Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  ‘The inherent racism is pretty heavy,’ he says. ‘And the anti-Catholic songs we used to sing on the way to the firing range … It’s the worst aspects of rugby clubs all together, the British Army. Too many blokes, all swearing allegiance to the flag.’ As if to prove the rugby allusion, Billy remembers one private boasting that, if everyone gave him a pound, he’d drink a pint of his own piss. He managed it – although he was dry heaving for the whole of that night – and next morning, the corporal made them own up to it, with the line, ‘For £25 I’d eat a shit sandwich!’

  So, there may not have been much wit within the recruits, but the corporals made up for it with their Wildean repartee. On parade, they would talk about shagging their wives to taunt the recruits. ‘I got my hole last night,’ they would brag. ‘My finger went through the toilet paper.’ Boom, boom.

  There were no women around except the ones working in the NAAFI canteen. (‘They were great cooks,’ recalls Billy. ‘But they weren’t chosen for their looks.’) In the circumstances, the cover of a Nolans album took on an unnaturally erotic significance in those early weeks of basic – ‘it became a real object of desire.’ As the course went on, Sunday became the day on which the NCOs sold the recruits copies of Mayfair and Penthouse, encouraging them to ‘clear the custard’. This necessary release meant fewer fights and better concentration.

  After all the other kind, a spot of self-abuse was essential.

  Billy learnt a great deal in the army. He learnt about military tactics, about the army’s role in the British constitution, about why we’re in Northern Ireland. He also discovered macabre things about nuclear, chemical and germ warfare. Don’t look at a nuclear explosion, and, in the event, dig a small, shallow trench, lie in it and put fifteen inches of earth over the top of yourself (ready for the Pioneer Corps to come round and stick a gravestone in). Billy learnt about nerve gas: the Russians have a particularly effective one that makes the walls of your lungs weep so you literally drown in your own juices – and it smells like new-mown hay. Every time Billy smells new-mown hay …

  Half-way up the stairs of the blockhouse was a huge map of the Soviet Union, so Billy quickly learnt what they were all doing there (‘There was never any doubt’). He learnt that it is just fifteen miles from the Soviet Union to the United States of America (a short hop from Chukotsky Khrebet to Alaska across the Bering Strait). He understood what a red alert felt like, as the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands died on 5 May, and the barracks was put on one for three days. He learnt what real boredom felt like on guard duty, an eight-hour shift with a pick-axe handle. (He’d heard that even the real guards who had guns didn’t have bullets in them. It’s called a deterrent.)

  Billy also trained with a Sterling sub-machine gun and knows how to dismantle one. Like all recruits, he was forced to take his gas mask off in a roomful of CS gas, recite his name, rank and number thereby forcing him to swallow, and then run out choking and crying. It’s a man’s life. Billy believes he is one of the only people who’s ever appeared on Top Of The Pops who’s both experienced the effects of CS gas and knows why it’s called that. (It was invented by Ben Carson and Roger Staughton.)

  But more importantly than all of this practical knowledge, the British Army taught Billy Bragg about class.

  This was the first time he’d tangibly seen class. There had been plenty of race politics in Barking, but not class politics. You never really met any middle-class people in Barking. The Leftley estate had a bit more money – carpenters, sparks, more working-class aristocracy – but those people weren’t genuinely middle class. Only middle-class people who’d fallen on hard times lived in Barking. They were social not geographical immigrants, with the pretensions to prove it, like violin lessons, but the very act of living there meant ‘they were prey to the same vices as all of us and worked in the same set of values.’ And the public schoolkids of Oundle operated in a surreal, countrified bubble.

  In the army, meanwhile, class is an important, clearly defined issue. You can see it in operation, in living colour, within the ranks. Sergeants are the last working-class people in the officer hierarchy; after that it’s 2nd Lieutenants, the COs (commissioned officers), who leapfrog the system from Sandringham, polo-playing, horsey types who are pissed off that they’re not in the Household Cavalry. Billy had a nightmare 2nd Lieutenant, named Page, whose father was a general – ‘a stuck-up twat with no idea of our value system, or why certain things were important to us, and no man-management skills whatsoever’. He recalls being out on exercise, digging trenches on the Yorkshire Moors, and the NAAFI van turned up. The recruits ran at it to get tea and biscuits, while 2nd Lieutenant Page stood and laughed at them. Billy remembers thinking, ‘You bastard. You really don’t understand. You’ve driven up here in your fucking sports car, you’re going home tonight, you’re not going to sleep in a trench like the rest of us, and you think it’s funny that we’re desperate for a cup of tea! Such a prat.’

  Another time, after his unit had run up a notorious hill called The Snake, Page turned up at the top – in his sports car, with not a shred of respect for the proles – and ran back down with them, an act that symbolised the class barrier for Billy, who was moved to make a snidey remark. As a consequence, as if to reinforce the injustice, he was thrown in the guardhouse for two hours, his bootlaces and belt taken off him, as is the standard procedure. This happened to Billy twice during his army days – both times for being lippy. His only consolation was knowing that this privileged CO hated being in the army more than he did.

  When Billy decided to leave after basic training was over, 2nd Lieutenant Page said, ‘Well done, Bragg, you’re the only one in this entire unit with any sense.’ This incensed him further: ‘For a long time after, I felt that if I ever saw him in Civvy Street, I’d chin him. Whether or not I still feel that way I don’t know.’

  There was a climactic, weekend-long exercise at the end of basic training, a glorified game of Cowboys and Indians (Blue Army versus Red Army) out in the pine woods at which, again, Billy proved adept. His crew was the only one to negotiate successfully their way back to base on the exercise. When faced with the task of map-reading in the pitch black, Billy’s brainwave was to trace their way around the perimeters of fields until they found a gate. The rest of the recruits got lost, and had to be picked up afterwards. Billy and co won the Best Crew shield. ‘I can’t tell you what the joy is like taking your helmet off after three days!’ he says.

  He managed to write a letter to Brenda and Joe in Peterborough while on exercise, and his slightly embroidered words sum up the loaded, rarefied nature of military life:

  ‘There is something mystic about lying in semi-darkness at the edge of a pine forest waiting for a barrage to start, dressed in full combats with an SMG (sub-machine gun) lying under your chin, safety catch on. There are about 30 other blokes in this forest but you can’t hear them or see them. It’s twilight and no light penetrates. We come out into the open and move towards where we think the enemy will be. Rolling and crawling in the half-darkness we discover four Royal Signallers. Sure enough they’re wearing Red Army armlets, but they’re brewing a cup of tea! “What the fuck are you doing?” they ask. “Creeping up on you,” we say. “Would you like some tea?” they ask.’

  The battle report continues, and he concludes that this exercise ‘has been the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since joining the army. The rest has been polishing floors, ironing kit, making beds and being humiliated by various NCOs. The only spare time I get is spent thinking and shitting simultaneously, so I shit often and think about anything but ARMY.’

  The only other opportunity for privacy a soldier gets is having a bath (‘your own little world’). Billy was in the bath when his corporal came in and told him that it was he or Trooper Harding who would be named Best Recruit at the end of training: ‘My immediate thought was – they’re not going to let the Best Recruit leave are they?’ So he dried off and went to see the sergeant immediately, cap
in hand, informing him that he wanted out. ‘He was very pissed off, but he stayed true to his word.’

  That was it. After three months of army life at what Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker called ‘a college for the phony-tough and the crazy-brave’, 24600765 Trooper Bragg had decided to become Billy Bragg again. He bought himself out for £175.

  That wasn’t quite it. So many had left or fallen back a squad during basic training, there were only sixteen of the original 36 left. If Billy left, they’d have an odd number – you can’t have a pass-out parade with 15 men, because you can’t make a square. So they asked him to stay for the parade, and, as a favour to Queen and country, he did.

  Soon-to-be-ex-Trooper Bragg ceremonially passed out, which was, as he says, ‘a nice ending’. (He’d promised Brenda and Joe in a letter that he was ‘not coming out till Adam & The Ants drop from Number One’, in reference to the four-week reign of ‘Stand And Deliver’. He’d kept his promise.) Katy came up to Catterick to collect him and take him home – he’d been the only one in his unit who had a girlfriend who wrote – and she sat between proud parents to watch him make up the square in the march-past. Unlike the other fifteen, he carried on marching, straight out of the gates, saluting as he went.

  ‘I felt so lucky to be back on the street again. And not there.’

  One piece of advice given to Billy by Sergeant Lee when he quit has always stayed with him: ‘Whatever you do out in Civvy Street, don’t ever become anti-squaddie. Remember these guys, they’re ordinary guys.’

  This hit home. He’d liked the blokes in his intake, particularly his three room-mates, and it had given him a more informed view of the world as it continued to teeter on the brink of mutually-assured destruction (or so we thought). Soldiers, Billy had discovered, were just plasterers and car mechanics in another line of work, working-class pegs trying to squeeze themselves into a hole (in this case, a foxhole). It is possible, he realised, to be pro-disarmament without being anti-squaddie – and to spare a thought for the little boy soldiers who give the warmongers a chance. The sergeant’s sound advice still stops Billy from being completely damning of those who find themselves fighting other people’s battles. It was, he admits, weird during CND, but the songs he went on to write about the Falklands and other conflicts were richer for his own experiences on the North Yorkshire front.

  It may be good for absolutely nothing, but war is what the army’s there for. Without his rifle, the Marine is nothing; without war, the soldier is redundant. Having been on the inside, Billy understands precisely why British soldiers were gung-ho for the Falklands when it went off in 1982: ‘Wars are like the World Cup, there’s only so many of them.’

  As such, when HMS Sheffield was sunk on 4 May by Argentine aircraft (the first British warship to be lost in 37 years), Billy found it all too easy to imagine what those young sailors who lost their lives were like – they were just like him and the rest of Intake 81/09. An Exocet missile hit the ship’s galley, and Billy couldn’t shake off the image of trainee chefs who’d joined the Navy to get away, ‘and there they are in the water’. A soldier is not a number, even if he is far from being a free man.

  Billy’s three-month sabbatical had changed him, broadened his mind, flattened his stomach, and galvanised him for what he wanted to do next: play some gigs again. Perhaps you truly have to wear a tin hat to know how good it feels not to wear one.

  6. LICENSEE: JACK RUBY

  Birth of Billy, 1981–1983

  What will you do when the war is over, tender comrade

  When we lay down our weary guns

  When we return home to our wives and families

  And look into the eyes of our sons

  ‘Tender Comrade’ Workers Playtime, 1988

  TRULY DEMOB-HAPPY, EX-TROOPER Bragg marched on to Civvy Street in the summer of ’81, returning if not to wife, family and son, certainly to girlfriend, family and Wiggs. The British Army had, like it said in the posters, made a man of him. Broken, no; strengthened, yes.

  ‘I felt very positive, as if I’d done EST or something. I felt that in some way I was stronger than the British Army. It had been a real sabbatical. I was really determined to do what I wanted to do. But it’s not something I’d recommend to anyone else.’

  He was as fit as he’d ever been in his life. The reduced Spurrell family (no Carol) treated him to a holiday in Southern Italy, Andrew Spurrell in the long-distance driving seat. From there they drove to Switzerland, to Venice, right down to the boot of Italy, and then into France, clocking up 960 miles in twelve hours and arriving just in time to catch a quaint village festival where they served French lager that was coloured red and green. Each evening, Billy and Andrew ran a mile and a half, not something they imagined they’d ever be doing together during Riff Raff, which already seemed a lifetime ago. (Andrew would go on to compete in three London marathons, while Billy contented himself with globe-trotting.)

  Late in 1981, Andrew moved to the impressive new vet’s surgery that he now practises from and Billy went up and helped with the stock-taking.

  ‘Did we actually pay you?’ asks Andrew.

  ‘I probably owed you it,’ replies Billy.

  Britain’s unemployment total tipped three million for the first time since the 1930s. Back in Barking, Billy had continued working for AV Movies over at Wiggy and Jackie’s, running messages and helping out, but, in Wiggy’s words, ‘the company was starting to fall apart a bit’ (money troubles). So Billy found a regular job, determined this time that nine-to-five work was going to be a stop-gap while he found his creative feet. He started work in a record shop, Low Price Records on East Ham High Road (a modest chain with two other branches in Stratford and Barking). It was close to a dream job. He wrote it off as research and development.

  Low Price specialised in ‘cut outs’, that is, unsold, written off, deleted or overpressed stock: boxes of vinyl records with the corners of the covers snapped off, sold on at 5p a unit. To the 24-year-old Billy, these were chests of buried treasure, and fed his insatiable appetite for plastic, stretching as far as Indian classical music, film scores and jazz. Todd Rundgren, he recalls, was on heavy rotation, thanks to shop manager Steve Goldstein, a practitioner of Britfunk bass who lived with his mum in a block of flats on Commercial Road.

  Against this background of vinyl intoxication, the re-energised Billy set about working out how he was going to do gigs. It was the buzz of the live experience that he craved after those three months of pointless manoeuvres and standing in line (‘I wanted the rawest, scariest possible adrenaline rush’). He felt even more like an individual, having survived the army’s dogged attempts to pat him into an identical shape on their conveyor belt. Perhaps this is why he never even considered joining or forming a band. He’d been a team player, now it was time to strike out on his own. No compromise.

  Billy calls 1982 ‘the year I stopped fucking around’. It was a long year. He went through the later songs he’d written for Riff Raff and filtered out just the one: ‘Richard’, a wounded love song that he considered worthy of his new-found voice (‘Do you think I only love you because you sleep with other boys?’). This and ‘A New England’, which he also wrote in Oundle, but which the disintegrating Riff Raff never played, were the only pre-army songs that would later make it on to his first album, but he’d been very prolific since getting out, and a new set was taking shape.

  Fortunately for Billy, always in need of something to fly in the face of, the new romantics hadn’t completely gone away and the march of electronic and digital technology had, for him, sucked most of the soul out of chart music. When he’d come out of the army, Spandau Ballet had greeted him doing ‘Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)’ on Top Of The Pops, and it was all the proof he needed that punk had died with its boots on.

  The Top 40 was full of it. Adam & The Ants, a pantomime Glitter Band led by a former punk, were everywhere (‘Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and yours tru-lee’), and ridicule, for them, wa
s nothing to be scared of. The surgical, all-synthetic Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf were enjoying a commercial renaissance – the pop equivalent of that early-80s Fiat Strada advert set to the operatic strains of Figaro in which not a single human worker is seen on the shop floor of a car factory (‘Handbuilt by robots’ it proudly proclaimed). Soft Cell, Duran Duran, Modern Romance, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – the Casio fops and the art students seemed to be taking over the asylum. Even Top Of The Pops had a new electro theme tune, ‘Yellow Pearl’. It was, as the Gary Numan hit of the day had it, ‘Music For Chameleons’.

  ‘It was those fucking Bowie fans,’ Billy says. ‘They never went away. It was Station To Station and Low that did it [Bowie’s gloomy late-70s albums that coincided with him moving to Germany and upsetting Russian/Polish border guards with the Nazi memorabilia in his suitcase] – good enough records, but they spawned Tubeway Army, Visage and Bauhaus, all those fucking bands, and they were the cutting edge!’

  It wasn’t just music that had forgotten how to rock. The whole world seemed to Billy to be on target for a rendezvous with George Orwell’s soul-free futurevision. Day-to-day technology that we take for granted in the 90s seemed like Logan’s Run in 1982 – the Sinclair ZX computer, the Phillips 2000 VCR, fibre optic cables, watches you didn’t have to wind up, microchips with everything – and it brought out the Luddite in Billy Bragg, as he plotted his one-man revolt.

  He bought himself a drum machine.

  The summer of 1982 was the summer of Fame. The American TV series spun off from Alan Parker’s film about the New York School Of Performing Arts was attracting eight million viewers on BBC; the nation was transfixed by a bunch of starry-eyed stage school brats in legwarmers. Perhaps it was the self-motivated ambition of Leroy, Bruno and co that caught the on-your-bike Thatcherite mood – ‘Here’s where you start paying,’ ran teacher Debbie Allen’s introductory pep-talk, ‘with sweat.’