‘I got absolutely no response,’ says Billy. ‘Every now and again I bump into one of the music business people who I sent it to and I remind them of the fact. I’ve got their names.’ (In a follow-up letter to Adam Sweeting, Billy mentioned ‘a flat refusal from CBS and a “not sure” from Polydor’.)
The Catch 22 goes, if you haven’t got a record out, you can’t get in the music press, and if you haven’t been in the music press, you don’t exist. As priceless as Adam Sweeting’s rave review was, it hadn’t opened any record company doors, so Billy set about opening them for himself. First, he reasoned, he needed a manager. As luck would have it, he’d been chatting to an artist he knew called Jim Davidson, who’d painted backdrops for The Clash back in 1980, and had been impressed by one of their co-managers, Peter Jenner. Billy had calculated that he specifically needed a manager who was a socialist and a father figure. A tall order, perhaps, but that was precisely what Peter Jenner turned out to be.
Jenner taught at the London School Of Economics in 1967, then moved into managing Pink Floyd when they were still an underground concern. He put on the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, and, with his partner in Blackhill management Andrew King, had handled T Rex, Roy Harper, Edgar Broughton and – most impressively to Billy – The Clash, between the time they sacked journalist Caroline Coon and reinstated original Svengali Bernie Rhodes (just over twelve months, during which time they toured the epic London Calling and recorded the triple-album folly Sandinista!). Blackhill also looked after Ian Dury & The Blockheads until 1980, when they were just over their commercial peak.
Billy spoke to Sumi Jenner, Peter’s wife, and was dismayed to find that he was no longer in management, and Blackhill had shut up shop. He was now Head of Marketing & A&R (Artists & Repertoire) at the Charisma label and had been for nine months.
‘I don’t know what I was,’ Jenner recalls. ‘Charisma was in a real mess.’ Charisma had been set up as a stable for innovative artists in the late 60s by Tony Stratton-Smith, or ‘Strat’ as he was known. Building on a nascent roster that included The Nice and Van Der Graaf Generator, Stratton-Smith had had the foresight to sign public school progressive rockers Genesis, then two albums away from commercial success (their Foxtrot album went Top Ten in 1972), but they were the sort of band upon whom a label’s reputation is forged. Stratton-Smith also managed them until 1973. When singer Peter Gabriel left the group in 1975, he stayed with Charisma, and recorded all four of his confusingly eponymous solo albums for the label, every one a Top Ten hit.
Charisma’s ornate Mad Hatter logo will be equally well known to Monty Python fans, as Stratton-Smith released seven Python albums between 1971 and 1980, giving them total artistic control and risking the wrath of many a nervous retailer. (Charisma triumphantly pushed the Pythons into the album Top Ten in 1980, with the Contractual Obligation Album, which was banned from TV or radio advertising for being ‘crude in the extreme’ and ran into legal trouble for its unauthorised and defamatory use of John Denver’s ‘Annie’s Song’ – subsequently removed.)
A rum label, to be sure, but not really Peter Jenner’s cup of tea – although he admits it’s unlikely he would’ve been happy as Head of Marketing & A&R at any label, and was quite a fan of Strat. In 1980, Charisma had placed a toe in the waters of movie-making, with the wilfully eccentric Sir Henry At Rawlinson’s End, produced by Stratton-Smith and showing disappointing financial returns. Jenner recalls ‘constant cashflow problems – we were haemorrhaging money’. He reasons that ‘Charisma’s golden era was pre-punk, they’d never really got hold of post-punk.’
By 1982, the last studio album Peter Gabriel would record for the label was in the charts, and a deal with Dutch giant PolyGram meant that Charisma’s pressings were paid for, but Jenner describes his job thus: ‘I was there to fire everybody’ – by which he means artists who were past their sell-by date. His task was to ‘thin out’ the roster; unfortunately he was not much cop at the high-powered corporate game: ‘I was a real fucking softy. I just let bands make another record. I was really unsuccessful at that job.’
As cash-flow slowed down to a trickle, the pressure from PolyGram mounted: they were saying, if you want more money, we’ll have to take over. Stratton-Smith’s response to the crisis was admirable, as Jenner relates: ‘He would come into work at twelve, go to lunch at one, come back at four, and then go out all night. Great geezer. Old school. Very sharp.’
These qualities were also true of Jenner, who’d been round the music biz block himself. ‘I realised that if I was going to sign anything, I was going to have to be very economical.’
Because Charisma was part-independent, part major label, as an A&R, Jenner simply couldn’t get involved in bidding wars for hot, unsigned artists: ‘The nightmare of being an A&R man is trying to work out whether somebody’s worth spending £100,000 on as a business investment. It’s a crap shoot, it’s madness.’
But this turned out to be a blessing.
Billy had by then left Low Price Records (‘the last proper job I ever had’), and had more time on his hands to go wandering in central London, hawking his wares around. On 2 November 1982, Channel 4 went on the air, as, in the same week, did the first ever edition of Tyne Tees’ live Friday evening music show The Tube. And here’s where divine intervention takes over.
Peter Gabriel was on that first Tube the same day that Billy Bragg turned up in reception at Charisma, hoping to get to see Peter Jenner and give him his tape (he liked what he’d heard about Jenner, and the Clash connection said ‘kindred spirit’). He sat, like Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (‘I’ll wait. I’m happy to wait’), when someone came out looking for the TV repairman. Because Gabriel was on The Tube, they were keen to video it, but didn’t know how to tune the VCR into the new channel. Now, Billy was more than au fait with video equipment, thanks to his time working for Wiggy, and saw his way in.
‘And I did look a bit like a TV repairman!’
Yes, he said, he was there to fix the video, and he was duly taken into the room where the telly was to perform his alchemy. Job done, he wandered down the corridor and found Peter Jenner’s office. Putting a tape or record into someone’s influential hand is a hundred times better than putting it in the post, or leaving it at reception, as any plugger will tell you, and Billy made the drop. Not only that, he made an impression.
‘He was a laugh,’ says Jenner. ‘Instantly likeable.’
That weekend, Jenner was off to see his parents at their place in the country, and he took the opportunity to listen to a clutch of demos. He liked Billy’s, picking up on ‘the enthusiasm and the vibe. I especially liked “The Busy Girl Buys Beauty”. Having been involved with Roy Harper and The Clash, I’d been aware of singer-songwriters, and I guess I had become a lyric man rather than a music man.’
Jenner vowed to himself he’d get back in touch with the bogus TV repairman.
Better, he ventured down to the Tunnel Club to catch Billy play. There’s no venue too obscure or too far away for a good A&R man, even if Jenner wasn’t a particularly good one – he committed the cardinal A&R sin and turned up just as the artist he was there to see had reached his last two numbers. However, the atmosphere inside the pub was tangibly electric, and Jenner’s radar sensed that something was in the air. He took in Billy’s last couple of songs, made a mental note of the buzz, and took care on his way out to ask somebody at the bar if Billy had been any good (evergreen A&R stand-by). The answer was an unequivocal yes, so Jenner left the Tunnel satisfied that his hunch was correct. The bloke on the tape had something.
More spooky coincidence: the reason the Tunnel’s audience were so wired was that someone had just knocked a pint glass off a table and, following the sound of breaking glass, everyone was waiting for the fight to start, including Billy. This air of tension did not dissipate for the remainder of his set. And the punter who Jenner consulted at the bar? Katy Spurrell. The space hardware was evidently lined up in Billy Bragg’s favour that
night.
As he left, Jenner made his pledge to Billy: ‘We must do something, however trivial.’
By the end of 1982, Billy had moved out of his mum’s to a new base in Southfields, near Wimbledon (Katy was house-sitting there for some friends of hers who’d gone to Africa). On the map, it’s not much closer to the action than Barking, but it felt more central.
Even though it was a large house, Billy and Katy never had the heating on full, and as a result the warmest room was the bathroom, where the hot water tank was. There was a small vanity table in there, which meant that Billy could use the room as his study and write songs. He remembers Katy banging on the door wanting to use the bathroom while he was in the throes of writing ‘Between The Wars’. ‘She just doesn’t understand,’ moaned the tortured artist, forced to write the last verse out on Wimbledon Common (‘I’m surprised it didn’t turn out like the Wombles’).
Wiggy remembers taking food parcels round to the refugees in Southfields: ‘They were going through their starvation days.’
Because there was simply no Charisma money forthcoming, Billy was caught between a rock and hard place. ‘He wasn’t doing what was “happening”,’ Jenner explains. He knew that they would have to find a more wily way of getting a Billy Bragg record out than simply finding the funds and paying for it: ‘If you can get a tape done,’ he told Billy, ‘I’ll put it out.’ He was out on a limb with his belief in Billy, and needed a co-visionary. Jeff Chegwin turned out to be that soldier. Bearing in mind Charisma’s interest, Chappell stumped up a special one-off publishing deal, which basically meant three days in their demo studio at Park Street – and no money. To Billy it was like winning the pools, and it solved Peter Jenner’s financial niggles. Between Chappell and Charisma, he could make a record.
‘The principle that you had to spend an enormous amount of money was wrong,’ reasons Jenner. ‘So we came up with the mini-album for £2.99. If you can put out a twelve-inch for £2.99, why not put out an album with seven tracks on it? Same piece of vinyl.’ He made Billy an offer.
There would be no contract. PolyGram would pay for the pressing. Chappell would look after the recording costs. Jenner passed the artwork through as petty cash. He aimed to cover his arse with £500 he had left over from what has since passed into Bragg folklore as a Gregory Isaacs record, but may have been something else entirely.
Jenner drafted Billy a letter, dated 21 January 1983, on Charisma headed notepaper:
‘Dear Billy, this is to confirm our intention to release some tracks of yours which you will be doing at Chappell’s expense. We expect to release, unless it is indescribably ghastly, a record of some sort between four and twelve tracks long depending on what you come back with. We would own the record for the world and would pay a royalty of eight per cent, rising to nine per cent after 10,000 sales and ten per cent after 50,000 sales. Hope this reflects our discussion and I look forward to hearing the tapes.’
Booked to go into Chappell on 2 February for those three days, Billy performed his last gig at the Tunnel the night before. He was supporting a band called Shark Taboo. He played his songs to a total of eight people in the bar (‘not uncommon’). He finished up, collected his money, and he and Wiggy, who’d driven him down, were preparing to leave – at which point the entire audience got onstage. Shark Taboo were the audience. Too embarrassed to go, Billy and Wiggy sat down to offer their moral support to these fellow travellers round the U-bend of rock’n’roll. Mercifully, after just two songs, the barman told them to get off, as they were bothering the customers in the other bar.
Billy Bragg had, he felt, done his time.
On 2, 3 and 4 February, between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. at Park Street Studio, Billy recorded what would be his debut album. As with the Gilmour House dry run, he just played his proven live set over and over again, this time in a soundproof booth with in-house producer Oliver Hitch pressing record and stop. There was no mixing, they just ran it straight on to quarter-inch tape. Billy recalls doing thirteen versions of ‘A New England’.
He takes his hat off to Jeff Chegwin, who was ‘enthusiastic and encouraging’ throughout, if unable to express his appreciation at the end of the three days, having just had his wisdom teeth out.
‘Really good!’ he mumbled through a broken mouth.
‘Nobody else there gave a shit,’ Billy reckons. ‘They didn’t know what the fuck I was on about.’
Not a problem. He’d found two men at two separate companies who knew exactly what the fuck he was on about, and were willing to sidestep corporate consensus and chuck Billy Bragg a few scraps. Without Chegwin and Jenner, Billy would be wandering around Wimbledon Common telling passers-by that he’d had his tape reviewed in Melody Maker and coulda been a contender.
On the subject of which, uplifted by the stirrings in the record industry, Billy continued to push his nose up against the media’s window. Not about to let his first print admirer off the hook, Billy pestered Adam Sweeting for a follow-up review or an article to legitimise his quest.
This has been a recurring theme: all the way through the Flying Tigers and Riff Raff, Billy has striven for conventional legitimacy, be it the band’s ‘advertising debut’, or the first gig in Hornchurch, or the keenly-clutched copies of Cosmonaut. For a hardened music press reader, these are the given points of reference, and it would take Billy a few years before he realised that achievement on his own terms was more important to him than the orthodox requirements of the music biz.
Adam Sweeting arranged to meet Billy and interview him for possible publication at a later, unspecified date (after all, Billy had no product out to tie in with a feature, and that’s the way the supposedly alternative press works). On the bus there, Billy was bursting with excitement and nerves at the prospect of talking into a tape recorder, and wrote down all the things he wanted to say, so as not to waste this first crack at bending the world’s ear. The singer and the writer met at a pub near the British Museum. The interview went well. Billy even ran through his checklist in the toilet midway through, and was, of course, duly outraged that Melody Maker didn’t print it all when the piece ran in April.
Before that though, during the interminable limbo period between the recording of the album and the day it came out (five and a half months), Billy went back to Peterborough to play The Glasshouse at the Key Theatre. It was a modest lunchtime gig (‘A bar and food are available and accompanied children are welcome’), but the local press treated him as a returning local hero. ‘Well known locally,’ said the Classified Standard, ‘Riff Raff became a regular feature on the Peterborough music scene.’
Billy played on long after the bar had closed, and was invited back in June. ‘A selection of his songs have already been recorded for release in the near future,’ noted Cheryl Przybyl in her Pop Scene column in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. (In June, she was still talking about it in the future tense, saying the album was ‘due for release any time now’.)
Back in London, Billy played three nights at the Latchmere pub in Battersea, performing two sets a night. One night, between the two sets, an A&R from CBS records made himself known and said, ‘Very entertaining, Bill, but do I hear a hit single?’ He might as well have tweaked Billy’s nose. Jenner had never asked him about hit singles.
In Melody Maker dated 26 March, Mick Mercer reviewed a Spy Vs Spy gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead supporting two-piece Re-Set, in front of what Mercer calculated was ‘a motley two dozen’ people. It was a PA-stacked-on-beer-crates sort of place with posters advertising gigs by Blurt, Play Dead and The Impossible Dreamers. ‘Billy The Kid could enjoy himself playing to one person, let alone 30,’ ran the review. ‘What a cool nerve! What a voice! The night belonged to Old Bill. Dull he wasn’t.’ (Mercer, later willingly pigeon-holed as the country’s leading expert on goth music, had written the only ever national feature on Riff Raff in Zig Zag. Sympathetic souls continually hove in and out of view.)
A week later, Sweeting’s interview appeare
d, under the headline ‘The Climate Of Reason’, and accompanied by a three-column photograph by Tom Sheehan confirming that he was still Billy Bleach. Overenthusiastically announcing that the album was coming out in May, Sweeting expertly described Billy as ‘part stand-up comedian, part musical flying picket’. Among the quotes Billy did manage to get into print were a confession to buying Smash Hits religiously, some well-expressed fears for the welfare state and details of his Spandau Ballet epiphany (seeing them perform ‘Chant No. 1’ on Top Of The Pops and feeling that punk was truly dead).
It was the last time he’d use the name Spy Vs Spy.
He may have been in a music paper at last, but his album was trapped in the ether somewhere between Chappell in Marble Arch and Charisma in Wardour Street (above the old Marquee club); a pleasant little stroll apart down London’s busy Oxford Street, or three short stops on the tube. Billy found himself bouncing between the two a great deal during April, May and June. ‘It seemed to take for ever,’ he says, recalling a knot of dread every time he stepped out of Marble Arch tube, for fear that this was the time they’d tell him, Sorry, the record’s not actually coming out. ‘I was so close to getting my hands on that record and going and doing it,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t have any kudos at either company, they had much more important things to do.’
In April and May, Billy Bragg did his first gigs up North: at The Gallery in Manchester, and at a twenty-fifth birthday party for a bloke he knew called Dave C in Liverpool at the Warehouse. His initiation to Liverpool was beset with stereotypical trouble. Katy drove him up there and duly had her car broken into during the soundcheck. Billy remembers two coppers taking down all the details out in the street, with Katy in tears, when the party’s host came out and said ‘You’re on.’ There’s nothing like centring yourself before a show, and that was nothing like it. (Dave C’s now a sheep farmer.)
Billy Bragg Page 13