Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Some years before Wiggy’s affinity for gadgets would influence actual career options (guitarist, guitar tech, audio-visuals, production), he became the master of the reel-to-reel tape machine. He’d first felt his way around one aged four. Said machine was a cumbersome Mission: Impossible-style beast upon which the ramshackle Wigg & Bragg Radio Shows were recorded in either’s bedroom. Ah, the reel-to-reel! Anyone with domestic experience of this type of voluptuous, boxy contraption will recall with fondness its ton weight, its circulation-stopping carrying handle, the inevitably battered, flat cardboard boxes the tapes came in, and the heave-ho one-button controller that required shoving into stop/start/record/wind position like a Morris Minor’s gearshift.

  The two armchair DJs recorded singles on to tape by propping the microphone next to the record player’s speakers and keeping quiet. Woe betide any kid brother who might noisily wander in while Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Scarborough Fair’ was being ‘broadcast’. (Good fortune on this front came in David Bragg’s natural talent for swimming, which took him off to frequent tournaments, with Mum and Dad in tow, leaving the house empty.)

  Musically, the 1960s had kind of passed the two friends by. (Wiggy claims that he wasn’t automatically allowed to watch Top Of The Pops on a Thursday, if, say, his mum wanted to watch a film on the other side, and Billy doesn’t recall ever being able to watch it – ‘It must’ve clashed with something, or else it was just too soppy in our house. We didn’t watch a lot of BBC. We were Magpie kids, not Blue Peter kids.’) But they ‘got’ the 1970s from the word go, and found every ebb and trickle of the Top 30 utterly enthralling, excitedly nipping home from school every Tuesday lunchtime to tape the new rundown, and then memorise it.

  This was the time of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by Middle Of The Road, ‘My Sweet Lord’ by George Harrison and ‘Knock Three Times’ by Dawn. It was Mungo Jerry, T-Rex, the England World Cup Squad and R. Dean Taylor. In those formative years of 1970 and 1971, the Number One spot was graced by a motley parade: Dave & Ansell Collins, Edison Lighthouse, Lee Marvin, Clive Dunn, Free, Tony Christie and Benny Hill’s Ernie (‘The Fastest Milkman In The West’), which occupied the top slot for five weeks until a rock cake caught him underneath the heart. Billy and Wiggy got into the Faces, Slade, Elton John and Bob Dylan. They started compiling personal weekly Top Twenties in exercise books, based on their own limited stocks of vinyl and tapes: never mind Ernie’s reign; ‘Scarborough Fair’ was top of Billy’s charts for two years, from February 1971 to January 1973. At one stage, fourteen out of the twenty songs in his list were by Simon & Garfunkel.

  Billy had taken his first Saturday job, aged fourteen, in a hardware store called Guy Norris on Station Parade in Barking, sorting shelves and humping massive wallpaper books. ‘It was the size of a small supermarket, like a Spar,’ he recalls. There was a second branch at Gants Hill. The owner had inherited the business, and introduced a wider range of goods that reflected his own interests, namely records and model trains. (‘I don’t think he was into hardware very much.’)

  The trains were at the back, the records downstairs, where Billy would while away his lunch hour in the listening booths with a bun from Barton’s the bakers. This was where he first heard Bob Dylan (a fairly natural progression from the more saintly Simon & Garfunkel), and where he bought his very first chart single with his first ever wages, Rod Stewart’s ‘You Wear It Well’. He also remembers buying Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and playing it incessantly, like you do – ‘The one where he’s carrying a book on the front. It did my head in.’

  Although a little suspicious of David Bowie – he was, after all, to use the favoured vernacular of the time, ‘bent’ – the friends shared vinyl copies of Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and were never above a garish, TV-advertised treasure-trove like K-Tel’s 20 Golden Greats (‘Original artists! Original hits!’). ‘I was more of a singles man,’ Billy recalls, ‘I thought 45s were called 45s because they were 45p.’ Wiggy could be relied upon to shell out for Faces albums: A Nod Is As Good As A Wink … To A Blind Horse in 1971, Ooh La La in 1973. These were heady, voracious days.

  Girls? Who had time for girls? The knotty appeal of the inscrutable opposite sex was but a distraction to our dedicated pop cadets. Granted, going comprehensive had led Barking Abbey to introduce a rowing club into its extra-curriculum, and, as Billy freely admits, ‘Some of the tastiest women were in the rowing club. So we all joined.’ They were similarly motivated to sign up for the Methodists Association Youth Club (‘tasty girls from the Leftley estate’), even though they had to be confirmed to get in. And in many ways, they got over Bowie’s bentness because the girls at school loved him, and would go home at lunchtimes to listen to his LPs. But these lads weren’t going to allow unrequited kiss chase to rain on their hit parade.

  ‘I wanted to make noises like these records that I loved,’ recalls Wiggy. ‘But with the Faces it was really difficult because you didn’t know if you wanted to be the singer or the guitar player or the drummer or the keyboard player, every bit of it was so individual and so good.’ He plumped for the guitar – although had his Woolworths organ more closely resembled a Hammond & Leslie in ambience, it might’ve come a close runner-up. In 1972, Wiggy bought a Rudy Classic acoustic guitar, with nylon strings, and the attendant tune-a-day book. He couldn’t tune it, however, and had little interest in learning ‘Go And Tell Aunt Nancy’. ‘I was frustrated but turned on by the music.’

  In 1973, Billy got his hands on a harmonica, and they joined forces (with reel-to-reel forever rolling), Wiggy smashing out G, E minor, C and D, and Billy starting to sing his own words. Soon, they discovered the Rod Stewart songbook (‘It used a lot of really nice-sounding chords like F Sharp Minor seventh,’ Wiggy enthuses) and the Dylan songbook, both of which they devoured. In 1974, Billy’s dad bought him his first guitar, for sixteen pounds, a Spanish-style acoustic from Nathaniel Berry, a piano shop in Ripple Road. After much tuition from Wiggy, Billy could manage C, F and G on it, and so they ‘wrote some C, F and G stuff’ – approximately twenty original songs of their own in a two-year period.

  Enthused by their first big brush with popular music, Billy and Wiggy bought the company. Having eagerly soaked up the words to hit songs in Disco 45 magazine since 1971, they graduated to reading the New Musical Express, or the NME. More than just a 50-year-old weekly newspaper, this durable cultural touchstone tends to hit way-of-life status for whey-faced suburban and provincial boys (and it is mostly boys) who are too young to go out to the colourful-sounding gigs reviewed at the back and too broke to do much more than pore over the endless, magical singles and albums reviewed in the front. For young teens, it acts as a passport. For older teens, it’s a football team. For students, it’s a tool for meeting people in the bar. And even for some thirtysomethings who should know better it remains rock’s parish magazine.

  It is difficult to overstate the cyclical importance of the NME down the generations; and, to a lesser extent, Melody Maker and Sounds (although the former’s turned into a bouncy pop rag before being closed down in 2000 and the latter went in 1990). The weekly music press flourished in the 1970s, just when Generation Bragg needed it. Run by graduates of the hippie publishing underground, and staffed by a fair share of old jazzers sucking briar pipes, the ‘inkies’, as they became known during the glossy style-magazine boom of the 80s, acted as a lifeline to pop’s non-casual consumer. Around 1973, Billy and Wiggy joined the musical masons.

  In a book that is essentially about a musician, it is easy to see the world through pop-tinted, guitar-shaped spectacles. But for sheer unification at a difficult age, music has far-reaching social properties. Put into perspective, it is easy to see why Billy Bragg’s spiritual subscription to the music papers galvanised his ambitions to be a rock star.

  Music carries immeasurable commercial clout and export potential, but for a more objective overview it’s clearer to treat it, as publishing houses do, as a special interest or hobby, no differe
nt from trout fishing, canary breeding or period homes. As such, the NME and its subsequent glossy spin-offs, Smash Hits, Q, Mojo, Word et al., are specialist publications, there not to serve record buyers, but record enthusiasts.

  The fact that pop music provides a culture that permeates every corner of our lives and lifestyles, defines generations and soundtracks revolutions, should not distract from the fact that reading about rock is a big step on from listening to it. You can like pop music; you can love pop music; and you can join the vast, paying consensus who send singles and albums up and down the charts every weekend, without once being moved to pick up and read a weekly music paper. Those who do, and do so like addicts after a regular fix, are the anal retentives, the list-makers, the trainspotters, the chart-memorisers, the vinyl junkies, the fanclub-joiners, the catalogue completists, the record collectors, the indie saddoes … a publisher’s dream. And there are an awful lot of them about. Some of them form bands and become famous. Some get jobs in record companies or at the publications themselves. Others grow out of it. But there is an elementary distinction that separates the Billys and Wiggys from the rest of the population: you either listen to music, or else you read the sleeve while you’re listening to it.

  Once bitten, and forever smitten, Billy and Wiggy soon knew their NME – and, in the process, their enemy. Having never connected with the overblown likes of Led Zeppelin, Yes, Emerson, Lake or Palmer, they drew a line in the sand between themselves and the other kids at school. On their side was the blues-, soul-, and folk-influenced; on the other, ‘sixth-form music’ (a phrase which Billy stills spits out) – Deep Purple, Queen and Pink Floyd, whose 1973 opus The Dark Side Of The Moon was ‘huge’ at Barking Abbey Comp.

  This keen distinction, 80 per cent musical, 20 per cent class war (classroom war, at any rate), was not one that would leave Billy when he left school, grew up and broadened his mind. He retains an instinctive ‘thing’ about those in voluntary higher education, who clearly represent the dreaded middle classes somewhere deep and murky within Billy’s unreconstructed psyche. ‘That’s partly why I’ve never been big on drugs,’ he admits. ‘Because that was something sixth-formers did.’ He and his compatriots were ‘generally against people who went on to further education’. (When Billy was fourteen, the school leaving age went up from fifteen to sixteen, thereby adding another year to his penance, and scarring his better judgement for life.)

  Very loosely, the musical battle lines partitioned authenticity from artifice. As far as Billy was concerned, Dylan meant it, man, while, say, Alice Cooper was just a clown. A glance at the cover of one of his school exercise books of the period reveals some germane doodles: a representation in biro of Alice Cooper looking unwell, ‘after an attack by Dylan’ according to the caption, and a copy of School’s Out smashed into pieces. These primitive drawings are the propaganda of an emblematic war between Billy and Mark Whittaker, the Alice Cooper fan who sat next to him. Here is the news: ‘Alice is bent; Dylan is great.’

  Ah, you knew where you were in them days.

  As the song by The The goes, ‘It ain’t easy to be born in an unknown city.’ For anybody brought up in a satellite town, the feeling of dislocation is intense; it crawls beneath your skin and grits your teeth; it’s like there’s a party going on every night and you’re not invited. Teenagers feel disenfranchised enough – by their parents, the education system, society – without being geographically disabled on top. Rich local history is no use to a teenager teetering on the brink of self-discovery: he’d readily swap all the mediaeval remains on the map for a decent gig venue. Billy Bragg was luckier than most suburban outcasts: once past the age of locomotive consent, he could get into the city and – if he timed it right and left before the encore – back home again.

  At sixteen, like so many natives of the suburbs, Billy began to get restless. He left school with one O Level to his name (a grade A in English, which he’d taken a year early), having spent his final six months at Barking Abbey Comp anywhere but. This spell of truancy was not to fulfil the prophecies of his school reports, but a direct reaction to bullying. ‘There were some kids in our year who were very violent, and it was only a matter of time before they got around to you.’ This unsavoury wannabe firm had a technique: they’d pick on a likely-looking victim and, while four or five of them lay in wait inside an empty classroom, the hardest one would throw the meat into them – ‘Then they’d knock the shit out of you.’ When Billy’s number came up, and one of the tinpot racketeers punched him square in the face followed by the dreaded order ‘Get in there’, he legged it – ‘and I didn’t come back’.

  With both his parents working, it was a pushover to stay away from school and bum around the house or the park. Billy admits he was feeling ‘cocky’ about his impending O Levels because he had English Language already under his belt. And then, in the week of his exams, he fell in love with a girl from another school and couldn’t eat or speak, let alone remember in what year the Corn Laws were repealed.

  The girl’s name was Kim. This cursed experience of one-way romance later found its way into a song, ‘The Saturday Boy’ (on 1984’s Brewing Up album), but at this confused stage, all Billy could do was spew out his love in an entire exercise book full of poems, which, naturally, he presented to Kim – with no discernible comeback whatsoever. (They’d met on a week-long drama course in North Wales, working with the Theatre Clwyd – ‘I thought I’d made some sort of mystical connection.’) As it says in the song, ‘In the end it took me a dictionary/To find out the meaning of the word unrequited/While she was giving herself for free/At a party to which I was never invited.’

  As a postscript, on 10 April 1985, when Billy was playing a Save The GLC gig at Barking Assembly Hall, Kim turned up with her mum clutching ‘the damn book’, and presented herself to the would-be suitor of yesteryear backstage. Acute embarrassment was the order of the day. ‘No doubt the book will turn up at Sotheby’s one day. And I’ll buy it!’

  So. O Levels. Thanks to ‘a girl not old enough to shave her legs’, he failed the lot. The warnings had been there in his school reports (‘still not getting down to the sort of work needed for O Level … shows no interest in this subject whatsoever’), and in the results of his mocks (two and a half per cent for French, which wasn’t actually the lowest – Jackie Ewing got one and a quarter per cent and she became a policewoman). Billy’s teachers had him branded as ‘amiable but lazy’ and, even today, Billy doesn’t argue with their evaluation. ‘I was bored, but they don’t like to write that do they? Homework wasn’t a strong point. I still have dreams where I wake up thinking I’ve not done my homework, and I’m relieved when I realise that I’m actually 40.’ A self-professed unnatural in the exam situation, Billy would later take four goes before he passed his driving test.

  Wiggy passed ‘about seventeen’ O Levels (Billy’s exaggeration), Robert Handley ‘had them coming out of his ears’, but nobody ever asked to see them, which was a comfort to Billy No Levels, and years later formed the inspiration for another song, ‘To Have And To Have Not’, which would appear on his first album in 1983: ‘Just because you’re better than me, doesn’t mean I’m lazy.’

  ‘When I left school, you didn’t really have to have O Levels, just a nice suit. It was literally, go out, buy a suit, go to the interview and start a week later.’ Thus, unencumbered by pieces of paper, Billy put on the qualification suit and started work at Overseas Containers Ltd at the other end of the A13, who’d just opened a big container depot at Tilbury and a sub depot at Barking (‘everybody was working for them round our way’).

  ‘To Have And To Have Not’ sums up Billy’s job-seeking experience: ‘If you look the part you’ll get the job/In last year’s trousers and your old school shoes/The truth is, son, it’s a buyers market/They can afford to pick and choose.’

  At OCL, Billy was stamping bits of paper, processing claims by firms whose goods had been damaged in the containers in transit. His immediate boss, though no tyrant, s
at right opposite him (‘it was worse than being at school’), and after just six months, the would-be white-collar wonder jacked it in – ‘much to the chagrin of my parents’. He left the lights of London behind him and bummed around France for the summer.

  On his return, he got work as a bank messenger at the British wing of an American bank, Manufacturers Hanover Limited, literally in the shadow of the Bank of England on Princes Street. It was a vast improvement on rubberstamping detail at OCL for the itchy-footed seventeen-year-old. Some days the job entailed ‘doing in-trays and tea making’, but a large chunk of it meant wandering around the City and the West End on foot in a suit, ‘busy going nowhere’. It gave the non-deskbound young Billy ‘a bit of latitude’ – plus the chance to pay regular visits to Revolver Records on Cheapside in his lunch hour and soak up the sounds of the mid-70s. During his eighteen-month stretch at MHL, he also became a Rank Xerox Key Operator, which would serve him well during the cut-and-paste DIY design boom of punk.

  Without actually knowing it, he was a punk rocker waiting to happen.

  But in this story, you don’t get to punk without passing the Rolling Stones.

  3. EXILE ON MAGNET

  Forming a band, 1974–1977

  It’s a revelation/The next generation will be/Hear me

  Junior Murvin, ‘Police & Thieves’

  THERE WAS ONE rock’n’roll group in the pre-punk 1970s who defined Billy and Wiggy’s musical stockade as vividly as The Clash would do during punk – the Rolling Stones (a bunch of Kent ponces, but that wasn’t the point). The two vinyl junkies discovered the Stones out of necessity after the Faces had packed up in late 1975. They switched their unconditional allegiance sideways and went back-catalogue mad. This proved an enviable epiphany. Imagine coming in on ‘Fool To Cry’ and the Black And Blue album, and being granted instant access to such vintage delights as 1972’s rough-edged Exile On Main Street or the epoch-making Let It Bleed. Our boys tucked in, methodically purchasing albums one by one whenever funds would allow, and learning them. ‘They were the bee’s knees,’ says Wiggy. ‘They defined what being a band was all about.’ Their archaeological enthusiasm also meant tracing back the Stones’ influences: Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, blues and soul – an acceptable kind of further education. Jagger and Richards opened it all up. Wiggy recalls the knock-on effect, excitedly, ‘We wanted to have a band, we wanted to tour America and stay up all night like the Rolling Stones!’