Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  The strike may have been lost, but those who made that heroic stand had proved that there was plenty of fight in them yet. After the 1984–5 strike, Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan recorded an album called True And Bold: Songs Of The Scottish Miners as an expression of ‘solidarity and gratitude to the finest people I have ever known’, containing many stirring tunes like ‘Ballad Of ’84’, ‘Miner’s Life Is Like A Sailor’s’ and ‘Which Side Are You On?’, a traditional tune with new words by Gaughan about the NUM and Thatcher. The latter would feature on Billy Bragg’s next release.

  ‘Between The Wars’, left off Brewing Up but elevated to anthem status since the first miners’ gigs, was Billy’s first seven-inch single. Actually, it was a four-track EP, but it sold for ‘no more than £1.25’, and was resolutely not advertising a forthcoming or existing LP. For Billy, ‘Between The Wars’ itself was an important enough song to relax his principles for, and would be his public statement on the working-class experience as focused by the miners’ strike:

  I kept the faith and I kept voting

  Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand

  For theirs is a land with a wall around it

  And mine is a faith in my fellow man

  Theirs is a land of hope and glory

  Mine is the green field and the factory floor

  Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers

  Mine is the peace we knew

  Between the wars

  It was a magnificent show of strength, both collective and musical, as folky as anything Billy had recorded and yet shot through with punk dissidence. There were no jokes in it.

  The EP was structured conceptually. Alongside the no-messing-about ‘Which Side Are You On?’ (lyrics adapted by Billy) was an interpretation of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, formerly a gently rousing piano-led salute by Leon Rosselson, now a driving, guitar-led Bo Diddley thing. ‘It Says Here’ was untimely ripped from Brewing Up. The complete set formed a supercharged one-man folk festival. The cover image, featuring two happy children, came courtesy of a tin plate advertising Flemish marmalade, that Kershaw had picked up in an Amsterdam flea market. The whole package was, as Billy modestly puts it, ‘flying in the face of everything that was going on at the time’.

  It charted at Number Fifteen and landed Billy Bragg on Top Of The Pops. To quote Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’

  Most bands dream of their first Top Of The Pops appearance. Even today, with the beleaguered show adrift on Friday evenings when it was always a Thursday night fixture, it is a landmark for artist and record company promotions department alike. It was never Billy’s dream, partly because he didn’t watch it as a teenager, and when he did as a young man he kept seeing Spandau Ballet on it, but mostly because he never dreamt he’d be asked on. (Plus, of course, The Clash had famously refused to appear on it, which impressed Billy at the time.)

  The first fly in the Pops ointment would be Billy’s insistence on playing his hit song(!) live. This was not encouraged, as miming gave the show a technical consistency – however, since Billy’s recording was so primitive, they let him make his stand. The second niggle was the audience, who were told by the director to wave their arms in the air during Billy’s run-through. This was a vast improvement on the awkward dancing and balloon volleyball that characterised the show’s ‘party’ atmosphere, but before the actual performance, Billy leant down from the stage and asked the kids not to. Mercifully, they complied, and Billy was granted the dignity of crowd attentiveness, even if some of them were wearing plastic Union Jack hats and waved the odd flag.

  He was introduced by hey-wow, moustachioed Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright, who’d approached Billy beforehand and asked him to explain the whole song, which he duly did. He then came up afterwards and asked him again. ‘I didn’t fit in,’ Billy recalls. ‘And that was the idea.’ Marie Bragg tuned in and approved of the ‘nice shirt’ he had on.

  The single didn’t even plummet out of the charts the following week, which is the accepted deal – it hung in there for six weeks. Billy still considers ‘Between The Wars’ ‘a high watermark of Billy Bragg singles, and a high point of 1985. It stamped me in people’s minds.’

  In the solemn and apparently sincere words of Steve Wright that Thursday night: ‘This really is an evocadive song … would you welcome, Billy Bragg.’

  Hooray!

  10. HOW LONG CAN A BAD THING LAST?

  Another bit of politics, 1985–1987

  When the world falls apart, some things stay in place

  Billy Bragg, ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’

  Like many men of below-average height, he wished he were taller

  Andy McSmith of the Observer on Neil Kinnock

  ‘HANG ON TO your ideals!’ was Billy Bragg’s message to young people on 28 February 1985, when he joined a delegation of disgruntled YTS trainees on the doorstep of 10, Downing Street. An estimated 5,000 had turned out at a rally in Jubilee Gardens to protest at the government’s proposed supplementary benefit cut for school-leavers not signed to YTS schemes: it was seen as ‘industrial conscription’ (a bit like Labour’s New Deal in 1998, but dressed in different trousers). The demo was organised by the Youth Trade Union Rights Campaign and the Labour Party Young Socialists, and a petition was signed by such diversely sympathetic pop stars as Big Country, Madness, The Flying Pickets and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, whose message of support was an adaptation of one of their own popular T-shirt slogans: FRANKIE SAY, DON’T RELAX – ORGANISE.

  1985 was the year of getting organised. That summer the twin Live Aid concerts raised over £50 million for famine relief, the logical, if staggering, conclusion to pop music’s overwhelming bout of selflessness. Billy called it Egos For Ethiopia. Back at grass roots level, the causes being fought were less black and white – after all, it’s easy to decide how you feel about a dying Ethiopian child, but more difficult to take sides on a debate about, say, welfare cuts or unilateral disarmament or local council funding. Pop stars, in Billy Bragg’s experience, live in fear of being wrong and, as a defence, back only cut-and-dried issues like famine or homelessness. Billy was more interested in getting at the cause than sticking an Elastoplast over the effect (‘I applaud the efforts of Band Aid,’ he told Record Mirror, ‘but that song should have been “Smash capitalism and feed the world”’).

  In March, Billy set out on an eight-date Jobs For Youth tour (his Top Of The Pops appearance coincided with the date in Southend). Sponsored by the Labour Party as part of their Jobs And Industry Campaign, a couple of MPs were present at each venue to answer questions. Since there is no clear answer to ‘What about unemployment?’, the sessions provided a lively debating floor and a vital bridge between Young People and the Labour Party. ‘This tour is a manifestation of the fact that I can personally, physically do nothing apart from gigs,’ Billy told Colin Irwin in the Melody Maker cover story (headline: ‘WARNING! THIS MAN TELLS THE TRUTH’). ‘I don’t want to ram it down people’s throats. If you don’t come for politics, I don’t mind. Enjoy, enjoy. I’d like to think you don’t have to be a Labour supporter to listen to Billy Bragg.’

  Before the tour, Billy had visited the House of Commons to meet some of the MPs who would be attending the gigs (including MP for Livingston, Robin Cook) and put their minds at rest about trouser width. It wasn’t his first time in the House. On 26 February, he’d been invited to an informal discussion about youth issues by Neil Kinnock, along with Peter Jenner, Andy Kershaw and others. By all accounts a slightly awkward occasion with bowls of crisps, bottles of claret and Jenner playing the old hippy by quizzing Kinnock on the legalisation of cannabis. ‘It was all a bit sad and bizarre,’ recalled Kershaw. ‘And I felt sorry for Kinnock.’ If nothing else it proved the Labour Party – sorry state that they were in – were keen to expose themselves to new voices, and some kind of bond was forged.

  The image of Billy Bragg and the Labour leader became ubiquitous in the years running up to the 198
7 general election: usually the shot of the pair of them sipping tea and laughing. It was, at least, an improvement on Harold Wilson buddying up with The Beatles at the Dorchester Hotel in 1965. Kinnock was a dynamic figurehead for the embattled opposition party, a sprightly 43 years old, he’d won the 1983 leadership election by 72 per cent of the vote, thanks to almost total support from the unions. He and deputy Roy Hattersley represented the dream ticket for Labour, the dawning of a new, electable era after the scrag-end Michael Foot years. Kinnock’s background in CND, the ANL and the Gene Vincent Fan Club made him a relatively hip choice for the two and half million first-time voters coming through at the next election (although he’d lost credibility points for appearing in a Tracey Ullman pop video, and hard-line lefties would never forgive him for equivocating over the miners’ strike).

  Neil Kinnock remembers his first meeting with Billy Bragg well.

  ‘I’d checked Billy out with my own children, who were then about fifteen and thirteen,’ he says. ‘They said he was fine. Steve, the eldest, particularly rated him. Billy was open, energetic, articulate. He obviously had a strong sense of mission – but without any pretensions of self-righteousness. He also liked Jerry Lee Lewis and sent me some tapes. That was good enough for me!’

  On Labour’s apparently deliberate courtship of youth culture, Kinnock today is unbowed:

  ‘For me it was natural rather than deliberate. Democratic politics must speak a language that people understand and it was also essential to identify the Labour Party with freshness, fun, modern ideas and attitudes when it had been seen as stale, outdated and out of touch.

  ‘My action carried risks – the Tories sneered, the press treated it as a “lightweight” gimmick – but it was the right thing to do. The attitude of people like Billy certainly helped.’

  So it was that Billy Bragg became inextricably wed in people’s minds to the Labour Party, for better or for worse. At the Sheffield University Jobs For Youth date, before a packed 1,500-strong crowd, Billy joked from the stage that Kinnock would be joining him on trumpet, at which cries of ‘Scab!’ went out from some militant faction. Billy defused the moment: ‘He can’t because he’s broken his leg – he fell off the fence.’

  On 10 March, ITV’s flagship arts slot The South Bank Show devoted an edition to Billy Bragg (actually, he had to share it with a half-hour film about Michael Crawford learning to tightrope walk for Barnum, but you have to take what you can get on Sunday nights). The introduction by his namesake Melvyn was succinctly put – ‘At a time when pop music is dominated by lavish production values, glossy videos and massive hype, Billy Bragg has made a virtue of simplicity’ – followed by a suitably low-key portrait of an idealistic, self-effacing Essex boy telling us his life story and being driven down the A13. There was also some specially shot live footage from a miners’ show at London’s Bull & Gate pub. It was a modest film, and one made unnaturally early in an artist’s career, but at least it told no lies.

  On 5 April, Billy played at the Labour Party Young Socialists conference at Blackpool, a natural enough invite after his solidarity in February. While there, he was, as he puts it, ‘summoned to have beer with the Militant Tendency – in the guise of the Young Socialists’. In a crowded room, they explained their programme, ‘and I explained that if I believed in everything they believed in I would join the Socialist Workers Party, and that was it. We left it at that, and I never really had anything to do with them again.’ Although Billy was a believer in direct action and the constant interrogation of Labour’s policies and motives, he felt that they were the only realistic, democratic alternative to the Tories. As a result, his commitment to Labour was very public, if always questioning. Splinter groups are fine for stirring up debate and doubling the numbers in a mob, but, as far as Billy was concerned, their actions were counter-productive to the Big Push.

  Having been in the army, Billy was certain that armed proletariat revolution was not a practical option (all those bored squaddies itching for a punch-up, and Northern Ireland-trained), and he drew the line at blowing up Thatcher – as the IRA had tried to do in October ’84 in Brighton (‘They’ll just get someone else in, another figurehead’). To the more strait-laced elements of the Labour Party, Billy was a rabble-rouser; to the hard left, he was a party-line sop, a Kinnockite poodle. In pop music, such distinctions were rarely even contemplated, which is what makes his position from the mid-80s onwards so fascinating.

  When Red Wedge was up and running, he believes that the ‘Millies’ (Militant Tendency) deliberately undermined many of their day events. The Young Socialists would promote the event, advertise that Paul Weller was going to play when he wasn’t, and thereby create a bad atmosphere, which discredited the Wedge and soured pro-Kinnock feeling. Some of the local Labour parties made it difficult too, wrongly imagining that anyone under 30 in the party must be tied to Militant – Billy remembers the Derby branch saying, ‘Don’t bother coming here, we haven’t got any young people.’ This was the sort of mentality they were up against.

  Neil Spencer, who’d left the NME when Red Wedge started up, refers to ‘an ambivalent relationship with the Young Socialists. They were a Trotskyist front for the Militant Tendency with impossiblist ideals. You couldn’t live up to their expectations.’ Spencer goes further than Billy, saying, ‘They systematically tried to sabotage everything we did right from the beginning. On another level they were simply a fucking pain – they were damaging the Labour Party’s chances of ever being elected again.’

  Red Wedge was still a collective twinkle in the eye at the time of the LPYS conference, and it would take a few months before people like Bragg, Weller and Spencer – agitated, educated – got organised. In the meantime, there were gigs to play, countries to visit, records to promote.

  A week after Blackpool, Billy played his first hometown gig at Barking Assembly Hall – the one to which O-Level Kim turned up with her mum and the book of teenage Bragg poetry. She wasn’t the only ghost: ‘Never do a gig in your own town,’ he states. ‘People who used to shit on you at school turn up and say what great friends they were with you.’

  He was back in the USA in May for what turned into a heavy-going six-week tour, consolidating all the university-newspaper interest and the fact that both his albums were now available through a tiny label called CD Presents (CD standing for Civil Defence – not Compact Disc, a two-year-old invention that had yet to take off). Run by a guy Billy had met at the New Music Seminar, CD Presents never actually paid him any royalties, but at least they put his records in the shops. (By the time of his third album, he’d signed a deal with major player Elektra.) Along the route, Billy met R.E.M. for the first time in Buffalo, NY. The jangly garage-rock four-piece from Athens, Georgia were really taking off in 1985, having breached the US Top 30 with their second album Reckoning and become a college-circuit sensation. Billy and R.E.M. hit it off, and their stories would intermingle again later.

  Wiggy, who’d ‘road-managed’ January’s US jaunt, couldn’t make this one, so Billy was accompanied by a Scottish ‘guitar nut’ called Geoff Davidson, whose only drawback was a refusal ever to break America’s 50 mph speed limit. This became a real problem only once, between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. To drive from one to the other involves crossing time-zones – subsequently, they were late for what was an afternoon gig in Cedar Rapids. Worse, it was the biggest-paying date on the entire tour, the fee was literally going to see Billy and Geoff from the West coast to the East. They arrived at the college just in time to see the place being swept up – all the kids were off home at the end of semester, which is why Billy was booked in the first place: all the money in the kitty was traditionally blown on whoever the ents officer fancied (he was a massive Bragg fan). ‘We’d really stewed the rhubarb,’ Billy says.

  Determined to do a gig (and earn his keep) Billy plugged in and, as they stacked tables around him, took requests off the ents officer for 45 minutes, like a human juke-box. Show over, they joined
this grateful student executive for a beer, and discovered, to their dismay, that he didn’t actually have the money on him – it was in the bank, and he couldn’t get it until the next morning. ‘We had to be nice to this horrible geezer all night!’ Billy laughs. ‘Next morning, we were up first thing. We drove him to the bank, and walked in there with him.’

  The notion of a cross-America tour seems a romantic one, but you have to imagine two men in a rented car, ‘let loose in a foreign country with a list of places, times and names of whoever was going to pay us. Off we went.’ Billy supported Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in Cleveland, Ohio; he played a cowboy festival in Edmonton, Alberta; and then, half-way through the Bragg dates, he got a telephone call from Pete Jenner, saying, ‘Join The Smiths!’

  It was The Smiths’ first US tour, taken somewhat reluctantly (it had almost been cancelled a fortnight earlier in a fit of band pique). Billy met them in Royal Oak, Detroit, for his first gig, where, despite what Smiths chronicler Johnny Rogan calls ‘a more restrained welcome’, Billy had the time of his life: ‘I remember watching The Smiths on that first night, beer in hand, thinking, I’m getting paid for doing this! It can’t be right! There must be a catch.’

  There wasn’t. Good money, travelling on the Smiths’ bus, getting on famously, having a long conversation with Morrissey about The Shirelles, to whom Billy had always mistakenly referred as The Shirlettes (he’d misread a sleeve) – the union even lent symmetry to Billy’s current inclusion of the Smiths’ B-side ‘Jeane’ in his set (‘after the first three nights, they put it back in their set’).