Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Jackie Mackay was the mastermind behind the venture – or, as Billy calls it, ‘the last piece of madness’. Eight Riff Raff songs were recorded at Pathway Studios in North London (where Elvis Costello had recorded his first ever demos), featuring Billy on guitar and vocals, Wiggy on guitar and bass, a chap called Mark Earwood on ‘electrical piano’, and twelve-year-old Oscar O’Lochlainn on drums. Robert Handley came down from Stoke Doyle to guest on backing vocals and get his hirsute features in the sleeve photo session – taken by Jackie – in which the lads hold up cut-out pictures of famous women (Virginia Wade, Margaret Thatcher, Hayley Mills, Sue Barker and Dame Barbara Cartland).

  The A-sides were ‘Every Girl’, ‘Kitten’, ‘New Home Town’ and ‘Little Girls Know’, backed, respectively, by ‘You Shaped House’, ‘Fantocide’, ‘Richard’ and ‘She Don’t Matter’ (all Bragg compositions except Handley’s ‘You Shaped House’ and Wigg/Handley’s ‘Fantocide’). These were pressed – in Paris for cheapness – as four seven-inch singles, 1,000 of each. They were released on the newly minted Geezer Records label, which, in the spirit of Stiff, at least had some catchy mottoes (‘Sending confusion to the world … Where eggs is eggs … Taking the Mickey or what? … At last the sound of the MCMLXXX’s). The unified sleeve artwork, courtesy of an old Oundle acquaintance calling himself Jarvis Pamphlet (John Parfitt), was notable for its stylised line drawings of nude ladies. To Riff Raff’s credit, the singles form an attractive if slightly saucy-looking set, and the eight songs are a fitting legacy (‘Welcome to the legend of Riff Raff,’ wrote Billy on one of the sleeves).

  The same songs comprise the 30-minute video entitled Every Girl An English Rose, visualised with stills and slides and the odd bit of moving footage taken on a leased Sony video camera. It went on sale ‘in selected shops’ for £15 a throw, or by mail order from Wiggy and Jackie’s Bayham Road house in Acton for £18. ‘We were too stupid to think of an album,’ says Billy – but that, in a radical format, is what it was.

  Music & Video magazine gave the release a reasonable punt, saying that Jackie had ‘put together a programme which almost certainly will win no awards, but which, in terms of interest and creative energy, certainly challenges the currently accepted form of music videos’. They described Riff Raff as ‘a rough and ready outfit with a nifty line in hard-headed pop; three years ago, they’d have been called punk, two years ago New Wave. Now they’re just another band who’ll sink or swim on the strength of their material and their determination to succeed.’

  Disappointingly, the singles slipped through the net, review-wise. Zig Zag gave ‘Little Girls Know’ a generous appraisal as late as January 1981 (‘Exuberant finish. Good one’) and the video was plugged in Melody Maker and Musicians Only – but all in all, it was clear that Riff Raff had breathed their last. They came, they saw, they conked out. ‘A bunch of chancers with no future’ they may have been ultimately, but what a catalyst they turned out to be.

  Though not just yet.

  Wiggy sorted Billy out with a cash-in-hand job at the beginning of 1981: artexing a ceiling (he was doing up a room in his house as a flat for one of his mates). It was not punk rock, and Billy came home with spots of plaster all over his face, but this odd-job for Wiggy led directly to an even odder job for Queen and country.

  The trek to Wiggy’s place took him past the Army Careers Information Office in Acton High Road every day. Eventually, and quite against the wishes of his hero Elvis Costello – whose 1979 Armed Forces album actually advised punters not to join the army – Billy strode in there and signed up. ‘There was nothing else I could think of,’ he says. ‘My whole identity had been based on being in a band.’ He’d artexed himself into a corner.

  Although Billy says he wasn’t aware of it at the time, by joining the army, and more specifically the Royal Armoured Corps, he was following in his father’s footsteps: ‘I was actually trying to escape sitting round at my mum’s all the time, but subconsciously, because my old man wasn’t around, I was looking for something he’d done to measure myself against. You’re quite welcome to assume that me joining the Royal Armoured Corps had something to do with that.’

  Dennis Bragg was called up in 1942 and joined the 43rd Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. His squadron spent most of the Second World War stationed in Suffolk, testing tanks, amphibious landing craft and other hardware like flame throwers, and then training other tank crews how to use it (‘He sat out the European war while everybody they trained went off to Normandy and Anzio’). Dennis never saw combat.

  Then, on 15 May 1945, just two days after VE Day, he learnt that his battalion was going to be posted to India to back up the British 14th Army in Burma, where they were pushing out the Japanese after three years’ occupation. Billy bitterly regrets never having had the chance to talk to his dad about this cruel twist of fate – victory in Europe, London’s safe, 115,000 servicemen a month are getting demobbed, and you’re off to fight the Japs, notoriously committed warriors who take no prisoners. How must he have felt?

  On 6 August, when Dennis was halfway there on a slow boat to India, American President Truman did him a favour. He dropped the big one. Hiroshima was destroyed by the world’s first atomic bomb, dropped by a US Navy Super-Fortress aircraft nicknamed ‘Enola Gay’ (after the pilot’s mum). Three days later, the same fate befell Nagasaki, and five days after that Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies after what Truman had promised would be ‘a rain of ruin from the air’. There would be no more fighting in Rangoon.

  ‘In some ways, the atomic bomb saved my dad’s life,’ Billy says, all too aware of the irony. (If only he could’ve had a conversation with his father about that at the height of CND.)

  Dennis stayed in India until 1947 and moved about between Hyderabad and Calcutta during the run-up to partition. Unrest was rife, as demonstrators demanded freedom from British rule, and the cities erupted with Hindu–Moslem rioting. After the war, Lord Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy of India and charged with presiding over the handover. He kept the troops back with all their equipment to keep the peace between the Hindus and the Moslems. ‘The tanks weren’t any good for battles any more,’ Billy recounts. ‘But if one comes down your street it certainly gives you pause for thought.’

  The job of Dennis’s regiment was principally to turn up. One bit of kit patented for the war came in particularly useful: the Canal Defence Light, which was a powerful searchlight mounted on a tank that was designed for crossing the Rhine into Germany and never used. It was great for crowd control.

  Billy knew that his dad had never killed anyone, and was always quite envious that he’d driven a tank, so a benign military role model was indirectly already in place. He also knew that, broadly, he didn’t agree with the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland and that nuclear weapons had made conventional warfare obsolete. You might say that Billy Bragg, peacenik, was not the textbook soldier, but he had read The Third World War by General Sir John Hackett, which made it pretty plain that we were more than just living in the shadow of the neutron bomb. So he was more than ready to don the khaki.

  At that delicate time, Billy felt that ‘it’ was about to happen: ‘We’d had Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1980, Tito had died, Solidarity went off, Brezhnev was on his last legs, and the Tories were winding up the Cold War. It all seemed very, very likely – and part of my decision to join the army was based on the fact that I’d rather be on the German Plain in a tank when it goes off, and know what’s going to happen, than be sitting at home watching Match Of The Day or panicking. I’d rather be there.

  ‘It wasn’t the army or the empire or the country I was looking to believe in; I was looking for something to prove my own worth.’

  He had a couple of stipulations for the Army Careers Information Service when he dropped in to join: ‘I wanted to drive a tank, and I didn’t want to go to Northern Ireland.’

  Well, the tank was a possibility in one of the mechanised cavalry regiments and as for the o
ther seemingly unmanageable proviso he was also in luck. West London, due to the high Irish population, is a favoured recruiting ground for the Irish Hussars, who were almost 100 per cent Protestant. Somebody at the MOD had sussed out that it wasn’t too clever an idea to take Johnny Protestant off the streets of Belfast, take him to England for six months, train him how to kill, give him a gun and put him back on his own street. As a result, the Irish regiments didn’t ‘do’ Northern Ireland. So, you were unlikely to be posted there in a mechanised cavalry regiment, and double-unlikely to go if you were in an Irish regiment. ‘So that hurdle I’d hopefully put in the way of my progress didn’t really work out.’

  He was in. Joe and Brenda bought him a single as a present: ‘The Call-Up’ by The Clash.

  May 1981 was precisely the right time for Billy to join the army, and precisely the wrong time. Six weeks before he took the train to Catterick for basic training, his brother David was involved in a nasty traffic accident: he hit a tree and, worryingly, was unconscious for a whole month (‘It was dreadful,’ recalls Billy. ‘If he’d died it would’ve destroyed my mum’). Thankfully, David came round and was discharged from hospital by the time Billy went away, but he wasn’t well and was largely immobile – ‘in a dream’, as Billy puts it. Part of him felt he ought to stay in Barking with his family, and it clawed at him inside when he did go.

  First, he failed his medical: ‘It was no surprise to me to find that I wasn’t very fit.’ Never a muscular lad, nor a subscriber to chin-ups, sit-ups or press-ups, he wasn’t dreadfully overweight, but nor was he a lean, mean fighting machine. ‘At the time,’ he remembers, ‘they’d take you into the British Army if you couldn’t read or write, and they’d teach you. And they’d still take you if you weren’t quite fit.’

  He was dispatched to Solihull in the West Midlands on a special army fitness programme that lasted a month and concentrated on running and what Billy calls ‘knees-up Mother Brown’. Frankly, it was fun. There were no uniforms, just a form of PE kit, and it was all reassuringly not like being in the army at all, more like ‘having a games lesson for four weeks non-stop. There was very little proper army shit.’

  Billy was 23, which gave him the advantage (many boys join the army straight from school at sixteen). Plus, he was surrounded by ‘some of the most pathetic human specimens I’ve ever seen in my life’. The holiday camp atmosphere was shattered on 11 May, when Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami, aged 36.

  It wasn’t just the premature death of a musical hero that took the wind out of Billy’s shorts, it was the sudden, suffocating feeling that he was in the wrong place: no one else there gave a hoot about Marley. ‘It was the first time I realised how totally, utterly different I was from these people, completely and utterly out of place and alone in what I was doing. I had a different value system.’ He found a single kindred spirit in the shape of a lad from the Midlands, and he remembers volunteering for extra bog-cleaning duty in order to earn the privilege of sitting in a little room with a TV in it, and the two of them, still stunned, watching Granada’s Marley tribute presented by Tony Wilson.

  Billy felt marooned.

  Four weeks of physical jerk-ups, and he was off to join the basic training programme at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire. This was where, before anyone would set foot inside the Royal Armoured Corps itself, they’d be licked into shape by a cavalry regiment based in Leeds (‘Nutty Yorkshiremen’). On the fitness course the environment was chummy, with very little pressure; here, the army’s gloves were off, and Billy was tossed into the machine (‘This was the proper army, a real shock to the system. I really did feel very much alone’). The very night he got to Catterick, he remembers phoning home and making himself feel even worse: ‘Another really low moment. I thought to myself, I’ve fucked up here.’

  The image of raw recruits being put through their gruelling, dehumanising paces is one that’s proved an evergreen at the cinema – and cinematic images are the closest most people will ever get to basic training now that National Service is no more. There’s comedy (Carry On Sergeant, Stripes) and brutal drama (An Officer And A Gentleman, GI Jane), but no film has drawn quite so much power from army training as Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam tale, Full Metal Jacket, which devotes almost half of its screen time to US Marine instruction at Parris Island in South Carolina.

  This becomes a weirdly emblematic film in the Billy Bragg story when you know that its Vietnam sequences were shot at Beckton, south of Barking, around the old disused gasworks where great grandfather Bragg worked. These days, the area’s known as Kubricktown, and there’s very little evidence left of the time the maverick director came to town and literally dynamited the buildings to recreate Hué City. It was surprisingly effective; the scenes where Matthew Modine’s platoon are ambushed by a lone sniper lack only a South-East Asian sky for total authenticity. (The area was more recently utilised by Oasis in the video for their anthemic 1997 single ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’)

  It’s tempting to see 24600765 Trooper S. W. Bragg and the 35 other recruits that made up Intake 81/09 transplanted into the first act of Full Metal Jacket, being told to ‘Sound off like you got a pair!’ by some sadistic drill instructor. Tempting, and not far from the truth.

  The army, be it the British Army or the US Marines, operates a brutal, effective and time-honoured form of psychology. Unlike the music press, it doesn’t build ’em up and knock ’em down, but the exact opposite. If you’re looking for ‘a kick up the arse’ you’ve come to the right place.

  Billy hit his lowest ebb in that first week at Catterick, which is all part of the army’s plan. ‘I lost all confidence, I was scrambling to get up to running speed, to get a grip on it, make a go of it.’ At the end of the first week, some of his number buckled and went home (you could go at any time, but the peer pressure and dumb male pride are chest high). At this juncture, the surviving recruits were gathered together by their boss, Sergeant Lee, a tanned, fit, intelligent Yorkshire tank commander who Billy describes with total respect as ‘a working-class Superman’ (he was the highest-ranking NCO or non-commissioned officer; there were also three lance corporals). ‘What you’ve seen this first week is not the British Army,’ he assured them, meaning: it’s about to get really nasty. He urged them to stick it out for the remaining nine weeks, to complete the full basic training. He gave them his word that if, after the full nine weeks, any of them still wanted out, they could come to him on the last week and he’d sign their paper ‘without question’.

  ‘Fair enough,’ thought Billy. He took the Sarge at his word, and trusted him. ‘I would go so far as to say I hero-worshipped him, but that’s what we were encouraged to do. He was God.’

  In return for the intake’s nine-week commitment (‘a fucking long nine weeks’, says Billy), Sarge gave them encouragement. This is how the mind-science works – nice Sergeant, nasty 2nd Lieutenant. Both men would shout in your face, but, unlike the 2nd Lieutenant, Sarge would shout in your face and then tell you how to do it. They were woken in the mornings by the hymn ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’ to get them out of bed, accompanied by the insistent percussion of boots marching down the parquet flooring. An officer says ‘Jump!’, you ask ‘How high?’

  The psychology continues: for the first six weeks out of the nine, you don’t get your uniform, you don’t have access to a radio, your privileges are precisely nil, and you’re not permitted to go home. They’ve got you. The army is your world, and, in the words of Full Metal Jacket’s Sergeant Hartman, it is ‘a world of shit’. ‘Everything you do is shit,’ says Billy. ‘You never get a let-up. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit … Then they let you go home for a weekend!’

  This pivotal weekend’s leave marks the beginning of the second phase of headfuck. On your return, you are given a uniform and a hat. You’re in. Suddenly, you are allowed to listen to the radio and visit the NAAFI (Navy, Army & Air Force Institutes, the organisation that provides canteen and shop facilities for the services). Better than
all that, you start getting recognition.

  ‘It’s blunt psychology,’ says Billy. ‘But it don’t half work. You are so desperate for them to like you! You can’t understand why they hate you so much!’

  Lance Corporal Wood, known as ‘Stumpy’, who’d come to pick Billy up from Darlington station when he’d first arrived from Solihull, was a short, yes, stumpy fellow, and he told him that he was going to be the best recruit – ‘And I near as dammit was. I was very good at it.’

  After that shaky first week, and having worked the knot of homesickness out of his guts, Trooper Bragg proved himself quite a natural at this soldiering caper. Being older than the others was a start, but he was also frankly a little cleverer and funnier, too. ‘There was not a high literacy rate,’ he says. ‘And not a high communication level. Plus, there wasn’t much wit.’ It goes without saying that nobody believed he’d made a record, and he had to get Wiggy to send one up for proof.

  His unit seemed to come from all over the country, but it soon became clear that they were lacking a decent minority to make sport with. The barracks were arranged not as Full Metal Jacket (one dorm, two rows of beds), but in four-person rooms. The four soldiers were known as a crew. In with Billy was a Polish guy called Marshalek, the spelling of which had the lance corporals bursting in on day one, shouting, ‘Where is he? Where’s the Paki?’ (It was no surprise to Billy to discover, after he’d left, that one of his lance corporals was in the British Movement.) In the event, of the 36 grunts, there were no Pakistanis and no Afro-Caribbeans. Most disappointing for the racists. Any Catholics? No. What’s next? Southerners! There were two Southerners, and Billy was one of them. This was the first time he’d been a minority.