Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  There were many highlights, not least the gig at Utah University in Salt Lake City, where Billy had $46’s worth of coins thrown at him (the Bunnymen’s roadies went around afterwards filling pint glasses with change, which, the next day in Reno, they promptly put into slot machines). Another unforgettable occasion came on the long drive from Chicago to New Orleans in the crew bus (the Bunnymen flew the rest of the tour, but Billy and Wiggy opted to stop on the ground, where the view is better). At Billy’s behest, the driver made a stop-off at Graceland in Memphis, Elvis Presley’s ancestral home. The roadies were all about ten years older than Billy and Wiggy, and excellent, if hard-living, company – and they were well into Elv, playing 1950s rock’n’roll tapes all the way there.

  Billy remembers running from the car park to Graceland, eager to get his fill of tack: ‘It is the Great White American Trash Experience. It’s like going into Tutankhamun’s tomb, the King buried with all his gold, or in this case, his Harley Davidsons.’ Entering into the spirit of it (and failure to do this would be like visiting Disneyland and complaining that Mickey was a man in a suit), Billy purchased some fluorescent socks with a Jailhouse Rock Elvis image on the ankle. He saved them, and took them home in mint condition, only to discover that they’d been made in Leicester.

  While the Bunnymen cruised above the anonymous clouds, Billy and Wiggy squeezed every last drop of first-hand experience out of their maiden US jaunt, usually sitting up front with the bus driver and playing cultural I-spy. (Needless to say, they were forever phoning Ricey from significant points and saying ‘Wish you were here.’) They were constantly amazed by the stamina of the crew – as the coach pulled into New Orleans, they emerged from their coffin-like bunks, disembarked and, instead of making for the hotel, made a bee-line for the famous Bourbon Street and started championship drinkin’ and carousin’. Billy and Wiggy followed, like new kids at rock school. Billy remembers with awe the American guy whose job it was to organise and sell the tour merchandising, estimating that he’d put the equivalent of ‘a sizeable townhouse’ up his nose over the years. ‘It’s the one thing I’ve never been interested in,’ Billy says of cocaine. ‘And Wiggy neither. Drinking’s OK, we’ll stay up all day drinking, but never the really stupid, expensive stuff. I’m not as judgmental about marijuana as I was, but cocaine is the most boring drug in the world.’

  The comic Robin Williams said that cocaine is God’s way of telling you you’re earning too much money. It’s equally God’s way of telling you you’re signed to a record company, where the hours are upside down and, as such, consumption is rife. Whatever anybody says, it’s virtually institutionalised, even in the health-conscious 90s. It probably never appealed to Billy because it’s an aspirational, middle-class drug, a plaything of the not-actually-rich, and a waste of money. And anyway, here was one man who didn’t need any help in talking bollocks really fast.

  He was certainly utilising this natural skill on stage, bamboozling the Americans with his accelerated patter. ‘Sometimes,’ Wiggy recalls, ‘he’d get into a rap and forget to play a tune.’ There was an increased rate of string-breaking in America too, usually one per song, occasionally two, which left Wiggy ‘ferociously re-stringing, or else borrowing guitars from the Bunnymen’ in the wings. In New York, Wiggy recalls, a guitar was passed back through the gap in the curtains, and in his haste, he tuned the B-string to an E and confidently handed it back to Billy. Recognising that it was out, Billy subsequently tuned the rest of strings to match the mistuned B. Ker-lang! It all added to the fun.

  At the end of the tour in Los Angeles, Billy and Wiggy stayed on for two extra days – just in case this was their one-and-only trip to America. They checked out of the expensive, paid-for hotel, where they each had a room with mirrors on the ceiling (very off-putting if you wanted to clear the custard), and checked into the legendary Tropicana, where the air-conditioning didn’t work but they didn’t care. They rented a car and drove to the end of Route 66, which is basically where Sunset Boulevard hits the sea. It was an emotional, you’re-my-best-mate sort of moment. ‘I can’t explain the achievement of seeing the Pacific Ocean,’ Billy says. ‘It was the conclusion of our childhood dream, the moment where all the things we’d ever wanted to do we could now say we’d done. Me and Wiggs.’

  ‘By the end of the tour we were old hands,’ says Wiggy.

  Peter Jenner remembers Billy coming home and being ‘remarkably relaxed’. He’d had a record out, made the cover of the NME and now he’d even gotten his kicks on Route 66.

  Anything else would be a bonus. Rudyard Kipling had it right:

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

  9. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

  A bit of politics, 1984–1985

  From South Wales across to Yorkshire

  From Scotland down to Kent

  The miners showed the NCB

  That what they said, they meant

  Dick Gaughan, ‘The Ballad of ’84’

  I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar

  It meant that you were a protest singer

  The Smiths, ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’

  ‘IF SOMEONE SAYS to me, What did you do during Thatcherism?

  My conscience is clear.’

  This is Billy Bragg talking today, at a safe distance from the struggle, a year on from the Labour landslide of 1 May 1997, and eight years since the tyrannical Margaret Thatcher was ousted from her post after a leadership challenge from her former Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine. (Hezza was pipped in the second ballot by Chancellor John Major, but the overthrow of Thatcher was a glorious day for the left either way.)

  Thatcherism’s effects did not magically evaporate when the woman after whom the term had been coined tearfully departed Downing Street on 28 November 1990. The Tories even secured a fourth term of office in 1992, despite the personality bypass of their new leader, and in many ways this was an even more demoralising defeat for Labour. Thatcher’s political legacy in this country lives on. As Eric J. Evans notes: ‘One of her major objectives was to destroy socialism. In the short term, at least, she succeeded.’

  In 1984, at the height of the fighting, for Billy Bragg and many like him, Margaret Thatcher looked as if she was going to dismember Britain with her bare hands, if not, through her ‘special relationship’ with the gung-ho Ronald Reagan, actually lay it to rest. And somebody had to stop her.

  It would be fanciful to say that you had to be political in 1980s Britain. The majority in fact weren’t. The Tories’ battle for the nation’s hearts and minds had been won not on ideological ground but at home. They offered council houses for sale, thereby pulling off the biggest confidence trick of their reign after the meaningless privatisation of utilities (you too can be a homeowner and buy a bit of British Gas – result: you will be deeper in debt, and the well-off will still own the lion’s share of the shares). Even though New Labour are often criticised for putting presentation before policy, it was the Conservatives who ran the country using smoke and mirrors, apparently raising the standard of living for all and creating what Major later called ‘a classless society’ while actually widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The average real income of families may have gone up by 37 per cent between 1979 and 1992 (a great Tory statistic to quote), but the real income of the poorest 10 per cent of the country plummeted by 18 per cent and that of the wealthiest 10 per cent shot up by a criminal 61 per cent. This was Thatcher’s Britain.

  At the 1983 election, the Tories won a 144 majority, the largest since Labour’s victory after the Second World War – so somebody was voting for them. As a rule, it was people who lived in the South of England, a demographic confirmation that Thatcherite rule was utterly divisive. (In the ’87 election, the Tories won 87 per cent of all seats in the South and the Midl
ands, while Wales, Scotland and the North showed up almost entirely red.) In a report published a year later called The Nationwide Competition For Votes – The 1983 British Election, Ian McAllister and Richard Rose concluded: ‘[Labour] is no longer the party of most working-class voters.’

  ‘By 1983, the scales had fallen from my eyes,’ says Billy. He vividly remembers seeing a Tory minister on TV who, when asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if the money spent on Cruise missiles was used to provide free school dinners?’, replied, ‘What good are free school dinners if they are being fed to our children by Russian paratroopers?’ It was, for Billy, a moment of realisation: ‘Reagan, Thatcher, Cold War … it’s going to happen.’

  Aside from that, he admits he has no clear memories of the 1983 election, except that Labour got in in Barking. Peter Jenner, more tuned-in politically by dint of age and experience, could see Billy smartening up his act: ‘Initially he was a social commentator. He sees what’s around him and puts it into a song. Having been involved with Ian Dury just before Billy, I could see that parallel. Within a year of getting out that first album, he’d become much more political.’

  Andy Macdonald concurs: ‘Intensely political. He became more confident, too. His presence on stage took on more of the avenging angel.’

  In March, 1984, the first vital signs of a divided Britain began to show. In opposition to the offer of a 5.2 per cent pay rise, and as a protest against proposed pit closures, 153 out of 174 coal-mines went on strike. Industrial action was nothing new, nor was it exclusively reflective of a Conservative government – the Labour government of 1974–79 was characterised by strikes, especially during its winter of discontent: lorry drivers, railway-men, local-government workers, teachers, even bakers and grave-diggers – but the miners’ strike ran deeper than mere unrest among the workforce.

  In his book The Miners’ Strike, former Daily Mirror industrial editor Geoffrey Goodman writes: ‘Primary responsibility for the conflict has to be attributed to the government. It wanted a showdown because it had become convinced that this was the only way to destroy [NUM President] Arthur Scargill … and through that route to administer a severe blow to active trade unionism.’

  It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to leap to this conclusion. Thatcher hated the unions, and she regarded the NUM as the Enemy Within, which is why the miners’ strike was a gift. The government had even been preparing for it (Thatcher ally Nicholas Ridley had drawn up a plan to defeat the miners as long ago as 1978), and it was the large-scale mobilisation of riot police to prevent flying pickets that most sinisterly summed up the mother of all battles. On 29 May, 8,000 officers mounted charges on picketing miners and their supporters at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire. It painted an unpretty picture.

  While Billy was touring America with the Bunnymen in August of that year, he’d assumed the strike would be over by the time he returned. Far from it. On 21 September, violence flared on the picket line at Maltby Colliery near Rotherham, some of the worst in the strike’s seven-month duration. On 26 September, just back from another European jaunt, Billy Bragg went out to the frontline.

  He’d been asked to play by various miners’ support groups – he’d made quite a few trade union contacts while doing gigs for the GLC, whose festivals and benefits were always overtly political in nature, with pamphlets everywhere and the exchange of ideas in the foyer (the GLC style was very much the inspiration behind Red Wedge). Billy was keen to throw his weight behind the miners’ struggle, as fund-raising was essential if the action was to continue: ‘And what I could do that the others couldn’t do was go and play outside London cheaply and effectively.’

  He played at the Docks United Social Club in Newport (raising £233.20 for the Gwent and Rhymney NUM food fund), and Corby Civic Centre, but it was the third miners’ gig at The Bunker in Sunderland on 28 September that truly galvanised his feelings. Before embarking on this short hop for the miners, his head was full of questions: ‘Why am I doing this? Am I just doing it for publicity because I’ve got a record coming out? What are my motives? Am I really political? Do I really walk it like I talk it?’ He knew the answers by the time he got to Sunderland, because he had to explain himself in a more ideological way to the miners and their supporters than he ever had to a music journalist – ‘where I was vis-à-vis the class struggle, where I was vis-à-vis Marx, the Labour Party. They wanted to know.’

  The other aspect that struck him in Sunderland was the sheer strength of feeling in those who got up on stage to speak between the music, all of them women, many of them with husbands in jail. Billy recalls the secretary of the Women’s Support Group chatting to him in the dressing room while the other support group were on stage – her husband and two sons had all been put away or were on remand – before the strike she’d never made a speech before in her life, but now she made one every night. ‘This was something you couldn’t get doing gigs in London,’ he remarks.

  The miners’ gigs weren’t just a political watershed for Billy, they also opened his ears and broadened his musical palette. Here, as with so many get-up-and-play protest gigs, he came into contact with the more politically motivated folk musicians – Roy Bailey, Dick Gaughan, Leon Rosselson – activists in a field from which he’d taken so much indirect inspiration, and yet names he’d never come across.

  The folk element in Billy’s music had always been there to those in the know, but it played second fiddle to the punk thrash. Despite having been schooled in Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, and having dabbled with folk sampler LPs from Barking Library, the cleansing fires of punk had burnt Billy’s folk sympathies off the map. But he was a big boy now, and rubbing shoulders with Gaughan and Rosselson during 1984’s miners’ benefits had an effect. The seed had been sown back at the Labour Euro-elections gig at the Free Trade Hall, when Rosselson and Roy Bailey sang ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. Here were folk musicians at work, and, as Billy was forced to admit to himself at the time, ‘they had a much more radical canon of songs than I did.’ It inspired him to play ‘Between The Wars’, a song that would soon define Billy Bragg.

  Because of the threat of flying pickets, the black Volvo and its occupants (Billy, Kershaw, Ian Richards) were routinely stopped, searched and questioned by police as they attempted to drive to gigs in sensitive areas: ‘The country was turning into a police state in front of our eyes.’

  By the end of this short tour, Billy Bragg considered himself totally politicised: ‘It had gone beyond being a punk rocker and playing lip service to a set of ideals. It was happening. And it was pretty heavy.’

  It took Billy Bragg 27 years to reach this state of finely tuned political activist, and it was anything but an overnight conversion. It is probably wise not to overanalyse this early political poem found in one of his school exercise books circa 1971, but his passion is commendable:

  ‘Let’s have a revolution/Kill the government/Kill the monarchy/Death to Socialism, Capitalism, Communism/Get a gun/Kill the army, navy and flyboys/Destroy religion/Kill the autocrats, bureaucrats, workers/Kill the people on the streets/We’re gonna save the world.’

  Billy’s first ever true political act was attending the Rock Against Racism march up to Victoria Park in Hackney, on 30 April 1978, ostensibly to see The Clash. He’d had what he now identifies as ‘political feelings’ at school, such as listening to Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and being inspired by it in a soppy sort of way. He realised that the National Front were not there to be tolerated, or treated as a joke (‘they were something to be opposed, physically if necessary’), and that racism was not just a black person’s problem. The Bulldog, newspaper of the NF’s youth wing, was sold outside Billy’s school gates by Barking branch organiser Joe Pearce, who, Billy recalls, would also try to set up football teams. South of the A13, east of the sewage works, lies the Thames View housing estate, built in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the fact that there is one road in and one road out enabled the NF to close off the enti
re estate and allow only white people in, as was their wont.

  The local Sikhs in Barking would get gyp for wearing turbans. Not from Billy, but he admits, ‘It didn’t occur to me that it was anything but spiteful – and there was that terrible feeling: rather them than me.’

  Rock Against Racism was, for Billy, ‘an eye-opener’.

  It is not an oversimplification of events to say that RAR was formed because of Eric Clapton. In August 1976, on stage in Birmingham, he informed his audience, quite out of the blue, that he agreed with Enoch Powell and stated, unequivocally, that he thought black immigrants in Britain should be sent home. (This, from the man who’d made his name playing the blues, and scored a Top Ten hit with Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ in 1974.) A wave of embarrassment swept through the rock community. A letter of protest from various media folk appeared in the Socialist Worker newspaper and the music weeklies. Support grew, and Rock Against Racism went from being a statement to a movement. In his book When The Music’s Over, Robin Denselow describes RAR’s five-year lifetime as ‘embroiled in controversy and chaos. In retrospect, it is remarkable that it survived at all and achieved so much, for it was attempting the near-impossible.’

  Nevertheless, it was British pop music’s first organised political front, as hamstrung by its affiliation with the Socialist Worker Party as was, for some, Red Wedge with Labour years later. Its heart, though, was in the right place, and it provided just the show of strength needed to counter the rise of the NF, 80 of whose candidates in the 1976 local elections polled over ten per cent of the vote. Rock Against Racism, like the GLC, put on some splendid gigs, mixing white and black artists and helping to promote British reggae to the white punks.

  At Victoria Park, Billy felt part of a mass movement: ‘Wow! I’m not the only person who’s into The Clash and into reggae, there’s a lot of us, and we’re very, very powerful.’ This was a common reaction. The march from Trafalgar Square to Hackney had been organised by the Anti-Nazi League, and the left-wing swell that day was tangible. All pro-liberation life was here. Billy remembers the shock of seeing men kissing (something he and Wiggy had, understandably, never seen in Barking). They felt entirely unthreatened. Billy thought to himself: ‘They’re part of this, it’s all connected, although fuck knows how. I’m not a queer, I’m still heterosexual, but it’s OK, it’s cool, don’t run away, they’re not kissing you, they’re kissing each other.’