Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  There was a feature in the NME about Randy Newman and the woes of touring at the time, and it was headlined ‘THE AGONY AND THE AGONY’. The blurb went: ‘If you have any desire to become a rock star, don’t read this feature.’

  Needless to say, Billy and Wiggy didn’t read it.

  Free of the noose that was the Barking Abbey school tie (Wiggy left in 1976), they did form a band. And although America wouldn’t come until very much later, boy did they stay up all night a lot.

  They didn’t become Riff Raff until 1977, but the seeds of the band were sown in 1975, when Billy and Wiggy’s two-man project had outgrown its own manpower limitations. Their first saviour came in the unlikely guise of a sixth-former. From grammar school.

  He was Robert Handley, from round the corner, number 106, Park Avenue. No stranger, he’d been to the same infants and junior schools as Wiggy and Billy, but in the year above Billy. He owned shitloads of Marvel comics, and had The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour at the age of twelve. They remember him coming round with a Paul McCartney violin bass to jam with them. ‘He was dreadful,’ says Billy. Undeterred, Robert gave up the bass on the spot and became the drummer – which is what he’d wanted anyway. ‘We weren’t really aware of bass,’ Wiggy confesses. ‘You don’t really hear it on records. We dealt with things in order of importance, and bass was optional.’

  The next recruit to the band with no name was Steven ‘Ricey’ Rice from Rainham, who also went to Barking Abbey, and played keyboards. Spotting a good potential ‘mad frontman’, they co-opted Ricey and his equipment, and he was soon sharing what music papers then called ‘the vocal chores’ with Billy. Ricey was big on Monty Python humour – ‘a real character,’ confirms Wiggy. ‘Lovely bloke.’

  So Robert would come round for backroom sessions with a Boys Brigade snare drum under his arm (it was so loud they had to cover it with teatowels). By dint of his one year’s seniority (or three in Wiggy’s case), Robert cut an impressive figure. ‘He was the first punk rocker I knew,’ says Billy. ‘He was always a bit strange, Robert.’ He was ahead of the trends and went to see The Damned and Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers before the other three knew what punk was.

  ‘There weren’t many punk rockers in East London. We might as well have been living on the moon. Heavy metal was the only live music in the pubs round our way. I think you had to be in West London or Bromley to really understand it.’

  Robert, who would’ve enjoyed living on the moon, played it weird. A trainee undertaker at the Co-Op, he would remove the little silver plastic Jesuses from crucifixes, pin them to his lapels and wear them to gigs, which usually earned him a wide berth from the others at bus stops.

  ‘We thought he might as well have walked around with a big sign on his back saying please feel free to kick the shit out of me.’

  In 1976, Billy was spending his lunch breaks at Revolver Records on Cheapside. He vividly recalls a rep coming into Revolver with ‘So It Goes’ by Nick Lowe, the very first release on Stiff records (historic catalogue number: BUY 1). It may not have been punk, but it was a link. Revolver was also the place where Billy later became exposed to Elvis Costello, who blew his mind: ‘I thought, Wow! This is it! Jackson Browne with attitude, I’ll have some of that!’

  Every year, Robert’s parents would go away for a couple of weeks and leave him to hold the fort, so the newly hatched four-piece would decamp there, ‘stay up all night and eat horrible takeaway food’. By now, they boasted two amplifiers, one of them a Burns purchased second hand from a local lad called Paul Charman, who’d previously sold Wiggy his first electric guitar: ‘a fifteen-pound Kay job’ with really hard strings that rattled when you plugged it in (this very instrument ended up being used on a Billy Bragg record in 1991 – the bottleneck parts on ‘North Sea Bubble’ on Don’t Try This At Home). The all-new electric outfit would plug in and play and play and play and tape all evening, and then listen back to it all when the neighbours started banging on the wall. (‘That was half the fun,’ says Wiggy of the playback. ‘Still is.’)

  Most young boys form a band for the sole purpose of sitting around trying to come up with a name, but this was not the case with Barking’s backroomsters, who just got on with it – if they were referred to at all it was as Ricey’s Mates or ‘that lot’. But with a twenty-number set to their no-name and all of the requisite jack plugs, they were a real rock’n’roll band. Billy was the natural leader, Robert was the band nutter, Ricey was the shirt-off sex symbol-in-waiting and Wiggy was both the keeper of the rock’n’roll flame and the one who knew about equipment (‘If it’s got knobs on, I usually know what it does and how it can change your life’).

  ‘We were a bunch of chancers with no future,’ Billy triumphantly declares.

  Regardless of ability or prospects, they were, in the classic rock’n’roll sense, a gang, and were soon venturing mob-handed outside Barking on gig expeditions. They saw their mentors, the Stones, on the Black And Blue tour. They (minus Wiggy) saw The Eagles at Wembley. They witnessed The Who at Charlton.

  Although Wiggy had caught ‘probably one of the greatest gigs of all time’ inside the local catchment area – the Faces at East Ham Granada in 1973 (Billy didn’t go, and desperately regrets it now) – as a rule, you had to put the miles in if you wanted to see anyone more thrilling than Alvin Lee at the Dagenham Roundhouse.

  They were presently forced to travel if they wanted to play, too. Robert put the tin hat on backroom rehearsals when he bought a Premier drum kit in black, white and grey, so they graduated to practising in a room at Gascoigne School with egg boxes on the walls and ceiling. (In fact, the band used this Victorian workhouse-like building until it was demolished, the first but not the last time they would bring the house down.) But the real rock’n’roll adventures took place in a suitably padded room next to the Magnet joinery on the A13, part of a complex that offered ‘parking, storage, refreshments’ for £1.50 an hour and threw in the constant blitzkrieg of lorries barrelling past for free. Like the band, it had no name, but they knew it, simply, as Magnet, and it certainly had its attractions.

  Magnet became the venue for jam sessions that went on from Saturday morning to Sunday night, ‘fuelled by beer and being away from our parents’. These weren’t rehearsals as such, because the boys weren’t strictly rehearsing for anything, but they felt important. The combination of adrenaline, Party Sevens, Smirnoff vodka and ‘Smarties’ made these sessions an end rather than a means. As Billy says, ‘We didn’t have a name, we didn’t do gigs, but we existed.’

  Predictably, they recorded everything, originals, fifteen-minute explorations of ‘Midnight Rambler’, and endless cover versions: Chuck Berry, the Faces, the Stones, Motown standards, and later, The Clash.

  They would emerge from Magnet deaf, sweaty and itchy, due to the Rockwool insulation. Life was sweet.

  * * *

  ‘Please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock’n’roll band,’ wrote Noel Gallagher, but he knew as well as anyone that it was a futile request. Billy and Wiggy had already invested theirs.

  This was not an easy time for Billy to put his faith in anything else. Diagnosed in the middle of 1975, his dad was dying of lung cancer. It took him eighteen months to go. ‘He’d smoked like a chimney for 40 years and never had a day’s illness,’ Billy remembers. ‘And then one day he just began to wither away.’

  ‘You knew it was happening but you didn’t mention it,’ says Wiggy, who was as close as anyone outside the family to the unmentionable tragedy unfolding within. ‘I’d go in quite a lot, and on a Monday night, we’d sit and watch The Sweeney, me, him and his dad. Sometimes he’d be fine, the next time he’d not be as well, and you just didn’t want to mention it. But we were aware it was going on.’

  ‘It felt like everything stopped while he was ill,’ Billy remembers. ‘He was definitely going to die, you could see he was going to die, but until it happened, everyone was in slow motion.’

  The band were Billy’s salvatio
n. For Dennis, barely over 50, it would be death. Wiggy sums up the paradox: ‘There was this heavy emotional thing going on, but we were still banging away. Billy was very quiet about it. Glimpses of it came out in the songs he was writing. It was really sad, it dragged on for so long. It was really horrible. He coped really well with it. A lot of it went in very deep, and it’s still very deep. For a long time, I think Billy thought he’d never end up being a father.’

  Up in the box room at Billy’s mum’s is a box, but not just any old box. It’s been up there since Billy packed it in 1976.

  When Dennis Bragg was finally released from his suffering in October of that year, aged just 52, one of Billy’s twelve cousins, Mel, came to live with them at Park Avenue. She took the spare room, so Billy set about clearing out his accumulated junk, all eighteen years’ worth. Some of it was wheat – enough to fill a trunk – most of it chaff, but the effect of sifting it was more than just a belated spring clean, it formed a symbolic pyre, upon which the first act of a teenager’s life was burnt. The very fact that he was ordered and forward thinking enough to put a trunkful of memories and artefacts into domestic storage demonstrates what a fastidious archivist Billy Bragg turned out to be. An incurable hoarder, in other words.

  Today, the box serves as a musty time capsule; the life’s inventory of a boy who was about to turn nineteen, released from the slow torture of waiting for his father to die, who trusted that Dennis would understand if he used this point in his life to close one chapter and open a fresh one. He packed away the treasures of his life-so-far into the heavy, brown chest, and metaphorically buried it.

  In the course of researching this book, Billy decided to finally relieve his mum of the bulky time capsule, and move it to his own attic, reclaiming the first eighteen years of his life, if you like. The day he took it away was one pricked with emotion for Marie. An indomitable, active, proud, humorous woman with what is now internationally recognised as the Bragg nose, Marie is one of those people whose life has been characterised by coping, and who makes you wonder how you’d have fared under the same circumstances (with a sneaking suspicion you might not be up to the job). Although it’s over twenty years since her husband was taken from her, the fact that Marie still occupies the house she and Dennis first moved into when they got married reinforces a bond between them that time can never erode.

  Not everything mother and son unearth from the trunk is manifestly significant, but the sum of its parts paints a precious picture of Billy Bragg up to eighteen. Many of the dog-eared effects tell tales, not least a cuddly toy dog whose lustre has been lost down the years, but which almost brings tears to Marie Bragg’s eyes. She recalls coveting it in the shop window as she saved up to buy it for her new-born son, knowing she couldn’t really afford it (or at least that there were more important things to buy).

  A selective inventory runs like this:

  A reel-to-reel tape.

  A fish made in a school woodwork class.

  A whoopee cushion.

  An oversized plastic nose with moustache attached. (Well, he needed the moustache.)

  A cub scouts Leaping Wolf badge.

  A bruised TV21 annual.

  A school economics folder bearing culturally significant ballpoint graffiti (Elvis, Andy Capp, Steeleye Span).

  A box that once contained the equivalent of My First After Shave (Woodhue For Men by Fabergé), now full of plastic soldiers and footballers, a Red Indian figure (‘That used to really move me,’ mentions Billy, as he handles it), an elephant with no ears from the very fine Britains range, a gorilla, and a selection of jelly-like monsters for the end of your pencil.

  A Dinky car containing superhero the Green Hornet.

  A bucket handle. (What earthly significance can possibly lurk within a plastic bucket handle? A great deal if, in May 1976, it was attached to the pail thrown into a perspiring Earls Court crowd by Mick Jagger when the Barking boys ventured into town to see the Stones. Ricey managed to wrestle it from the scrum.)

  Assorted stones and a snatch of sheep wool from Trewern in North Wales where Billy decamped on the drama field trip in O Level year and fell for the unobtainable Kim. The fleece was also a trophy: it said ‘I’ve seen a sheep!’

  Some issues of Disco 45 (1971–1974).

  An autograph book proudly containing the signatures of the Mayor of Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jimmy Greaves and the presenters of ITV’s Magpie.

  Instructions for various Airfix models.

  A holiday brochure named, enticingly, Your France, which makes the place look like a Silvikrin-advert paradise, and which inspired Billy to take his summer sabbatical there after he’d packed in his insurance clerk’s job in 1975, in an impulsive bid for Bohemia. With £100 in his pocket, he thumbed down the west coast of France and across to the Mediterranean, kipping at youth hostels, on the beach and ‘in hedges’. He saw Marseilles and Nice, stayed at a commune for a week with one of his brother’s teachers in Menton, and turned back at the Italian border, when he got the word that his dad was going into hospital for his first exploratory operation. He’d exorcised the gypsy in him. Except he hadn’t, as we shall see.

  Countless school exercise books, covered, as was required, in pages torn from the NME. In one, containing some early Bragg poetry, there is an eye-catching verse entitled ‘Roll Over Mrs T’. Having been written circa 1973 – when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education, and earning notoriety for scrapping free milk for schoolchildren over seven – it initially appears to be a nascent example of Billy Bragg’s anti-Conservative invective, but transpires to have been directed at a hated French teacher with the same initial (‘I reckon all French people are bent,’ it rages).

  On the subject of this period fondness for the term ‘bent’ – in retrospect, a somewhat off-colour insult – Billy is unruffled. ‘I had no idea what bent was,’ he says, in his own defence. ‘I never saw or knew anybody who was bent. I went on a Rock Against Racism march in 1978, and inadvertently ended up standing under huge banners that said SING IF YOU’RE GLAD TO BE GAY, and we didn’t realise we were standing under them until Tom Robinson came on and sang the song and the blokes around us started kissing each other.’

  Billy and his mum have been known to engage in a little repartee about euphemisms for homosexuality, he teasing her about her use of the adjective ‘funny’. (When, in 1991, Billy released the single ‘Sexuality’, with its calling-card line, ‘Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away’, Marie expressed fears that ‘people might think he was funny’. His reply: ‘Funny, Mummy? I’m bloody hilarious!’)

  Like any mother and son, there is an element of one putting up with the other’s cross-generational quirks, but Marie is incredibly proud of Stephen (as she still calls him), but not for the Billy Bragg reasons that get him invited on to late-night TV discussion shows, more for the fact that he’s given her a beautiful, bouncing grandson.

  ‘At least I didn’t grow up funny,’ Billy joshes to his mum.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t grown up at all,’ is her reply. She isn’t joking.

  A month after Billy’s dad died, as if to mark the beginning of Act Two, the band played their very first gig. Tragically, they’d christened themselves The Flying Tigers.

  The Grand Rock Contest For Amateur Groups was a talent contest held at the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, on Saturday, 13 November 1976. It cost £5 to enter, and Billy had filled in the form while his dad had been on his last legs – as a result, his mind was understandably not on the job and, without thinking, he entered the band’s name as The Flying Tigers. ‘There’s no significance,’ he says. ‘Everyone hated it.’ Wiggy remembers the name Captain Mombassa & His Smelly Boathouse Oars coming up as a possibility, but it was ‘a bit too long’. Band Of Hope And Glory was another reject, as was Special Fried Rice. Not a lot in it really.

  The Tigers were allocated an eight-minute slot. They selected three covers that they were dead sure about: ‘Sweet Little Rock’n’
Roller’, ‘It’s Only Rock And Roll’ and ‘Twisting The Night Away’. ‘I can’t tell you what a buzz it was,’ says Billy, who still has the photographs taken on the day. Although the band look a little lost on the vast stage, Ricey cuts a surreal dash dressed as a Viking (Rick Wakeman-influenced cloak, and braid around his trousers). Billy has on a shiny, wet-look leatherette T-shirt and a pair of ‘Lionel Blairs’, which somewhat undermines the punk look.

  Of all rock’n’roll coincidences, on the very same bill as The Flying Tigers were a Leytonstone metal band called Iron Maiden, who’d only formed that May, and who would, six years later, knock Barbra Streisand off the top of the album charts with The Number Of The Beast. That Iron Maiden.

  But no matter how much the rags-to-riches story demands it, they didn’t win the Grand Rock Contest For Amateur Groups. And nor did the Tigers. It was won by a fourteen-year-old in a West Ham bobble hat called Dougie Boyle who played guitar like Carlos Santana. (Astonishingly, in 1988, Boyle was hired by Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant to play in his backing band: he played guitar on the Manic Nirvana and Fate Of Nations albums.) That’s rock’n’roll for you. For Billy and gang, however, it really was the taking part that counted: ‘We’d been blooded. We’d played in front of an audience, we’d got applause. My God, it was incredible!’