Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  As with the other VIPs, Billy was let loose in a room full of freebies, ‘shirts and shoes and shit’ that didn’t appeal. But he spotted Guitar Hero for the Xbox and took that home for Jack. An instrumental karaoke game, players simulate onscreen rhythms and riffs using a guitar-shaped controller for points. He hoped that he and Jack might be able to play it together.

  ‘I don’t know shit about videogames – I’m the wrong generation for that – so Jack set it up and showed me what to do, and the first couple of days, I kept beating him on the remedial level. He couldn’t get it. He was hating it!’

  As might any 14-year-old being thrashed by his Dad. ‘Eventually, instead of sitting behind me, he sat beside the telly and watched me. And then the next day, he beat me.’

  Once Junior had pulled ahead of Senior, there was no looking back; Jack completed all the levels while Billy was stuck on the first. ‘The next thing I know, some of his mates are coming round and he wants to get my amps out.’

  After Guitar Hero, a standard-bearer for the educational potential of videogames, Jack quickly graduated to strumming along on a real guitar to ‘Baba O’Reilly’. Billy showed him ‘where to put his fingers’ for ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and that was the last song he helped him with, after which his hand was invisible. ‘He just went, like a rocket.’

  Jack’s first band, a three-piece, were initially called Teenage Wasteland – a nod to rock heritage that would make any modern parent proud, and indicative of Jack’s sure grasp of musical history – but changed it to RPM, another heartwarmingly retro allusion from a generation supposedly defined by the iTunes Store and Justin Bieber.

  Dad is banned from RPM’s gigs, and has only heard them live through the kitchen wall when they rehearse in the garage. Fortunately, some impressive, professionally-recorded demos are now entering the house. Although allowably self-conscious about his famous Dad – Jack has adapted Juliet’s surname to Valero for the official bio – music continually provides father-and-son bonding opportunities, whether it’s sitting down to watch house-favourite pub-rock documentary Oil City Confidential, or standing in the drizzle at Camp Bestival to see an 82-year-old Chuck Berry duckwalk his way through the hits. Billy worked out that Chuck Berry was about as old as his own father would’ve been. Cat Stevens had a song for it.

  Jack turned 19 at the end of 2012. He’s studying filmmaking at Arts University Bournemouth, but rock’n’roll may force some kind of gap year. It’s beginning to feel a lot like the Circle of Life. Fortuitously or otherwise, Jack today looks the spitting image of the young Billy Bragg – although he may not thank you for pointing that out.

  19. Delivery man of human love

  Who is Billy Bragg then?

  I was hugely influenced by Bob Dylan but I knew fuck all about him. In the end he turned out to be a bloke who wrote songs.

  Billy Bragg, Dublin, 1998

  ‘HERE HE COMES again: pop’s political conscience in his dilapidated trousers and sensible shoes, worthily correcting the unenlightened and uplifting the downtrodden with his unsubtle songs and unlovely voice …’

  Thus ran the intro to an intended hatchet job back in the October 1991 issue of Q – ‘Who The Hell Does Billy Bragg Think He Is?’ The magazine’s ‘Who The Hell?’ slot was as old as the publication itself, a much-loved monthly assassination of some media tart, usually from outside of music (Edwina Currie, Jeremy Beadle, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards). This month, however, it was Billy Bragg who was in for a lashing from hitman Tom Hibbert.

  Unusually for both section and writer, it was a 0-0 draw. Hibbert managed to rile Billy once or twice, for instance over the suggestion that his lack of image was contrived, but no real points were scored. Hibbert was even forced to admit, ‘He’s a charmer. Hard to dislike’ (this from a writer whose love of the rich and famous knows no beginnings). Furthermore, Billy sussed that he was being ‘prepared’ for that notorious section of the magazine. ‘So who the hell do I think I am, Tom?’ he asked. ‘I don’t suppose you really know, because you come and see me for two hours and, no offence, Tom, but you’re just peeking through the keyhole. Peeking through the keyhole.’

  It was a fair point, although not one Hibbert would’ve conceded from the mouth of, say, a pompous Radio 1 DJ or a humourless Ringo Starr in similar Who The Hell? articles. Billy was a bad commission – not only has he never wallowed in self-publicity, nor put his own celebrity before his art, he’s an honest man. If he has a major fault, it’s that he’s all too aware of his minor faults.

  The Q piece did throw up a problem, though, and it resonates into this century. Is Billy Bragg too good to be true?

  The Teflon troubadour has been in the biz for over 30 years now, during which time he’s made countless friends and only a smattering of enemies, and these are only ideological ones (Theresa Gorman, the East German authorities, Our Price Records, Oliver Letwin, George Galloway, Richard Barnbrook, various members of the constabulary). The abiding impression that people who meet Billy take away with them is ‘nice bloke’. He prefers ‘straightforward bloke’ – like a certain wood stain, he does exactly what he says on the tin. You might think that a man with such lofty political ideals would snort at a legacy so bland and inauspicious, but for Billy Bragg, straightforwardness and blokeness not only have their place in a cruel, deceptive world, but a uniquely persuasive power, too. During Labour’s darkest years in the 80s, young voters would never have earbashed local MPs if it weren’t for the nod from that affable, humorous, straightforward bloke on stage. If you want to plant a metaphorical bomb at the Last Night Of The Proms, get a nice, straightforward bloke to carry it in.

  In the 1990s, when the sun came up and the last punk rocker had been replaced at the NME, Billy found a niche appearing on television discussion shows, where his straightforward bloke persona smuggled a true voice of dissent onto our screens. He has always known how to use the media to his advantage (or to the advantage of his cause), an extension of his acute ability to set political rhetoric to a tune and make ‘gold dust’ our of what’s in the papers. Remember when Our Price threatened to remove his £3.99 album from their racks – but only once it had dropped out of the chart? That’s the dichotomy of revolutionary art: it’s either too dangerous to be seen and heard by the masses, or else it’s sanitised in order to reach a wider audience. When Billy Bragg gets it right – ‘Between The Wars’ on Top Of The Pops, ‘Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away’ on a Radio One Roadshow, a singalong of ‘Never Buy The Sun’ in Liverpool, even Tacticus Braggus on Newsnight – he is worth a thousand hectoring extremists urinating in the wind.

  Would he have been on That’s Life or inside the House Of Commons if he was a horrible, unpredictable bloke? Would he have met the Queen, as he did when he was invited in 2007 to write new lyrics for Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ and the work was premiered at a Royal gala?

  Billy Bragg is a child of the revolution. He watched punk rock explode in Britain, and he watched as they picked up the pieces. For a while there, as the 70s turned into the 80s, it really was like punk never happened – Billy’s revolution, Britain’s revolution, had failed. But instead of retreating to a life of subservience and reminiscence (‘What did you do in the punk wars, Daddy?’), he continued to wage his own war on want, waste and wankers. By the mid-80s, we were with him; outside of parliament, Billy Bragg was the most famous left-winger in the country before Ben Elton took over. What sport it was to parody him and mock him (Friday Night Armistice still considered him the mascot of the left in 1997; Bill Bailey later essayed a more subtle parody with his Bragg-endorsed spoof ‘Unisex Chipshop’) – but he carried the Big-Nosed Bastard From Barking tag with good humour and even a little pride. After all, in the army, he was just a number, and at school he was just an O-Level.

  Yes, his nose is big. Yes, he is from Barking, and always will be, wherever he lays his hat. But he is not a bastard. He sometimes forgets to leave enough hot water in the tank after having a bath. He has been driving a
4 × 4 ever since he started to spend more time in the country. He supports West Ham (the only fault Andy Macdonald could come up with when asked to dish the dirt). He uses the word ‘twat’ and sometimes ‘cunt’ in unguarded moments. And his anti-smoking fervour borders on the fascistic.

  But I’d like to have seen Albert Goldman get a book out of that.

  It would be a swiz if, like Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg turned out to be just a bloke who wrote songs. But while Dylan has been both mythologised by his followers and subsumed by the record industry, Billy has been spared both fates, through his availability and his independence. Love or hate the songs, at least the bloke behind them is neither grisly curmudgeon nor unchallenged old statesman. When he’s on stage with a bee in his bonnet, racing through ‘A13’ or barking out ‘Between The Wars’, it’s like the last 29 years never happened. Unless you look at the colour of his hair, which, you have to admit, suits the ‘dignified’ pigmentation of advancing years.

  A friend once translated some of Billy’s lyrics back into English from the Japanese (always a hoot). ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’ came out as ‘The Delivery Man of Human Love’, a rather poetic adjustment. It’s a pity ‘I will give you an extra pint’ became ‘I will give you an extra portion’. Or perhaps it isn’t.

  Old rock stars never die, they just float themselves on the stock market, buy a farm and get Buddhism. Then they rediscover their roots and play smaller venues in order to get back in touch with their fans, a group who have naturally become more selective. Billy turned 40 in December 1997, and with that, became an old rock star before the first edition of this book even came out. At that time, he lived comfortably in West London (Jack was the first ever Bragg to be born outside of Essex, marking a new, cosmopolitan dawn for the family), with a holiday home on the Dorset coast. After 30-odd years living in glorified student accommodation, on other people’s floors or out of a suitcase, few except a Daily Mail leader writer would have denied Billy Bragg a proper house with stairs and a garden and one of those nice, fitted, stainless steel kitchens.

  Some shuddered when he took the plunge and moved permanently to the South coast – the, ahem, ‘clifftop mansion’ certainly gave ammunition to those that think socialism is about where you live, rather than how you think. But Billy’s been even more engaged in grass-roots politics and community issues since he moved to Burton Bradstock. The 2001 general election saw him doorstep campaigning for the first time in his life, something he’s carried forward. The Sun may have called him a ‘country squire’, but Billy still calls himself a Londoner, and when the shit went down in Barking & Dagenham, he was always there for his old manor, where, lest we forget, his nephew now lives in the old family home on Park Avenue. He keeps it in the family, too.

  ‘I’ve never had the urge to wade in wonga,’ he says, as if such a thing would unravel all of his good works – and maybe it would. ‘Like most couples, Juliet and I put together all the money we saved and did up a nice townhouse.’ Selling that townhouse enabled them to buy one by the seaside. Both of them still work for a living – in fact, since seizing control of Billy Bragg Central, as they’ve stated, ‘we’ve never worked so hard in our lives’.

  ‘I’m a good example of a small, self-employed businessman. I’ve earned all my money through my own hard work, and at 55 years old, I own my back catalogue, unlike a lot of people in my trade. I lease it out to Cooking Vinyl and they do a good job of getting it into the shops. Thanks to Pete, I have a smart deal with them so that we all make a few bob out of it.

  ‘I pay my taxes on time’ – except once, as we have seen – ‘and I keep my nose clean. The big mistake of a lot of musicians, especially session musicians and people in bands who get money in lump sums, is they buy a nice house, they live in the house, and ten years later, they get a big tax bill and they have to sell the house and they’re not in the band anymore. It’s gone.’

  Billy admits he doesn’t like spending money. It’s a working class thing. Just as he has hoarded cuttings, photographs and tour passes, so he’s gathered a fair amount of money in 29 years. As we have seen, he could have gathered a hell of a lot more if he hadn’t played so many benefits, supported so many causes, toured so many cost-ineffective Eastern Bloc countries and given £1.1 million quid away to the staff of Go! Discs, but the man before us would not be half as comfortable in his smart, new surroundings if he hadn’t given the rest of the world ‘a squirt’ of his winnings. When he first came into some money in 1984, he paid for his Mum to have central heating put in – a lot less troublesome than spending it on himself and a good deed to boot (‘I think that tells you a lot about the background he came from,’ suggests Kershaw). Because money was always tight at home, Billy appreciates every penny of it, and is subsequently keen to hang onto it. If he feels he’s earned it, he’s more than happy to bank it.

  Kershaw remembers a gig at Leeds University around the time that Billy started picking up a grand a show. As tour manager, Kershaw planned to bank what was a risky amount of cash to carry around at the branch of Barclays at the end of his sister’s road in Headingley. Billy wouldn’t let him. He didn’t feel confident that the money would actually appear in his own account at the Barking branch. This story doesn’t just illustrate Billy’s initial distrust of international banking, but an all-round unworldliness, confirmed by another Kershaw story from an early trip to Amsterdam.

  The Dutch promoter had booked the pair of them a table at an Indonesian restaurant before the gig, but Billy refused to go in. Kershaw takes up the tale: ‘I think it may have had something to do with fear of the unknown – which equally applied to marijuana, to Indonesian food or to the business of going in a restaurant, which was pretty alien to him. I was fuming that night! We ended up walking down the bloody street eating chips and salad cream out of a vending machine. And we had a reservation at a restaurant not far from the venue – all paid for!’

  The nature of the job soon put paid to this naiveté. As Kershaw says, ‘I think he’s acquired a certain polish over the years.’

  Tiny Fennimore vouches for Billy’s generosity (herself a grateful beneficiary of the Go! Discs payout, remember): ‘He’ll always go the extra mile for his mates. Sometimes that means money, but it also means giving of himself. He says money’s like manure, you should spread it around.’

  Porky used to join Billy on a mooch round the coin collectors’ market under the arches at Charing Cross. He recalls one such trip where Billy was taken with a Commonwealth half crown from Cromwell’s time. The stallholder was asking £8 for it, but Billy wouldn’t pay it because he’d seen the same coin elsewhere for a fiver. ‘I know I can get it for the right money,’ he told an incredulous Porky, and they left it. While Billy’s not quite in the Sting bracket (whose accountant was famously jailed for creaming £6 million off him without Sting noticing), he can surely spare £3. But this was not Billy Bragg being mean, merely demanding value for money.

  Although Juliet, Jamie and Jack coincided with an upturn in the quality of Billy’s living arrangements, he is not a material man (and he always used to make a point of telling you the 4 × 4 was Juliet’s). In fact, he’s become ever more elemental and spiritual, especially since connecting with the Jurassic coast – the mythology of the British Isles and points of rural interest don’t just fuel his love of ancient history. There’s something in those stones.

  ‘If God is an all-powerful being, he’s quite capable of finding me and my family without me going to church to find him,’ Billy said, while pondering the subject of religion in Dublin during the Mermaid Avenue sessions.

  (Incidentally, on my way back to Dublin Airport after that very studio visit in 1998, my cab driver, a devout Catholic, told me he was becoming less and less enchanted with the church, and spoke of ‘going straight to the top’ instead. It was clearly a common malaise, even before the paedophile priests scandal broke in 2002.)

  ‘Whilst I have my moments of rationalist doubt, I think one of the failures of the Soviet U
nion was to deny that people have a spiritual need, and must to be able to express that in some way. What you don’t want is a society based purely on materialism, or one based purely on spiritual fundamentalism, like Iran. My idea of spirituality is to do with being able to stop and appreciate a sunset. It’s like seeing heaven in a wild flower – William Blake kind of stuff, without getting too drippy about it.

  ‘I sometimes fear that my spirituality is more of a focused superstition. But equally, after my father died, my mother went back to her Catholic faith quite strongly, and I was really impressed by that. So I’ve never felt able to completely dismiss it.

  ‘Parenthood focuses all of that. It makes you think, What’s it all bleedin’ for?’

  Neil Spencer, a keen astrologist and fellow Blakean, says of Billy, ‘He is a deeply spiritual guy but he’s still struggling with a way to talk about it. Billy lives up to what is said about Sagittarians: ruled by Jupiter, fire sign, idealistic, moral, noble, prepared to travel a long way both in physical terms and otherwise. Blake was also Sagittarian.’

  Spencer, ‘the Arch Druid’, once drew up Billy’s astrological chart for him. He suspects Billy thinks it’s ‘all a load of bullshit’.

  There is no great revelation in Billy’s devotion to his partner, his child and his godson, nor to his mother and immediate family, but this long-term, rock-solid loyalty spreads through the entire network of cousins and aunties and, of course, into all of his relationships, professional and social. What does he think these long-standing relationships say about him?

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not just me – for instance, Pete could’ve fired me but he didn’t. We do have times when we can’t speak to one another, but we overcome them. When you see people around, you say hello to them.’