Billy could still see the class struggle.

  The year 2000 started slowly, career-wise, while renovation work continued in earnest at Barton Olivers. On 29 February, Billy addressed the Oxford Union on national identity (‘partly because my old man would be so made up’).

  In May, Mermaid Avenue Vol II was released. Less fuss was made of it, predictably enough – it was second helpings after all – but it was no less inventive and various than the first. The track listing almost suggests they’d deliberately held some of the best stuff back: ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’ (already a live favourite), ‘My Flying Saucer’, ‘Secret Of The Sea’. And it had a picture of a cat on the front. It was Grammy-nominated, like its cousin, in 2001.

  On 29 May, Billy was grilled by future Tory MP and London Mayor but then simply editor of the Spectator, Boris Johnson, for a Radio 4 programme Why People Hate … Tories. ‘It was not so much an interview as a shouting match.’

  Johnson, somewhat akin to a public school-educated Dulux dog, accused Billy of being a Tory and ‘a great big zeppelin of hypocrisy’, to which Billy replied, ‘I sold my house not my principles.’

  The two of them actually hit it off. So, when Billy was asked to present part of BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, he gave Boris a call and invited him along – a festival virgin, of course. The resulting chalk-and-cheese docusoap, which aired on BBC Choice (the precursor of BBC3), was unmissable television. They had henna tattoos, performed in the Poetry Tent (Johnson did part of The Iliad in the original Greek, which must have freaked out the stoners) and were accosted by naked protesters in the field with the stones. Johnson admitted he quite liked it, having concluded that everyone there was also a Tory.

  Back in Burton Bradstock, ‘the village’ made first contact. The Parish Clerk came to visit, on behalf of the Millennium Committee, and asked Billy if he would play a gig on the village green. ‘You do know what kind of music I play?’ Billy asked. The Clerk said he did. So it was a New Orleans jazz band on the Friday, bingo on the Saturday, and Billy Bragg and the Blokes on Sunday – all to raise money for the local scout hut (not quite the Youth Trade Union Rights Campaign or the dockers, but good causes begin at home).

  To show that he was serious about connecting with Dorset, Billy sang Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘Linden Lea’, based on the poem by Dorset-born William Barnes, born in 1801. Barnes wrote in the local dialect. And Billy still sings in his.

  In July, they played at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, commemorating the six Dorset farm labourers who were transported in 1834 for forming a union to defend wages and conditions. Proof that moving out of London hadn’t necessarily removed Billy from where the left-wing action was.

  In September, another first. A new production of Shakespeare’s Henry V was performed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, featuring songs especially written by Billy Bragg for the soldiers as they marched towards Agincourt. This radical move can be credited to 33-year-old director Edward Hall (son of Sir Peter). Billy loved the experience (especially as it fitted into his long-term Englishness project) and says he could easily imagine doing a little bit more of that.

  The University of East London (formerly Barking Polytechnic) gave him an honorary degree, which was poetic, as the young Stephen Bragg had been denied this particular route after failing his eleven-plus. ‘It was a day out for the kids and Mum,’ he shrugs. His mum asked the people from the university, ‘Why are you giving him this?’

  ‘Because he’s from Barking and he’s done well.’

  ‘My other son’s from Barking and he’s done well – can he have one?’

  Fair point.

  It’s important not to observe politics but to be politics. Generate ideas. It’s not just writing about it, you’ve got to engage.

  Billy Bragg, 17 September 2001

  Another election year, the fifth since Billy Bragg had been a professional singer-songwriter and agent provocateur. And a forgone conclusion, now that New Labour had spread their political picnic blanket out, and the Tories had become so fixated on Save The Pound they appeared
to have Lost The Plot. A good time for Billy perhaps to disengage from party politics, retire, sit back and think of England.

  By now he was deep into the writing and recording of his tenth album, England, Half English (the title taken from a 1961 collection of essays by Colin MacInnes). Tracks were laid down with Grant Showbiz at Monnow Valley Studios in Monmouth, South Wales.

  In March, the family put a nasty British winter at Sea Change behind them and moved full-time into Barton Olivers again. The national outbreak of foot and mouth disease put the countryside on the front pages and, although the burning cattle pyres and the men from the ministry in protective suits didn’t actually reach Dorset, it scared the life out of the farming community there. It also drove a nationwide wedge between town and country. Billy found himself seeing both sides of the argument. He’d seen livelihoods destroyed during the miners’ strike, but who’d subsidised them?

  His links with the local community were strengthening the whole time. In March, he started a songwriters’ workshop at the local comprehensive Sir John Colfox. This was a result of his appearance at the Burton Bradstock Millennium Festival in 2000, after which the headmaster of Jack’s village school, David Powell, hit upon the idea of Bridport World Music Week, involving 1,500 kids of Jack’s age writing songs about their experiences of living here, linked via the Internet to India, Gambia and Chile. Billy got heavily involved, and the workshop idea came out of that.

  In May, the Bridport News ran a big feature on Billy (‘Meet the milkman of human kindness – pages 24–25’), detailing all of his community efforts since moving to Dorset, and picturing him with the John Colfox kids. (There was also one of Buster, the new Bragg family dog, a black ‘Labradoodle’, which is a cross between a Labrador and a standard poodle.)

  But, by then, Billy was engaged in a new battle, a local campaign that gained national prominence thanks to his previous form and a sixth sense for headline grabbing. On 14 April, Easter weekend, Billy was asked by the New Statesman to write a diary. ‘What are you going to do about voting?’ they asked. He hadn’t really given it too much thought; he was getting ‘a bit of pressure’ from the Dorset Labour Party – maybe it was time to weigh up his options. The general election had been moved, because of foot and mouth, from 3 May to 7 June, so there was plenty of time to get his act together.

  Dorset West, his constituency, was held in 1997 by the Tories, with the Liberal Democrats just 1,840 votes behind, and Labour in third. A vote for his traditional party would, Billy reasoned, be a wasted one. ‘Voting Liberal Democrat became even more attractive once I realised that the sitting MP was Oliver Letwin, the ardent Eurosceptic and rising Tory star.’ (And the man who leaked the Tories’ secret spending cut figure of £20 billion.)

  In neighbouring Dorset South, Tory MP Ian Bruce was a wafer-like 77 votes ahead of Labour.

  Inspired by the website tacticalvoter.net, a nationwide vote-swapping scheme designed to keep the Tories out by pairing up tactical voters around the country, Billy looked into setting up his own for Dorset. He met with two local ‘netheads’, they designed the page and the search engine, he bought the webspace, and votedorset.net was go. Billy announced his intentions in the Statesman diary.

  ‘We just put the thing up and there it was. I didn’t realise how quickly it would take off. The morning the Statesman came out, there was a story in the Guardian. They’d rung up the Lib Dems to ask how they felt about me voting for them, and they then put out a press release. The Dorset Echo faxed it to me. I thought to myself, Jeeeesus, I can see how this is going to go – I’d better get my brain around it.

  ‘I thought, does any of this matter if Labour are going to win anyway? Yes it does. After the election, the Tories will regard the number of seats they’ve gained as a measure of how well their “Little Englander” rhetoric has gone down in the country. Tactical voting will punish the Tories for their lurch to the right.’

  As the votedorset leaflets and posters said: ‘Send a message to William Hague: no to racist campaigning.’ You could also register your dissatisfaction with Tony Blair.

  Billy’s tactical crusade generated acres of press, not just local. In fact, tactical voting and John Prescott punching a farmer were the only election stories in 2001. The letters page in the Bridport News was full of it. ‘Have I missed something? Was there a poll that elected [Billy Bragg] spokesman for Dorset while I was away somewhere?’ asked reader Derek Jones.

  ‘I think you should come clean and re-title your publication The Bridport News And Billy Bragg Newsletter,’ wrote Michael West, spookily echoing those old letters in the NME which used to say, ‘Why don’t you just change your name to the New Morrissey Express and be done with it?’ Oliver Letwin was even forced to write in to defend his record (he boasted of the 31,000 letters he’d written, the 1,200 constituents he’d seen at 129 surgeries, the 239 questions he’d asked in parliament etc.).

  During the election, Jeremy Vine drove around the country in a clapped-out Newsnight camper van looking for stories. In Dorset, he found one. In the spirit of Dorchester’s Roman town status, Dorset County Museum had organised a public debate about the future of Durnovaria (Dorchester) with the three election candidates – Oliver Letwin, Labour’s Richard Hyde and the Lib Dems’ Simon Green. The museum rang Billy up and asked if he would be in the audience.

  Because the candidates would be dressed up in togas, Billy had an idea. Bridport Museum were having a Roman week; he got in touch with the Living History guy who set this up, and asked if he could hire a centurion’s uniform …

  Thus, with Newsnight in tow, Billy turned up at the meeting in full Roman soldier’s regalia. ‘They were just about to convene the vote, and I had to climb over the fence and march through the audience with this great big, fuck-off, eight-foot spear, a big shield and two swords!’

  He announced himself as ‘Tacticus Braggus’. He pointed at Letwin and said, ‘Render unto Thatcher that which is Thatcher’s.’

  The crowd lapped it up; Letwin hated it, whipping off the toga before he was embarrassed by the cameras. And the Lib Dems won the vote.

  ‘So much of what we did during the campaign was focused on using up pages of the Dorset Echo; because it was almost silly season, they were looking for stuff to run, every week I was trying to think of something to keep this issue in people’s minds. And it paid off.’

  Billy’s serious clowning (and the shoe leather of those on the campaign with him) literally put Dorset on the political map.

  Labour won the election on 7 June, predictably, although the turnout was embarrassingly low. William Hague resigned as Tory leader on cue, and what Billy calls ‘the battle for the soul of the Conservative party’ commenced. Sadly, the Lib Dems didn’t win in Dorset West; Letwin actually gained 5.5 per cent of the vote (‘You can’t just expect these people to roll over,’ reflects Billy). But, in Dorset South, Labour overturned the Tories with a 153 majority – the only seat Labour took off the Conservatives in the whole country. ‘Depending on which paper you read, it was a complete failure or a complete success.’

  Ian Bruce, Dorset South’s defeated Tory MP, later wrote in Parliamentary IT Briefing magazine: ‘The real damage to the Conservative cause was the masses of TV time devoted to the message that tactical voting was about Labour and Liberals ganging up against “evil” Conservatives.’

  A sore loser, Bruce also gave an interview to the Express that led to a piece on 13 June attempting to hold Billy up as a great big zeppelin of hypocrisy, except with none of Boris Johnson’s schoolboy humour. ‘ANTI-CAPITALIST SINGER’S LIFE OF LUXURY IN £500,000 MANSION’ went the headline, above an aerial shot of Barton Olivers, the ‘cliff-top mansion’ to which ‘he has since added an extension’. The traitor!

  Ian Bruce said, ‘Conservatives like me are very glad our policies and philosophy were able to provide him and his family with such a wonderful environment in which to live.’ Touché!

  ‘Perhaps,’ wrote yet another local resident in the Bridport
News, ‘now that the dust has settled after the general election, Billy Bragg would like to leave the good folks of Dorset to their own peaceful ways.’

  You’ll be lucky.

  I sold all my vinyl yesterday

  At a boot sale out on the highway

  And now my room is full of fresh air

  ‘Tears Of My Tracks’

  England, Half English, completed in October 2001 and released in February 2002, is a landmark Billy Bragg album, the sound of fresh air blowing through his attitude to writing, playing and singing. It’s the first post-Woody record and the first truly co-written and co-performed with his own band, the Blokes. (The Red Stars had, after all, been strictly a touring outfit, despite their crucial role in Bragg history.)

  The album’s fifteen tracks flit easily between grown-up pop and sit-down balladry (‘Some Days I See The Point’ is one the most beautiful slowies he’s ever written), shuffling through musical styles as though flicking through an atlas: folksy Americana here; Arabic there; a dash of Jamaican; and some English music hall. Billy sings – except when he doesn’t – but there’s no shock value in that since Woody.

  As for words, the balance between the social and the socialist is as we have come to expect, although the older Billy gets, the more we must applaud his righteous, constructive anger – a sentimental lyric like ‘Baby Farouk’ (‘Join us now in celebration/To each child a generation!’) is something any songwriting parent might have penned, but ‘NPWA’ (‘no power without accountability!’), ‘Take Down The Union Jack’ and the wry, manifesto title track are a long way from what, say, Phil Collins was writing about at 43.

  In ‘NPWA’ the protagonist laments losing his job, car and house ‘when ten thousand miles away some guy clicked on a mouse/He didn’t know me, we never spoke/He didn’t ask my opinion or canvass for my vote’. How frightfully unfashionable to write about job loss, and yet it was only in May 2000 that Ford laid off 2,000 car workers at Dagenham, ending car production at the plant after 69 years (and all because they can make a Fiesta in 24.4 hours in Cologne while it takes 25.3 hours here).