Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  If Billy Bragg had crystallised the working-class struggle in ‘Between The Wars’, it was The Style Council who provided the soundbites for the optimism of Red Wedge with their hits of the day, ‘Shout To The Top’ and ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’ (‘You don’t have to take this crap/You don’t have to sit back and relax/You can actually try changing it’).

  Back in September, Billy had widened his political net and played two gigs in support of Nicaraguan Solidarity at Dublin’s SFX club. But it wasn’t the issue of Central America and the Sandinistas that threw up the trip’s one sticky moment for Billy. Someone in the appreciative audience called out ‘Play an Irish song!’ This threw him completely (‘It really weirded me out’), because at that point, he’d filled many a waste paper basket with songs about the situation in Northern Ireland that didn’t make the grade (‘sixth-form shit’, is how their author describes them). It turned out afterwards that the heckler was journalist Eamonn McCann, and maybe he had a point.

  Billy had a firm handle on British politics, but further afield, even as close to home as Ireland, there was still work to be done, and debates to be had. Intervention by one country into another’s affairs was the common ground between the question over British rule in Northern Ireland and US government support for Nicaragua’s anti-Communist Contra rebels. ‘When I used to lecture the Americans about Nicaragua, they would say, well what about Northern Ireland?’ Billy recounts. ‘All I could say was, It’s not a clear-cut issue, we’re not trying to destabilise the country, and, with all due respect, they’re not bombing your hometown.’ Billy realised that the more he travelled the world, the more informed he had to be about domestic issues. (It actually took him another ten years before he nailed the Northern Irish question in song – ‘Northern Industrial Town’ on the William Bloke album – although he had covered Eric Bogle’s ‘My Youngest Son Came Home Today’ in 1990 ‘which said what I felt: until the killing stops, nothing’s going to happen.’)

  Back at base, October had seen Go! Discs sign The Housemartins, quickly promoted as ‘the fourth best band in Hull’. There is a myth that without Billy Bragg, The Housemartins would never have signed to Go!; one that is hotly disputed by biographer Nick ‘Swift Nick’ Taylor in his idealised book Now That’s What I Call Quite Good! What is certain is that Andy and Juliet Macdonald went to see the band’s self-styled ‘left-wing gospel’ at the Hammersmith Clarendon pub in May 1985. ‘I would have had to be blind not to see their potential,’ Macdonald raved, having been pestered for weeks by the band’s guitarist Stan Cullimore on the phone. ‘It was dripping from their fingertips!’ The eventual three-year contract with Go! Discs involved Macdonald providing The Housemartins with two sets of boys’ football strips which they presented to a young team on a local council estate (who became Housemartins A.F.C.).

  The Housemartins had supported Billy at the Tunnel in London, in Brighton, and back up at Hull Tiffany’s in April. The band’s Paul Heaton remembers being struck by his busker’s zeal, and by his onstage humour, a skill The Housemartins were only in the process of developing. ‘He was just funny, and I know he gets really nervous, but he came over really confident,’ Heaton recalls. ‘What also struck me was what a good guitar player he was. I was pretty mesmerised. And the same way we picked up on Billy’s enthusiasm, he picked up on ours. I think Billy had a word in Andy’s ear for us.’

  Billy liked the cut of their cardigan, and nudged Macdonald in their direction – both had heard the band’s first demo tape and were unmoved, but the second one, with what would be their first single ‘Flag Day’ on it, did the trick. Though Taylor attempts to paint a picture of Billy having nothing to do with The Housemartin’ Go! signing (‘On the contrary, Billy Bragg never championed them’), it is fairer to say that he lubricated the wheels of industry in their favour.

  Either way, their addition to the Go! roster was critical: it gave the label a second hit act (they were Top Ten by June ’86) and sealed what later became Go!’s irksome reputation as a stable of left-wing boys-next-door. (Macdonald encouraged this initially, saying, ‘None of our acts have to get changed to go up and perform on stage.’) There was a colour-coded year planner on the wall at Go! Discs, on which the movements of The Housemartins were represented by green and Billy’s by red. ‘Ours started off very occasional and then got a bit thicker,’ Heaton says. ‘But Billy Bragg’s was just a big red wall. Quite often we’d cross off bits of his, and I’m sure he’d cross off bits of ours. We’d only find out that Andy had signed a new band by looking at the wall chart. Who’s this band in brown? It’s the Boothill Foot Tappers. It was a very exciting time, but as we got more and more famous, we went into Go! Discs less and less, and crossed paths with Billy less. There’s only ever been good words said to each other.’

  When Billy next toured the States, he took 50 Housemartins records out with him and plugged them at college radio stations.

  Around the same time, Billy moved out of Wiggy’s and bought a top-floor flat in Acton Green. It was very civilised. Outside the South African Embassy in Trafalgar, things were not so civilised. After a peaceful 3,000-strong picket was barred by the Metropolitan police, preventing those taking part from decorating the building with flowers and tokens as an anti-apartheid action, they opted for a sit-in. Billy was there. He was also among the 322 who were arrested and carted away in vans (he ended up in a cell in Highbury, unable to phone his mum for fear of upsetting her, and missing a Hank Wangford gig he planned to attend). He wasn’t charged. Over in Texas, 16 October’s edition of the Dallas Morning News named Billy ‘Britain’s Bruce Springsteen’.

  ‘Days Like These’, which had been Billy’s Party Political Broadcast song, came out as a Christmas single. It only got to Number 43, but he was satisfied (it contained the pertinent line, ‘Wearing badges is not enough in days like these’). Macdonald hadn’t wanted it out as a single at all, but Billy did and he struck a deal with him: in return, Go! could put out Macdonald’s own choice of single (a new song, ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’) in the new year.

  In the personnel department Go! Discs expanded by a third before Christmas, taking on Phill Jupitus, then better known as Porky The Poet (he was quite porky and he performed poetry). He met Billy on 8 March 1984, opening for him at Sussex University. Attila The Stockbroker and Seething Wells were also on, and Porky had a mate at the university who blagged him on to the bottom of the bill. He earned £20, but, more importantly, he found he had a lot in common with Billy – though four years apart, they’d both been to Northbury Juniors, both fallen in Barking Park lake, and Porky’s granddad had owned the Brewery Tap pub in Barking, where Riff Raff once played. Porky even shared mutual friends with Wiggy. Naturally, an alliance was formed (long-term, as it happened).

  Billy invited Porky along to support him at the Key Theatre in Peterborough (‘A ranting poet is a very easy support act,’ Porky explains. ‘They occupy about as much space as an amp in the back of a car – or slightly more in my case. And Billy just seemed to take to me’). Among other subsequent supports (including the entire Jobs For Youth tour), Porky did the South Bank Show Bull & Gate, which is where he met the Macdonalds. In December, they offered him a job ‘answering phones’ at Wendell Road, at which time he was unemployed and earning £30 a week learning to be a paste-up artist, so he couldn’t resist. ‘My job at Go! was making tea and arsing about,’ he recalls. ‘Which you could do at indie record companies. It was very, very matey.’

  Billy’s final gig of 1985 was on 29 December at the Hammersmith Odeon, then a landmark London rock venue and the biggest Billy had headlined. On paper, he’d done 135 shows that year, but taking into account impromptu performances and double-ups, it was undoubtedly higher.

  At that gig was Catherine Fennimore, better known as Tiny, who was then working as a writer for Jamming!, the politically conscious music magazine founded in 1983 by Jam fan Tony Fletcher (he’d left school to run Paul Weller’s ill-fated Jamming! record label, which had the plug pulled aft
er just over a year). The thrust of the magazine was writing about issues and getting political ideas across to a wider audience. Tiny had become actively self-politicised at South Bank Polytechnic – hailing from Amersham in leafy, Tory-dominated Buckinghamshire. She admits that prior to college she ‘knew nothing about politics, until I looked up “apartheid” in the dictionary and was shocked that people were that evil’.

  A huge Billy Bragg fan (when she’d bought Life’s A Riot, she didn’t take it off her turntable for five and a half hours), Tiny had been active in support of the miners’ strike, and first met Billy at the Wag Club benefit. ‘There was this bloke who did what I was trying to do,’ she recalls. ‘I wanted to be involved in what he was doing.’ Having soaked up the collective vibe at Red Wedge meetings, Tiny was heartened by the sheer size and enthusiasm of the Hammersmith Odeon audience: ‘I hadn’t realised that there were this many people in the world who thought like I did. It was like coming home for me. Politically aware people who were into having a good time … or aware enough to cheer at the right bits.’

  She volunteered to help out with Red Wedge, as, indeed, had Porky before ‘the Macdonald call’. (He’s up front enough to admit to slightly questionable motives – ‘Am I here because I want to change the world, or to meet Paul Weller?’ – and that working for the Wedge involved ‘a lot of nodding’.) Tiny did some press work and a lot of writing with NME’s Paolo Hewitt and Neil Spencer. ‘It was so important to counteract Thatcher’s ideas,’ she says of that heady time.

  Tiny remembers watching Billy find his feet in the first months of Wedge: ‘At that stage, Billy couldn’t string a political sentence together in public, and it’s quite incredible when you listen to him now. The desire was there, but it was new to him. He had a go. Weller said nothing.’

  Before long, Tiny would also get ‘the Macdonald call’ and join the matey staff of Go! Discs. In the interim, she did her bit for the cause, and Andy and Juliet took on Teddy, a stray dog, as their Head of A&R. Twee? Go! Discs?

  It’s all fallen into place! Socialism isn’t a dirty word to me any more. The Labour Party really do care and can make a difference!

  man sees the light in a cartoon by Porky the Poet

  Billy had been given the OK by none other than his old mate Steve Wright in the Daily Mirror at the end of ’85 – ‘Whether he likes it or not, Billy will become a superstar in 1986’ – and it was with this approbation slung around his neck that he ventured back out into Thatcher’s Britain at the helm of the first Red Wedge national tour. It kicked off on 25 January, with a bill containing The Communards, soulster Junior Giscombe, reggae MC Lorna Gee, The Style Council and DJ Jerry Dammers. That was what it said in the programme – by the end of it, Madness, Prefab Sprout, Tom Robinson, Lloyd Cole and The Smiths had also appeared.

  On the opening night at Manchester Apollo, Billy went on first (there would be no hierarchy in Wedgeworld), and the good times did not cease for the whole evening. The music was paramount, and the politics came in brown paper bags (CND pamphlets, anti-apartheid bumpf). MPs like Peter Pike from Burnley loitered in the foyer, Gary Kemp did a controversial solo version of ‘Through The Barricades’ (was-it-brave? was-it-shit?), and a finale of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’ captured the jubilant mood. Robin Denselow compared it to a Motown Revue, and that’s exactly how it felt in the bus, too. John Gill, from listings mag Time Out noted that ‘out of London and away from the brutish consumerism promoted by the likes of The Face, the Red Wedge tour developed a momentum that surprised its most cautious supporters.’ In the same issue, columnist Julie Burchill, never one to let a party go unpooped, said ‘Red Wedge are in danger of becoming the Saatchi & Saatchi of socialism.’

  The day events, as organised by those pesky Young Socialists, were less slick and clear cut than the concerts, but the groundswell of support was continuous. After the first night, Billy was heard to ask Annajoy David, ‘Do you think there was enough politics?’

  Tiny enthuses about ‘a musical as well as a political buzz. But it was great to see the MPs in the hall, being prodded and pointed at by kids who were on their home turf, telling MPs who were very definitely fish out of water what they thought. It was a good enough reason for doing it.’

  At St George’s Hall, Bradford, Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory got up and led the cast in the only ever live performance of the band’s rousing 1981 near-hit ‘We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thing’. Porky, who sang backing vocals with DJ Wendy May, is just one who will never forget it.

  ‘We really did think we were going to change things,’ says Tiny. ‘After the first tour, it was not uncommon for 200 people to turn up at Red Wedge meetings. We didn’t know what to do with everyone.’

  Porky, who was by now a published cartoonist (NME, the Red Wedge programme, the first Billy Bragg songbook), found himself sent out by Go! Discs on the first Housemartins tour in February as master-of-ceremonies-cum-tour-manager. Of his tour-managing duties, he is very honest: ‘I did fuck-all work in that direction, Stan [Cullimore, guitarist] did it all. But I did draw the laminates.’ A stringer from the Sunday Mirror phoned Porky during the tour and asked if he had any funny stories to tell. ‘I was Johnny Naive,’ he says, happily telling the hack all about the Adopt-A-Housemartin scheme (by which audience members were encouraged to put the band up for the night to save on hotel costs). That Sunday, the story appeared under the headline: ‘COME BACK AND SLEEP WITH US.’ The Housemartins weren’t quite famous enough to be a front page sensation at that time, so it blew over, and ‘band spokesman Porky’, as he’d become, kept his job – although knickers and toys did start arriving in The Housemartins’ post. This was a taster of the unwanted attention fame can bring.

  In June, The Housemartins’ ‘Happy Hour’ single reached Number Three in the charts, thanks to a charming Plasticene video, and suddenly the fourth best band in Hull were the third most popular band in Britain. Billy left a poignant message on the Go! Discs ansaphone on the Sunday evening of the chart: ‘Tell the Macdonalds that I’m glad the weight of their mortgage has been lifted from my shoulders.’

  Tiny was taken on as Go! Discs’ press officer, which meant that she could work with her hero. ‘What I’ve always been interested in doing is pushing Billy,’ she says. ‘I think he’s brilliant, and what he does is very important. I always knew where my interest was.’

  In February, Billy went to the GDR or German Democratic Republic, otherwise known as East Germany, separated from Western Europe since 1946 by what Winston Churchill termed the Iron Curtain. As NME’s Danny Kelly, a recent visitor himself, put it, ‘In Europe, only medieval Albania so zealously and jealously guards its borders.’ With that in mind, it is easy to imagine Billy’s surprise when a gentleman sidled up to him in the gents of a folk club in Edinburgh and went, ‘Psssst! Ever thought of going to East Berlin, mate?’

  This happened back in September 1985. Billy was at the Left Turns folk club to see Dick Gaughan, an old-style communist, whose most famous album was A Handful Of Earth, featuring his version of Leon Rosselson’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ – the very song that showed Billy how he could adapt folk music for punk rock guitar. Billy’s first thought at the urinals was, ‘Brilliant! I’m being recruited for the KGB. This’ll look brilliant in the NME!’ In the event, it was an invitation from a mate of Gaughan’s who taught at the university there, to play at East Berlin’s week-long annual Sixteenth Political Song Festival.

  Billy could not resist. He hated the image that had become ubiquitous in pop videos of young pale Englishmen dressed as the Thin White Duke, of a romantic, dry-iced Berlin by the wall. ‘Get back to art school!’ he would shout at the TV screen. But what was actually through there, on the other side? He decided to ‘have a butcher’s’ (needless to say, PJ was gung-ho for it, and bagsy-ed the driving seat).

  The festival drew artists from all over the world – the communist world, that is, but with a smattering of left-wing Africans, plus Billy Bragg. The result wa
s a lefty WOMAD with bad weather.

  ‘The thing about the East Germans is that they were very proud of what they’d achieved,’ says Billy. ‘The best living standards in Eastern Europe bar none, and Berlin was the Paris of the East. Although the majority of it looked like it had been built by the same architect as Basildon.’

  He met Pete Seeger, the legendary protest singer and Woody Guthrie acolyte, for the first time at the festival’s opening ceremony, singing ‘The Internationale’, former national anthem of the Soviet Union and communist signature tune. Not dissimilar to Jobs For Youth and Red Wedge, the East German gigs encouraged discussions afterwards in the foyer, where young punks with green Mohicans turned up and expressed their burning desire to get out. Billy enthusiastically addressed them as ‘comrade’ and tried to fill them in on a little detail (‘It’s the same prison … with different bars,’ he told Kelly in the NME story).

  ‘Maybe I flatter myself,’ he says. ‘But the organisers felt that because I was anti-Thatcher I would be on their side in East Germany, but I found that they were doing exactly the same things that annoyed me about Thatcherism. Once I found my feet, I felt duty-bound to speak out a little bit about how I saw the world.’

  One gig took place at the Narva Light Bulb Factory, which instantly reminded Billy of Ford’s. He played at lunchtime in front of the toilets: ‘The people working there just wanted to get their lunch. They didn’t want to watch some noisy oik from Barking – Fuck this, I want me dinner!’

  An interviewer from East German radio asked him – live – what he thought of the ‘glorious people’s light bulb factory’. He replied, ‘I do this job so I don’t have to work in a shithole like this.’ The translator, Jorg Wolter, diplomatically omitted to translate.

  Wolter became Billy and PJ’s ally, a cultural as well as linguistic translator. He, like the rest of the festival organisers, was entrusted by the State to make contact with foreigners – they were implicit with the State machinery in some way, but our two shit-kicking envoys really tested the limits of Wolter’s role. They demanded to go and meet people involved in the alternative peace movement, which was led by a Bruce Kent-style pastor. Despite serious pressure not to go from the festival organisers, Billy and PJ went for dinner, with Wolter at their side. Jenner’s dad was a vicar, which they threw in as an excuse, but Wolter still had to report back. His mediator’s task became a balancing act: translate the drift of what Billy wanted to say without jeopardising his job.