Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  When spanking new Tory leader David Cameron was interviewed by the New Statesman in June 2006, he was fresh from Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, on which he’d chosen records by The Smiths, Bob Dylan and R.E.M., hardly the standard fare for those on the right.

  Under the worrying headline, ‘Equality, croquet, Billy Bragg and me’, he revealed that ‘A New England’ (the Kirsty MacColl version) had almost made the final cut.

  On the matter of whether this would have been an appropriate choice, he said, ‘This idea that you can’t like the music of people who don’t agree with you politically would kind of limit your musical choices a bit.’

  A near-miss for Billy that said as much about shifting generations as it did about the vacuity of the next Prime Minister. Only 39 when he was elected leader, Cameron was an undergraduate when Billy and The Smiths and R.E.M. first made their mark. Perhaps his appreciation of their pinko sounds was genuine. In some ways, let’s hope it was hollow, opportunistic, please-like-me spin.

  The only thing David Cameron and Billy Bragg have in common is Oxford. Cameron attended Brasenose College, and Billy was given an Honorary Doctorate by Oxford Brookes University in September 2005 (‘the cap and gown, all that shit’). The only thing.

  This is Cameron, and it certainly rings true: ‘When I grew up in the 1980s, there was a big gulf between left and right. You were either for CND or Nato, privatisation or state ownership of industry, cutting taxes and setting people free or high rates of marginal tax, for the trade unions or for trade union reform. It seemed to me we made a choice on those sorts of grounds.’

  The question Billy still asked, after 23 years in showbiz, two box sets, a Number One, a doctorate and a ‘knighthood’, remains disarmingly simple, ‘Which side are you on?’

  18. A WRITER NOT A DECORATOR

  Keeping faith, going to jail and becoming a Guitar Hero, 2007–2013

  My practicality consists of this – knowing that if a man beats his head against the wall, it is his head that breaks and not the wall

  Antonio Gramsci, letter from prison to sister-in-law Tania Schudt, 1930

  I know it looks like I’m just reading the paper, but these ideas I’ll turn to gold dust later

  ‘Handyman Blues’ Tooth & Nail, 2013

  IN MAY 2012, on the first leg of the Ain’t Nobody Who Can Sing Like Me tour, booked to mark Woody Guthrie’s centenary and to promote Mermaid Avenue: the Complete Sessions across Europe, North America and Canada, Billy found himself playing ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ at the Paradiso club in Amsterdam. Not an uncommon occurrence in his three decades on the road. But something surprising happened during the second half that firmly nails this gig to the annals. ‘There was no security or anything,’ Billy explains. ‘A tall, drunk-or-stoned guy got out of the audience, walked across the stage and put his arm around me while I was singing, and his mate took a photo.’

  Not the first time a punter had wanted his snap taken with the notoriously accessible troubadour, but the first time it had been forced upon him, without warning, mid-song. ‘I was fucking outraged!’ Billy lilted on to the end, still taken aback by the pitch invader’s cheek, and then it happened: the bloke climbed out of the audience again. ‘Something snapped’ – not a guitar string, but Billy’s fundamentally peaceable restraint – ‘I ran across the stage and stabbed him five times in the nuts with the neck of the guitar: “Fucking get off my fucking stage, you bastard!” As he turned round I caught him with the tip of my boot and booted him into the audience.’

  The unknown soldier was swallowed up by the night and nobody saw him again. But this somewhat out-of-character lesson in Billy Bragg crowd control is not the point of this story.

  ‘When I walked back to the mic … b-rrrrr-ing! – the Jim Dyson guitar was still in tune.’

  Billy refers to the guitar that had seen him alright for ten years as ‘a utility guitar for a utility guitar player’, but beyond the self-deprecation there is something pleasingly symbolic about the way both man and machine have survived the knocks and surprises of a lifetime spent mixing pop and politics. You might say that this guitar doesn’t need to say sorry.

  There is a truism that you get more right-wing as you get older. But as Billy stared down the barrel of 2013 and the milestone 30-year anniversary of his first record, he was living proof of that truism’s falsity. For some veterans, old alliances just harden like arteries, but not Billy, who has constantly adapted to survive. In a 21st century he considers ‘post-ideological’, he’s not just ranging his moral and political artillery against the cosy old enemies – the resurgent Tories, the constantly rearming fascists, the Tea Party – in days like these he’s as likely to rage against big business, the free market and institutionalised privilege; while compassion still burns beneath his other deeply held beliefs, he’s as driven in the modern day by the vexing subject of accountability.

  Rather than take his foot off the pedal and ease into a dotage of self-parody in his fifties, Billy Bragg is still very much in the Billy Bragg business, honing his craft, playing the benefits, curating his own tent at Glastonbury, supporting new firebrands like Jake Bugg and Grace Petrie, and turning headlines into songs.

  In his forties, he’d forged a lifelong link with history via Woody Guthrie, surrendered himself to the possibilities of collaboration and begun voting tactically in response to his new, non-metropolitan surroundings. As a result, he appeared to be in a good place when he turned 50 in December 2007, a milestone that would’ve been unthinkable to the Saturday boy and whose official public celebration he had to be gently cajoled into.

  For all his tentative paddling in the shallows of new media, the event cooked up to mark the big five-oh was defiantly analogue. Jude Kelly, artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre since 2005 and described by the Guardian as ‘one of the most powerful people in the arts’, led Billy ‘in conversation’ through an evening with himself, at the brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall. Before a packed house of 900, this night revolved, literally, around a stack of vinyl records he’d selected to conjure previous milestones: Dylan, The Clash, Linda Ronstadt, the Watersons, Thin Lizzy. He stood up from his armchair to play a few tunes, too, mostly greatest hits, a couple from the upcoming Mr Love & Justice album, but also a real rarity, Riff Raff’s ‘Here Comes The Now’, which most of us had never heard him play live before.

  At the end, he thanked everybody for continued support, and announced, with lump in throat, that he only keeps going because of the inspiration he gets from his fans. One of the new songs was the reciprocal ‘I Keep Faith’. Perfect.

  Those fortunate enough to have a Golden Ticket – a laminate bearing Billy’s school photo and the legend, ‘Honey, I’m a big boy now!’ – were stewarded into the Spirit Level bar for an after-show that was part underground club night, part wedding reception. The guest list ambitiously mixed close family with old pals and luminaries: Marie, Jenner, Tiny, Jupitus, Jerry Dammers, Neil Spencer, Chas Smash and, representing the post-Blairite Labour government, Ed Miliband, the 37-year-old former Treasury whizz recently sworn into the Cabinet by new PM Gordon Brown, and 37-year-old Culture Minister James Purnell (‘They were standing there chatting with each other, looking like a couple of wonks’, says Billy, who convinced them to take off their ties). It had been organised by Juliet with ‘military precision’, not least ‘sneaking Paul Weller in the back’ so that when Billy arrived at his own party, the Modfather was already the in-house DJ. (‘Weller really enjoyed the cloak and dagger of it,’ says Juliet.)

  There was even a cake in the shape of Billy’s old Orange amp.

  In March 2008, the Southbank-trailed Mr Love & Justice was released on Cooking Vinyl, his ninth solo album. A persuasive suite of songs, soulful and mature, with some terrific contributions from the Blokes – notably Mac on the Hammond and Wurlitzer, and Ben Mandelson on bouzouki and lap steel – it arguably lacked the unifying through-line of previous long-players, having been recorded in two chunks, nine months apart.
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br />   Half a dozen tracks were recorded with producer Grant Showbiz at The Butchers Shop in North London in September 2006, another half dozen at Chapel studios in Lincolnshire in March 2007. ‘Not only does that make for a less focused record, it makes for a much less focused budget.’ (Money was about to become a bigger issue for everybody with the financial crash of 2008, and such relative profligacy would go out the window.)

  To make matters less focused, when the band had gone home, Billy and Grant had ‘a dozen songs, but only six lyrics’. Billy made up the deficit as he walked in the Lincolnshire wolds.

  The modestly anthemic ‘I Keep Faith’ emerged as the beating heart of Mr Love & Justice; Laura Barton of the Guardian described it as ‘a perfect Venn diagram of the political and the personal’. Its deceptively simple lyric – ‘It doesn’t matter if/This all falls off the cliff/Together we are going to see it through’ – is a combined declaration of solidarity with those closest to him and those furthest away, namely, his fans. Keeping faith when ‘what you say is met with anger, contempt and lies’ has a clear political aspect, and Billy specifically singles out the Labour backbenchers he worked with during the 2005 election, ‘those bright young Red Wedgers who are now ministers’. The last verse (‘You have to make great sacrifice/For such little gain and so much pain’) goes out to Maxine Eddington and the inspiring women at Trimar Hospice.

  Talking of Red Wedge, former compatriot Robert Wyatt provides angelic backing vocals on ‘I Keep Faith’. Billy explained to Laura Barton how this came about. The studio caterers in Lincolnshire had agreed to cook up rhubarb crumble and custard (‘the pinnacle of desserts’) as long as Billy provided the fresh rhubarb. While parking in the square of nearby market town Louth in search of ‘the celery of the Gods’, he was surprised to see Wyatt sitting with his wife on a bench, smoking a cigar. He greeted Billy ‘like a long-lost son’, and a studio play-date was fixed.

  The album, like England, Half English, owes its title to Colin MacInnes, whose novel Mr Love and Justice is a sequel of sorts to Absolute Beginners, in which the ideals of a pimp and a policeman are tested in late-50s London. Although the album’s title track is about ‘fathers leaving children and leaving women’, people still assume Mr Love & Justice is Billy. ‘It was going to be Mr Love & Social Justice, but that was a bit unwieldy.’

  The album charted higher than the more cunningly promoted England, Half English, at a respectable if not revolutionary 33. Billy is circumspect about the record: ‘Really, I shouldn’t have spent as much money or as much time on it. It would have benefited from being done in the first tranche when I was in that more acoustic-y place, recording tracks like “M For Me” and “If You Ever Leave”. I just didn’t have a dozen like that at the time. It’s me working out how to write records in my fifties that resonate and aren’t just me writing songs because I can.’

  In many ways, Mr Love & Justice was a halfway house on the way to the far more radical tenth solo album in 2013. But a lot would happen in the five years between the two.

  Back at the beginning of his 50th birthday year, Billy received a letter from Malcolm Dudley, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation counsellor at Guys Marsh, a Category C prison on the site of a former military hospital near Shaftesbury in North Dorset, which had been criticised in a report by the Board of Visitors in 2002 for failing to curb re-offending and coming up short of the quality of its medical care.

  Dudley was teaching prisoners the guitar, with access to only two, one of which he borrowed off the chaplain, the other he’d found in a cupboard. He asked Billy if he had any spare guitars. He genuinely didn’t, but paid the prison a visit and talked to his class.

  Impressed by the good work being done with limited resources, Billy went to Denmark Street – London’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’, still notable for its congregation of musical instrument shops – and discovered you can get a ‘reasonable’ Chinese acoustic for £50 in Hank’s, and bought six, which Jeff Behan (‘Jago’), an old Clash fan who helped set up the Strummerville foundation, stencilled with appropriate slogans: ‘Strummer’, ‘This Machine Kills Time’, ‘Stay Free’, and, most resonantly, ‘Jail Guitar Doors’, the B-side of ‘Clash City Rockers’ which lent its name to what had now clarified into an initiative. Billy donated them to Guys Marsh, stirred by the fact that ex-prisoners who have actively participated in sessions like Dudley’s have a re-conviction rate of between 10–15%, compared to the national average of 61%. ‘Playing a guitar can transport you momentarily from wherever you are’, says Billy. ‘If you apply that element of emotional transportation to someone in prison, you realise how access to guitars could really help.’

  Jail Guitar Doors – ‘the loudest charity on earth’, as it would later be described – was officially announced at the NME Awards in March, marking the fifth anniversary of Strummer’s death with something more concrete than ‘another gig where a bunch of boring middle-aged Clash fans sat around singing his songs’. The band’s Mick Jones was the ‘first man in the room’ to offer his services.

  In July, accompanied by the Guardian, the pair went to Wormwood Scrubs in West London to play for ‘rows of men dressed in grey tracksuits and pale blue T-shirts … slouched in their chairs’. The article ‘went around the world’, and as a result, commemoration of Strummer’s death now often involves money being raised for JGD.

  He’s been into around 50 prisons in the UK since then, initially using the contacts he’d made with the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice while Labour were still in power. He struck deals with British manufacturer Tanglewood and the international Gibson Guitar Corporation, and found like-minded axefolk everywhere. ‘You don’t have to explain it to musicians twice – they get it straight away.’

  Billy has met some ‘incredible musicians’ inside, perhaps none more so than Leon Walker in Dartmoor, a recovering heroin addict and repeat offender since the age of 17, and the only person Billy ever met in a prison who had heard of him. Since getting out, Walker has forged a nascent career in music, playing Glastonbury’s Leftfield (which Billy started curating in 2010) and Greenbelt. He and Mancunian Johnny Newsom have been the star ‘graduates’ of the scheme.

  In 2009, the US chapter was launched by Wayne Kramer, founder of seminal Detroit agit-rockers MC5 and very much the right man for the job, having been locked up in the 1970s for drug possession and immortalised in the original Clash lyric: ‘Let me tell you ’bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine’. A dedicated activist, now in his sixties, and a veteran prison lecturer about narcotic abuse, he had previous links with California’s powerful prison service union CCPOA (‘representing the men and woman who walk the toughest beat in the state’), so, like Billy, ‘he knew exactly who to call’.

  On 2 May 2009, Billy accompanied Kramer and ‘a bunch of rock’n’roll reprobates’ including Perry Farrell, Gilby Clarke of Guns N’ Roses, Tom Morello and Jerry Cantrell from Alice In Chains to New York’s maximum security facility Sing Sing, and JGD USA was born. ‘To say it was memorable would be a massive understatement,’ Kramer blogged for the Huffington Post. He’s been into around 25 penitentiaries since, delivering what one reviewer called ‘weapons of peace’ to inmates. Billy looks upon this as ‘seeding the system’.

  Raising money to rehabilitate convicted criminals is not a clear-cut black and white issue – certainly not one that Phil Collins would have touched with a bargepole in the 1980s. But, to quote ‘I Keep Faith’: ‘If you think you have the answer, don’t be surprised if what you say is met with anger.’ Billy always gets ‘the same shit’ about JGD, which is: why give money to the prisoners and not the victims? His response: ‘I’m trying to stop there being any more victims. If we lock up these people and throw away the key we’re just building a criminal class. 25% of the people in our prisons should never, ever come out again, but 75% are undoubtedly redeemable.’

  It’s an uphill redemption. A cut of 26% was imposed on the Ministry of Justice after the new Tory chancellor George Osborne’s Spending Review in
2010 – that’s £1.9 billion over four years – and with the resulting staff reductions, non-vocational ‘luxuries’ like music lessons will be the first to go. ‘It’s mad, because those people who are in now are going to be out next year, and they’re going to be living next door to you. Do you want them to have been fucked over in prison? Angry with society? Or do you want them to think, “Do you know what? I don’t want to come back here”?’ Although it’s unlikely that any of them will be living next door to the future 18th baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon, George Osborne.

  Having been announced as one of Q magazine’s new star columnists as part of a ‘stylish new look’ in September 2008 – as well as host of his own show on the digital Q Radio – Billy also increased his contributions to the Guardian. From three columns in 2007 and six in 2008, he upped his total to a dozen in 2009, aiming his keyboard at everything from PRS and illegal filesharing to the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike. (He also commemorated this watershed moment in British industrial history with a nine-date tour of Wales, from Blaenavon to Blackwood, reminding people who didn’t need reminding of the ‘naked selfishness at the heart of the Thatcherite experiment’). Contrary to the Guardian’s sometimes comically left-leaning editorial stance, its online readership represents the full spectrum of political opinion, and Billy does not get an easy ride ‘below the line’, where ‘comment is free’. Always up for a free and frank exchange, Billy usually parries after publication, as long as his critics keep it clean. (Unfortunately, the anonymity afforded by the internet leads to a lot of time-wasting, mud-slinging and point-scoring from hungry trolls. Let’s call them the ‘cliff-top mansion’ brigade.)

  He kicked off 2010 with a particularly striking demonstration of standing up and being bean-counted. Headline: ‘Why I’m withholding my tax.’