Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Worse than that, it put paid to their wheeze of telling the locals that they were The Stranglers.

  ‘The Stranglers were proper pop stars,’ Billy says. ‘Such twats.’ Drummer Jet Black, by then the first punk to have turned 30, was like their mum – he’d send the other Stranglers into town with £30 for the week’s shopping and bassist Jean Jacques Burnel would come back with £30’s worth of Wagon Wheels.

  In December, Sounds wrote that The Stranglers were ‘the first new wave outfit to get it together in a cottage in the country’, which was so very nearly true. When they moved in to Bearshanks, the O’Lochlainns’ marriage was evidently falling apart, and all things considered, it seemed like a very good time for Riff Raff to move out. But where to?

  The answer came in the form of local girl Katy Spurrell, who the band had met in February at a gig at the Bridge Hotel. Billy and Katy hadn’t yet but would later form a romantic attachment, and it was through her that all four members of Riff Raff moved into her parents’ home – ‘a lovely detached house on the edge of Oundle’ – for six months. This noble act of charity towards a bunch of Barking oiks was a clear indication that veterinary surgeon Andrew Spurrell and his wife Carol were anything but stuffy, green-welly Oundle locals. In fact, they turned out to be liberal-minded groovers beyond the call of duty. As Billy sees it, the strange new lodgers provided ‘a wonderful distraction from nice, straight, middle-class family life. They were lovely, but they were a bit out of kilter, and we became their badge of honour.’

  The Spurrells, of Welsh ancestry, had three children, Matthew, Katy and Fenella, none of whom, reassuringly, went to Oundle School. Andrew, whose father was Oundle’s local doctor before him, is an amateur dramatics nut and a keen member of the local Gilbert & Sullivan Society and the Stamford Shakespeare Company – who put on plays in the grounds of a sixteenth-century manor house, the largest open-air theatre after Regents Park – and worth a mention because he once talked Wiggy and Ruan into playing a gala night there. At the time, Carol Spurrell bred Chihuahuas. Between them, they increased Riff Raff’s local approval rating by association.

  And not only did the Spurrells put a very pleasant, middle-class roof over Riff Raff’s heads in 1978, but, like the O’Lochlainns, they encouraged them in their quest for rock’n’roll supremacy, to the unlikely extent of Andrew driving them to gigs in his Ford Cortina.

  An instantly likeable James Herriot figure, he’s still Oundle’s local vet, and jokes that he’d like Richard Briers to play him if they ever make a film of Billy Bragg’s life.

  ‘They hadn’t got any money,’ is his reasoning for taking Riff Raff in. Though Billy suggests that it was Andrew’s theatrical bent that drew the band to him (‘I always thought that made it easier for us to connect with him’), Andrew cannily believes it was more likely his daughter.

  He also dismisses the description of the lads as punk rockers. ‘They weren’t punk rockers. They were just normal. They slept when I was at work.’ (Mind you, he suspects that Kevin kept a bottle of gin under his bed.) Billy describes those six months as ‘a regular sort of life’. It was a much-needed oasis of ordered calm after the weirdness of the previous stint at Bearshanks; it wasn’t just rock’n’roll, there were also goats to look after, and a lamb they named Pretty Vacant. One particularly oversized goat among the herd became Desmond The Mutant. It accidentally hanged itself one night trying to reach some leaves on a tree while tethered to another one, and Billy had the job of burying it, which involved breaking its legs to get it in the hole.

  He extended his animal husbandry skills at the Spurrells’ by helping out in the vet’s surgery, but was put off by the experience of carrying a huge greyhound out the back in a black bin liner after it had been put to sleep.

  In return for any help, the Spurrells allowed Riff Raff to rehearse in their garage and play at their garden parties. Andrew would offer them gin and tonics when he got in from work (Robert was always a taker). In Billy’s words, they ‘really put up with a lot of teenage behaviour’. It was a crucial break for the boys, or else they’d have had to go back to their mums, and the band would have suffered a premature demise. In the true spirit of over-accommodation, Andrew even found himself transporting Riff Raff and all their gear right the way down to London (his Cortina had a trailer on the back). The gig was at semi-legendary punk hostelry the Hope & Anchor in Islington, and Billy remembers hurtling down the A1 at 90 mph.

  Andrew has a clear memory of the night: ‘We picked up the PA system in Peterborough, put it on the roof rack, they sat in the back with the backline on their knees. There were eight of us. I even set the equipment up! And packed it away afterwards while they talked to their fans. You could say I was their de facto manager.’

  On the way home, the touring party stopped on Islington Road and picked up a Chinese takeaway, guaranteeing the Cortina stank of sweet and sour pork balls for days afterwards. It shouldn’t happen to a vet.

  Although Billy, Wiggy, Robert and Little Kevin had left home, they’d effectively been living with surrogate parents ever since, in proper little home-from-homes to boot. They’d had it easy, in other words, and it was time for them to suffer. Like artists.

  It wasn’t that the Spurrells evicted Riff Raff, nor that the boys broke the house rules or outstayed their welcome, but six months is six months, and Andrew helped them find a new place to live. (He continued to drive them to gigs after they’d moved out, and thanks to the continuing Katy connection, Billy has never lost touch. ‘He always comes back to see us,’ says Andrew. ‘And when he does, William is still the same as he was, there are no frills.’)

  In 1979, Riff Raff began a fifteen-month stint in Studentland. The four of them moved into a rented house at 15, North Street, owned by a taxidermist. (From real animals to stuffed ones – there was a mounted badger in the attic.) North Street is a narrow terrace of mostly eighteenth-century houses with no front gardens: the pavement is your doorstep and the front door opens straight into the living room. These days, it is relatively shy of traffic. In the 70s, it was a main artery for articulated lorries hammering, usually during the hours of darkness, from the Midlands to Harwich. As they flew past, Riff Raff’s new home would literally shake.

  Within no time, it was named Wobbling Heights (or ‘Wobbling Ice’ as, again, Zig Zag magazine misheard it). ‘It was our university,’ says Billy. ‘Meeting weird people, taking weird substances, staying up all night. It was somewhere between The Young Ones and the Manson family.’

  A slender, three-storey house, number 15 was one-up, one-down, one-in-the-middle. It had no shower and no central heating. The top room (where nobody ventured much, but Robert called it his own) was full of dead butterflies. A single Calor Gas heater meant that the downstairs lounge was the only habitable room in cold weather, and that’s where everybody would sleep, huddled up in sleeping bags. The odd outbreak of crabs was not uncommon. A Clash poster was soon erected in the toilet, a shot of them posing in some toilet cubicle, to which a poet later added the legend: ‘REBEL ROCKERS WHO SHIT STANDING UP’.

  Wobbling Heights had a black cat with no name, who used to sleep atop the stuffed badger, once it was brought down to the lounge and placed in the front window. Though no one liked the cat, the cat worshipped Kevin, and it would express its undying love by presenting him with bits of mouse. (Still, at least one resident of the house was eating properly – when a potato lorry collided with another lorry on North Street and spilled its load, Riff Raff could be seen scrabbling around in the road, collecting spuds for their tea.)

  They rarely cooked, as the electric stove had a habit of giving shocks. The toilet came away from the wall if you sat too heavily on it, and the bathroom sink leant precariously if you were ever foolhardy enough to fill it up with water. People talk of the University of Life (formerly Life Polytechnic) – well, the tenants of number 15, North Street had just enrolled on a one-year course.

  That winter, during a particularly cold snap (Oundle was virtually cut
off from the world by heavy snow), Riff Raff had assumed the massed-sleeping-bags position for shared body warmth downstairs, when, in the middle of the night, the street lights went out, the house started shuddering, and the deafening noise outside convinced them all that the end of the world was nigh. It turned out to be no more than a larger-than-normal juggernaut, blocking out the lamps as it rumbled past, and it was soon gone into the night – but they truly felt as if they’d come close. This was the Cold War, after all, and the foursome were already living like the dead.

  ‘Initially it was fun,’ says Billy. ‘But it was pretty horrible as well. It got too squalid really.’

  Wobbling Heights, for all its architectural faults and no mod cons, became an ideal HQ for Riff Raff; Bomber Command for a bunch of supposed anarchists, a safehouse for the detritus of Oundle, and a parent-free drop-in centre for the local schoolgirls, who would pop by for a cigarette and occasionally bring sandwiches. Riff Raff signed on, did gigs, drank pinched Black Tower wine, lived like the students they categorically were not, and frankly courted notoriety with the attitude, ‘Well, if they think we’re a blot on the landscape, let’s give them something to twitch their net curtains about.’

  Robert Handley proved himself adept at planting ideas among the neighbours. For instance, they never took their empty milk bottles back to the Co-Op, or indeed rinsed them out. As a consequence, the table in the kitchen – for which there wasn’t a great deal of culinary demand – became a kind of art installation made of unwashed milk bottles in ‘various states of decomposition’. In fine Withnail And I style, nobody went in there. Eventually, as word got around of the North Street Dairy Mountain, Riff Raff were accused of artificially putting up the price of milk in the area. Next thing anyone knew, thanks to some expert Handley rumour-mongering, they were actually saving the bottles to use for Molotov cocktails come the revolution. Within 24 hours of this one getting out, a Co-Op van arrived and kindly took the whole lot away. Notoriety travels fast.

  As does the scent of sexual availability. Riff Raff never really experienced the inconvenience of steady girlfriends until they got to Oundle. ‘There were women around,’ Billy admits. ‘Before that, there weren’t any around. How were we gonna find women? If they weren’t gonna come and knock on the door and say, “Shag me”, we didn’t have a clue. Not that they ever did that in Oundle, but at least they showed interest. They knew we were in a band, they knew we were up late, and everyone knew you could come round our house and have a smoke. We became a centre for all that sort of stuff.’

  Smoking and canoodling are, as anyone who’s ever lived in sub-zero housing knows, both surefire methods of keeping warm. Riff Raff also ensured that one of their number was always romantically entangled with a girl who worked directly over the road, in the Oundle School refectory – this meant left-overs. If push came to shove, and the life of the Cratchitts became unbearable, Billy had an army-style greatcoat with ‘poacher’s pockets’, an excellent way of liberating pork pies from Safeway (‘a regular occurrence’, he admits, but he is not proud of the fact).

  If solids were in short supply, there was always a flagon of Ruddle’s County from the Angel pub. They called it Jekyll & Hyde, for obvious reasons, and Billy recalls plenty of ‘Ruddles-induced oblivion. We’d wake up the next morning and say, “Oh my God, did I really say that? I don’t even know that woman and she’s only fifteen.” Dreadful.’ Ricey would frequently drive up on a Friday for some r’n’r from Ford’s, ‘and the whole weekend would be lost’. He was often accompanied by his semi-legendary mate Steamy – a big-hearted, larger-than-life nutter who worked the high-powered steam-wash at the factory, and whose party trick was to hold his breath until he went blue if you wouldn’t do what he wanted.

  Crazy scenes. But it wasn’t all sexually-transmitted disease leaflets, shoplifting and debauchery. The band were still very much ‘go’, and rock’n’roll paid their rent. An Oundle lad called Pete Goodman became essential to Riff Raff’s movements: he had a van, and routinely drove them out to hotspots like Clopton, five miles south of Oundle, for gigs (he would also occasionally dep for Kevin on bass). The local bands, it seems, didn’t much care for Riff Raff, even if the punters did. ‘Not only were we punks,’ explains Billy. ‘But because we had a record out, we were a real, proper band, and they were just playing at it. To be honest, there wasn’t much of a scene.’

  Peterborough’s one punk band, called The Now, had split up by 1978, although, to their credit, like Riff Raff, they did get a single out, ‘Development Corporation’. Their drummer, Joe MacColl, and his partner, Brenda Woods, became great friends of the Wobbling Heights lot, eventually moving from Peterborough, where Joe worked at Andy’s Records, to Stoke Doyle, which is little more than a row of houses between Oundle and Pilton. It’s about one horse short of a one-horse town. The sign claims it is ‘twinned with Barcelona’. I wonder if Barcelona knows about this.

  They still live here, in a lovely, low-ceilinged place (beams, roaring fire, cat) that was, when they first squatted here, not lovely at all – there was grass growing through the floor, and no toilet connection. Along with the Spurrells, Brenda and Joe are another point of contact with Oundle that Billy has been careful to keep through the years. In fact, the couple – who these days run a local chip van – have an impressive collection of postcards Billy has sent them from whichever corner of the globe he’s in since going professional. It’s unusual enough for the rest of us to stay in touch with old friends or college room-mates, but a rock musician?! There’s plenty about Billy Bragg to mark him out as different from the music biz herd, but the more you find out about the importance he invests in old pals and family, the more convincing his political focus on the power of the community.

  In 1978, the odds on Billy and Joe becoming friends at all were slim, as Brenda explains: ‘The Oundle bands didn’t like the Peterborough bands, because they thought they were coming after their girls.’

  But Joe had a sneaking respect for Riff Raff, as he’d enjoyed ‘I Wanna Be A Cosmonaut’ in the shop, unaware that they were ‘an Oundle band’. He and Brenda even saw them at the Wirrina. Stout Labourites (the old, left-wing kind) and hardened peace campaigners, the couple had no time for the Peterborough–Oundle wars, and had allies in both camps. They were soon part of the Wobbling Heights universe, and beyond. As Billy says, ‘Brenda and Joe became family.’

  Put the three of them in a room together today, and the Riff Raff years come flooding back (these were truly college days without the college, just as rich with stories of squalor and bad behaviour). After The Now, Joe joined The Name, also from Peterborough, a mod five-piece who later (in 1980) also pulled off the trick of getting a single out, on the Din Disc label during the UK’s first mod revival. They even toured with fleeting New Mod luminaries The Lambrettas, The Purple Hearts and The Chords (‘The Ocean Colour Scene of their day,’ spots Billy). During The Name’s two-year lifespan, they took Riff Raff down to London as their support band at a Hope and Anchor gig. The proprietor apparently said, ‘Fuckin’’ell! If I’d known you were gonna bring Riff Raff, neither of you would be playing.’

  Of Billy at that time, Joe remarks, ‘He certainly lived up to his nickname’ (i.e. Billy Bonkers, a punk pseudonym inspired by Willy Wonka of Chocolate Factory fame). The endless local gig circuit meant that Riff Raff were everywhere, they were well and truly in Northamptonshire’s face: the Focus Club, Dogsthorpe; Victoria Hall, Oundle; Oundle Rugby Club (‘Bar applied for’); Warmington Football Club Dance (‘Pancake race. £1. Supersound disco’); even the US Air Force base at Alconbury. Of these bread-and-butter dates, Billy recalls, ‘There’d always be a break in the middle for a fight.’

  Riff Raff even pulled off a residency. Out at Clopton lies The Red Lion. Built in 1650, it still stands today. In those days, inside what looks like a barn next door, was a club called The Lion’s Den, appropriately enough, for it attracted a very specific clientele – ‘Dare we say it?’ smiles Andrew Spurrell. It was a
gay pub. In rural middle England. Visitors came from as far afield as Scandinavia to see it. And Riff Raff made it their home.

  The Lion’s Den ran on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, entrance 50p, capacity 120 people, late bar. A write-up in Gay News on 3 May 1979 declared it ‘totally gay’ on Thursday and Saturday. Riff Raff would play on Sunday lunchtimes, in return for the door takings. ‘It was hit and miss,’ Billy says. ‘But none of the locals would go, because obviously homosexuality was a communicable disease.’ The boys in the band had a rare old time. Robert Handley developed a habit of forcibly dancing with the other members of Riff Raff in a suggestive way (‘He was a provocative fucker’), but there was no friction between the Essex heterosexuals and Northamptonshire’s gatepost queens. That said, an atmosphere of heightened tension, sexual or otherwise, was always guaranteed at the gigs. Brenda, Joe and Billy all cherish the memory of Robert’s bid to deflect some potential grief from a heckling biker: he faced up to the disruptive element, raised his own straight beer glass, and took a huge bite out of it. The biker fled. ‘After that, everybody left Robert alone.’

  The summer of ’79 gave Riff Raff the closest thing to their glory days, even though, in retrospect, it was to be their last big push, and one that only really ran as far as the county line. Having fallen in with some silk screen printers, at least their odyssey was immortalised by a string of creditable posters, tickets and stickers (and Billy was still ‘a keen photocopier’). As he says, ‘Between Oundle and the A1, we were it. Every single football dance, they wanted us.’

  But local fame is a flirtatious mistress. Riff Raff’s non-contract with Chiswick Records never stretched to a second single, which was a shame, as it put a glass ceiling on the band’s ascent to superstardom (or even the expansion into Leicestershire and Bedfordshire). At the beginning of that year, they’d appeared on a single through the Albion label, but it was really Ruan O’Lochlainn’s – they backed him on his composition ‘Sweet Sweet Narcissus’, and in return provided the B-side, ‘Barking Park Lake’, written by Robert and Wiggy but based on a Billy Bonkers riff (Billy owns one copy of this rare item). Without product, you’re strictly small time.