On the apparent dichotomy of supporting goth bands and old folkies, Billy told Swells in the NME, ‘I want both those audiences and everyone in between.’ On 10 November, Billy played with Thompson at the New Cross Venue in grotty south-east London, where he met his old economics teacher at the bar. The exchange went like this:
‘Was that you up there, Bragg?’
‘Yes, sir. That’s what I do for a living.’
‘Stop calling me sir and buy me a drink.’
On the final night of The Icicle Works leg in their hometown of Liverpool, Billy appeared with them on stage dressed in a gorilla costume for the conceptual finale. Possibly in response to The Smiths, who were making a name for themselves by chucking fresh flowers around at gigs, The Icicle Works had collected a dozen bin bags full of leaves to have scattered around the stage by the gorilla. Unfortunately, Billy remembers with horror, the bags also contained ‘old, hard bits of dog shit’. Not that he cared, he was inside a monkey suit.
While he was out there peddling, his wares got their biggest push to date. In the issue dated 19 November, the NME finally ran a review of Life’s A Riot – the sort you couldn’t buy. Billy had previously been up to the NME’s Carnaby Street office with an album under his arm, relying on Swells as his point of contact. He’d met X Moore, who subsequently listened to the record, picked up on the clenched fist of ‘To Have And To Have Not’ and decided to pen the review. It was the biggest of the lot, a five-column ‘page lead’, as they’re known, headed ‘BRAGG ART’.
‘DOWN WITH MISERABLISM!’ wrote X Moore (his capitals). ‘When pop’s operative word is WALLOW, when all around is flat INDULGENCE and the Gallup machines on high click gamely to the grim beat of the dollar, a man like Billy Bragg is a sparkling tonic. Be lifted by his AMBITION, laugh at his EXUBERANCE, trust him to make a fool of himself – Billy Bragg is some kind of wonderful.’
It is pertinent that the writer picked up on Billy as an alternative to the increasingly commercialised, wipe-clean pop status quo. By side-stepping both the available technology and the fast-track corporate infrastructure, Billy Bragg became an instant cause, a pocket revolutionary – music to the ears of the NME’s ardently politicised writing staff. As pop became more remote and its practitioners more unreal, Billy arrived on the doorstep and demanded they put the kettle on.
Neil Spencer, the NME’s editor at the time, reckons Billy’s appearances at Carnaby Street were ‘a complete managerial masterstroke, because nobody came round the office; musicians kept their distance. I remember Bananarama and Wham! came up in their earliest days, but in general you just didn’t do it. Peter Jenner saw very astutely that if you met the musician, you were less likely to dis him. If you’ve met musicians, providing they’re not awful people, then you realise that at the end of your cutting, witty prose there is another human being, and you may not feel quite so casual about putting him down. It wouldn’t have worked if Billy hadn’t been such a personable bloke, but of course he was.’
Spencer became evangelistic about Billy. He even sent his secretary Karen Walter home for the weekend with a copy of Life’s A Riot, saying it was ‘the most important record she’d hear all year’. Walter remembers taking it home to her mum’s, and on first listen thinking, ‘What on earth is this? Then I put it on at the right speed and realised what all the fuss was about.’
The fuss was snowballing.
‘He was in the office all the time,’ Walter recalls. ‘It wasn’t just his music, but his music reflected how most of the office felt about politics. He had a lot in common with the staff.’
‘Life’s A Riot was fantastically refreshing at that time,’ says Spencer, summing up precisely the malaise that Billy had set out to detonate. ‘By 1983, punk ideals had got pretty much lost, the idea of do-it-yourself, back-to-basics, take-no-crap was fast disappearing under a welter of double-breasted suits, cocktail hours and absurd and shallow glamour bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. And at the other extreme was a dreadful, Oxfam dreariness and fatalism summed up by people like New Order. You had bogus glamour on one side and bogus industrialism on the other.’
He recalls a pervasive sense of gloom at the paper. At the end of 1983, the writers were asked to pick Next Year’s Big Thing, and one of them, Biba Kopf, wrote: ‘The end of the world (please).’
‘There was a feeling of defeat. Billy’s record went right against all those ideas. It was true to the spirit of punk inasmuch as it was DIY and coming up fighting. It immediately stood out. And Barney Bubbles’ design on the sleeve was very important, because record sleeves are a statement of intent.’
Bubbles was dear to the NME’s heart, as he’d designed their enduring, blocky logo. He was famous for his graphic record sleeve designs for Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and others (the Dury connection was how Jenner had drafted him in to work on Life’s A Riot). Spencer goes as far as saying Bubbles ‘was undoubtedly the most gifted designer of his generation’. The Life’s A Riot artwork – utilitarian, simple, two-colour, based on the old Penguin book covers for ‘classic’ allusions – without a doubt played its part in Billy’s early success. It was the kind of record you wanted to have. (When Billy revived the Utility imprint in 1988, the Bubbles template was used as a unifying label identity.)
‘The early songs are as good as Bill’s ever written,’ maintains Spencer. ‘“St Swithin’s Day”, “A New England”, these are evergreen songs.’
Things were looking up for Billy Bragg. Fame was on the counter and he was paying for it in sweat. While the press file grew, he was usually in transit – without the aid of a Transit van. In 1982, he’d done 28 gigs; in 1983, he clocked up 96. After that, he pulled his finger out.
Billy may have been getting pretty practised at the art of gigging, but this, coupled with an unforgiving itinerary, did not have the effect of blending one town into the next. There was always something to mark each gig date from the next – although perhaps none so vivid and unsavoury as what happened in Newcastle. It was during the November campaign, fireworks night, an unscheduled stopover to play at a rowdy, pissed student-only ball in the University.
The dressing room was a huge student common room with a telly (just the ticket for the football results), and Billy was buoyant enough not to care about the fact that he was sharing with three strippers: two women and a bloke. Thinking nothing of it, he went out and did the gig. Not having anywhere to go in Newcastle but back to his digs, he decided to stay for the main act. If only. The college rector got up onstage and announced to the pickled audience that the strippers would not be performing. A near-riot ensued, so Billy nipped back to the dressing room for his gear. It was locked. He banged on the door, demanding to be let into his dressing room. The door opened a crack, and he saw that the common room was full of students. The banned strippers were going to do the show right here.
It’s worth stressing again that Billy knew no one in Newcastle, and had nowhere better to go. He sat down to enjoy the show (bit of harmless fun) and was forced by lack of available seats to sit in the front row.
‘There are two things I remember,’ he now recalls. ‘The sound of the geezer’s member thwacking against his belly and knees, which was much too close, and then this woman takes one of the bananas off the rider and puts it up her. I thought, If this is what college is all about, I should’ve gone! Anyway, she takes the banana out of herself and offers it to the front row. All these students go, Eeeeuurgh! I think, fuck it, and when it comes to me, I nearly bite her fingers off!’
Cue: a roar of approval from the undergraduate crowd. Billy cites beer intake in mitigation, and society is obviously to blame, but this unfortunate display was not allowed to fade from his memory. Months later, on 10 March 1984, Billy found himself doing a National Union of Students gig in Battersea Park. All of a sudden, mid-set, a banana was thrown onstage with a shout of ‘Newcastle!’ – the reference was lost to the majority of the audience, but Billy knew that somewhere out there in the sea of faces was a stude
nt from the North East with a good memory.
‘There was a period when I could not play a student gig in the North East without a banana coming onstage, or someone shouting, “Banana!” They were still doing it during Red Wedge at Newcastle City Hall!’
A regrettable incident maybe, but it proved that Billy Bragg’s audience were starting to follow him about. He was an attraction, and the significance was not lost on him: ‘My people were out there. They were coming to see me, writing to me.’
Billy had played many a London date with Sincere’s other white hopes The Opposition, but by December, rather embarrassingly, he started accidentally blowing them offstage. A gig at the Half Moon pub in South London’s Herne Hill on 12 December was reviewed in both Sounds and Melody Maker (‘Pity [Billy Bragg’s] doting followers, who arrived in their buzzing droves, didn’t have the decency to stay for the main act. Most of them left before the Oppos played a note’).
It was like the scene in the film Jaws when Police Chief Brody sees the shark for the first time, and says, quietly, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ Billy Bragg was getting too big for support slots.
On 17 December, Life’s A Riot topped Melody Maker’s indie charts, although at the time, indie charts were a bit hit-and-miss, relying on a random selection of specialist shops for their sales information (Melody Maker’s that week were supplied by Jumbo Records in Leeds). In the same week, Billy was Number Five in NME’s indie charts. But more importantly, the album had entered the real, national chart at 44. Here, he was competing with the big boys.
In the Christmas issue of Sounds, Billy was invited to write about life on the road, and his single O Level came in handy yet again: ‘Oh, the joys of being a pop star. I think my amp-carrying arm is getting longer.’ There were tips on following in his pioneering footsteps, and a look to the future that was either totally disingenuous or the talk of a man who had kept his head while all about him people were losing theirs:
‘There’s a possibility of going to America, but if that doesn’t work out, well sod it, it’s only a hobby.’
Thanks to the tireless commitment of Go! Discs, the unshakeable belief of Sincere, and all the hoopla over at the super-influential NME, Billy Bragg had a full-time job of work: seven-day week, unsociable hours, no company car, short-term contracts, no pension, no save-as-you-earn share scheme, and yet, the best job in the world.
Billy was invited to play the NME’s Christmas party (‘Prance, Preen and Promenade’ said the ticket) on 22 December. Karen Walter remembers that ‘a few people were talking during his set and Neil was furious!’
Some kind of NME mascot (without the patronising tone that might go with such an honour), Billy found his album in the Vinyl Finals, beaten only by Tom Waits’ oompah-epic Swordfishtrom-bones and at Number One, Elvis Costello’s mighty Punch The Clock (which contained his heart-rending Falklands lament ‘Shipbuilding’). ‘Number Three was pretty good going,’ says Billy. ‘I was really proud of that.’
In the Sunday Times, academic Simon Frith named it as one of his Records Of The Year. On 31 December, none other than the Daily Mirror predicted fame for Billy Bragg in 1984: ‘Excellent, if odd, solo performer from London.’ Similar tips came from Music Week and the Guardian.
Only a hobby.
He was asked by one of the papers to sum up 1983: ‘It was the year that I realised that the only place I could ever truly find nirvana was between nipples and Nissen Hut in a dictionary.’
8. A GREAT FRIEND OF DAVE GILMOUR’S
Take-off, 1984
I’m looking for a vehicle
I’m looking for a ride
I’m looking for a party
I’m looking for a side
David Bowie, ‘1984’
BEWARE THE SAVAGE roar of 1984. This was the year that the future arrived in Britain: an overused graphic of Big Brother is watching you. George Orwell set his nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four in that year because it was written in 1948, but what the heck, it was as good a reason as any for twelve months of designer paranoia. After all, scientists discovered the Aids virus, the Soviet Union boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics, the year-long miners’ strike began, and American nuclear warheads were strategically placed all over the English countryside.
‘We shall abolish the orgasm,’ promises torturer O’Brien in Orwell’s book. ‘Our neurologists are at work on it now.’ No wonder Frankie Goes To Hollywood and their multi-sexual apocalypto-disco took off in 1984.
London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, rock’s foremost ponceteria, got the bandwagon moving, staging a nine-day New Year Rock Week from 23 December 1983 to 7 January 1984. Orwell’s Big Brother glared out of the tickets, posters, flyers and stage backdrop. The second Thursday night gig, 5 January, saw the first real example of what shall be dubbed Braggmania, when Billy performed on the same bill as The Redskins and the little-known Bronski Beat, featuring a falsetto-voiced Jimmy Somerville. (Also playing during that bonanza week of ICA gigs were Prefab Sprout, Gene Loves Jezebel and Modern English, plus Einsturzende Neubaten’s Concerto For Voice And Machinery. It was not a week of comedy.)
Billy knew in his bones that this was his coming of age: ‘None of this bollocking about playing the Half Moon and the Rock Garden, this was a proper gig that got proper reviews by everyone.’
‘The audience was like putty in his hands,’ observed Paul Bradshaw in the NME a week later, just one of the predicted umpteen reviews of the ICA shows. ‘Braggmania is sweeping the nation,’ spied Adam Sweeting at the Melody Maker.
Also in January, Andy Macdonald borrowed some money from his uncle in order to pay for another pressing of Life’s A Riot. It was a small price to stump up. Go! Discs famously spent just £150 on the marketing of the album. Billy paid his own way. He’d signed to Go! for just the one album, and his dotted-line fee was a complete set of Motown Chartbusters albums and a 1965 tin of Beatles talcum powder that he coveted, belonging to Macdonald. Usually, a record company will lavish a new signing with a handsome advance in the comfortable thousands, but a) neither Macdonald nor his uncle could afford one, and b) Billy didn’t want one. (‘He doesn’t like to feel he’s in hock to someone,’ Macdonald notes.) In fact, Billy would never take a whopping advance from Go! Discs, even when they could afford it, and he only ever signed for one album at a time. As the years went by, this irritated Macdonald no end, but it kept Billy and PJ happy, and they paid him back with eight years’ worth of loyalty (and many thousand sales).
The sales of the second pressing of Life’s A Riot pushed it into the national Top 40 (to 32 according to the Music Week chart of 4 February). It sold 50,000 copies, just shy of a silver disc (it would subsequently pass silver and go gold). ‘A New England’, though not even a single, had been voted Number Seven in John Peel’s annual, listener-led Festive Fifty on Radio 1. As his Go! Discs biography, finely crafted by Kershaw, declared: ‘Billy Bragg has risen from obscurity to the status of semi-obscurity.’
Before all this, Billy had always carried with him a mental check-list of three distinct musical ambitions:
Make an album.
Tour America.
Be on the cover of the NME.
One down. The 14 January issue of NME made it two. ‘GIRLS, GUNS, GUTS, GUITARS’ ran the cover-line, subtitled ‘Billy Bragg’s New England by Gavin Martin.’ He’d made it. Just as models move into a new orbit when they become ‘cover girls’, so a music press cover star carries a certain cachet – but it’s not quite the equivalent passport to success. For a kick-off, the glory lasts only a week. Sure, it means everything for the seven days that your mug is on the news-stand, but next Wednesday, you’re chip paper, potentially never to be heard of again. That said, such long-term realism rarely tarnishes the kudos when you’re on the cover of the NME – for that week, you are the most significant name in rock.
In these competitive times, choice of cover star is more often than not a commercial decision for music magazines, but in 1984, before the glossy
boom, the NME used its cover as a manifesto. Billy Bragg was the NME, and vice versa. Times have changed so much in the intervening years, it is inconceivable now even to imagine a newspaper without colour, but that was then. The NME wasn’t about undignified jostling in WHSmith, it was … the NME. Billy was photographed by that season’s in-house image-maker Anton Corbijn in front of the Houses of Parliament: very dark, very oppressive, very end-of-the-world-(please). Martin, a Northern Irish firebrand who’d risen during punk, provided a comprehensive interrogation inside, and declared Billy ‘a damn sight funnier than George Orwell’. Which, for all the studied, apocalyptic gloom in the air, was crucial.
It is worth noting the near-parallel rise of The Smiths, whose transformation from Manchester cult band to national pop phenomenon occurred at the same time as Billy went overground, and the two acts would frequently cross paths. In January 1984, by which time The Smiths had garnered some ecstatic early press, recorded their first Peel Session, topped the indie charts and scored a Top 30 hit with ‘This Charming Man’, Billy had his ears opened to the songwriting genius of Morrissey and Johnny Marr by Andy Kershaw, now ensconced at the Jenners’. (Kershaw recalls his sister Liz seeing him off to London on the coach from Leeds, and he told her, ‘I’m going down for ten days, and if I don’t like it I’ll be back. And I’m still here.’)
It was in the lull after soundcheck at a Billy Bragg headline gig at Sheffield Poly: Kershaw had taped Billy the third Smiths single ‘What Difference Does It Make’, and Billy gave the tape to the sound man, who duly played it over the PA. It was the tender B-side ‘Back To The Old House’ that did it for Billy. He recalls a divine moment of understanding and empathy: ‘This marked a return to people writing songs about things. As far as I was concerned, the new romantic movement was dead.’
In a synthesised world, Billy seized on The Smiths’ old romanticism, and was enthused by both Morrissey’s arch lyricism and Marr’s dynamic guitarwork. ‘The Smiths coming along gave me a lot of encouragement, something to measure myself against – although not as a competition.’ Even media shorthand seemed to rope them off together: Morrissey and Marr were the new Lennon and McCartney, Billy Bragg was the new Bob Dylan. Both began 1984 with their first NME cover, and both would have a great year.
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