Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  In the week of the election, an advert for Back To Basics (Billy’s first two albums and EP on one £5.99 disc) was ‘rejected’ by newspapers because it read ‘No one with a conscience votes Tory anyway.’ That same week, the NME showed its colours and put Neil Kinnock on the cover. ‘LOVELY, LOVELY, LOVELY!’ it yelled, in reference to his Spitting Image catch-phrase.

  Looking back, does Kinnock believe that Red Wedge got him there?

  ‘Yes. I certainly wasn’t there for my looks or my fashion sense.’

  Everything seemed to fall into place. Despite a comfortable Tory lead in the polls, Labour seemed to have everything going for them. Young voters accounted for sixteen per cent of the electorate, and there could surely only be one choice for them in the middle of all this music and merriment. Even U2 entered the fray on stage at Wembley Arena, Bono singing ‘Maggie’s Farm’ (a Bob Dylan song lent new meaning since The Specials had covered it in 1980) and ‘Springhill Mining Disaster’. At Islington Business Design Centre, Neil Kinnock starred in a prematurely triumphant rally, where Billy and Hank Wangford sang the Woody Guthrie song ‘Deportees’ (after ‘Power In A Union’ was deemed unsuitable by image-conscious Labour organisers). ‘We Shall Overcome’, Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’, balloons … it was, as Robin Denselow had it, ‘Britain’s first pop election campaign’.

  And Labour’s first pop election defeat.

  Red Wedge gathered in the coffee bar at London’s Mean Fiddler that fateful night, with television screens relaying the results as they came in, and instead of attending the party of the year, they saw their hopes dashed, as the Tories won an historic third term (375 seats to Labour’s 229). ‘A lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth went on,’ describes Tiny, who was there. ‘No one could believe it. At least there were some kindred spirits around on the night.’

  Neil Spencer compounds the miserable picture: ‘People were literally crying into their drinks. The tears were splashing into the lager. I remember having to put my arm round a lot of people and say, “Come on, it’s all right.” I was disappointed but I wasn’t gutted, and I didn’t feel thwarted.’

  Many did. Tiny says, ‘It put a lot of people off politics.’

  The Tories’ council house sell-off had worked (40 per cent of council-house owners had voted Conservative), and the illusion of a larger middle class had served the blue vote well in the South. Self-interest won the day. In his book Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution, Peter Jenkins concludes that Labour had become not the party of the working class but of the underclass. There was some consolation in the fact that Red Wedge had apparently increased Labour’s vote among 18- to 24-year-olds. And indeed, that there was something deeply flawed about an electoral system that allowed a party to run the country when they’d been effectively voted out in Wales and Scotland – but none of this made the early morning of 12 June any easier to stomach.

  Billy remembers trudging home in the June sunshine to his flat: ‘I took it really personally. For a few days afterwards, I felt that everyone I saw on the tube was not in the same country as me.’

  He’d agreed to appear on Channel 4’s After Dark, the late-night, leather-armchair discussion show, which is all a bit of a blur to him now, except for one pointed exchange. Tory MP Teresa Gorman – who still had her blue rosette on – leant over to Billy when the cameras were on someone else and said to him, ‘You and your kind are finished. We are the future now.’

  They got knocked down, and they got up again. Eventually.

  ‘We all took it personally,’ says Tiny. ‘We felt we had much more to lose. I remember thinking, If people are still going to vote for “her”, knowing what she does, then what’s the point?’

  To all intents and purposes, Red Wedge ended on election night. Not administratively – they continued to put on the odd benefit gig (for Nicaraguan solidarity in October, sacked Kent miners in December, a short tour of Ireland as late as June 1988), and the Wedge magazine Well Red lasted into 1990 – but the fight had been knocked out of them.

  ‘The wind went out of the sails,’ Spencer admits. ‘It was never going to be possible to maintain that coalition of people when there wasn’t the pressure of a scrap.’ He hoped it could continue as a youth- or arts-oriented think-tank, but it was not to be. ‘That was it until there was another rallying point.’ (In effect, Free Nelson Mandela and Artists Against Apartheid saw the natural continuation of Wedge politics and the Wedge vibe.)

  ‘I think we could’ve made more difference than we did. I thought the vote would be closer than it was. But I saw Red Wedge not just as intervention into the election, but intervention into the party itself, a way to clue them up, a way to make them aware of issues they were not grasping.’

  ‘We upturned a few stones,’ says Tiny. ‘We did blow a bit of fresh air into the corridors of power. Not much, but a bit. And if we did, that’s enough of an achievement.’

  Looking back, Billy is disappointed that The Redskins could never work with Red Wedge. Back in January, he’d been involved in a heated Melody Maker debate, with Weller, Dammers, Clare Short and himself versus X Moore, Stewart Copeland of The Police and Tory MP for Derby North, Greg Knight. X Moore’s criticisms of Red Wedge were indirect criticisms of the Labour Party from a very long historical perspective, while Copeland declared himself a capitalist, and Knight babbled, ‘You may get a round of applause by slagging Mrs Thatcher but where does that lead?’ Billy became incensed, yelling at Moore, ‘Look who you’re sitting with!’

  The Redskins’ stubborn SWP allegiance still irks Billy: ‘If Red Wedge had been as controlled by the Labour Party as the Redskins were by the SWP, I certainly wouldn’t have joined. I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge-pole. I’ve been called “scab” by the SWP. I sat on a panel against them once and one writer said they felt “more comfortable with Billy Bragg’s doubts than with X Moore’s certainties”. God save us from the people who have no doubts, be they left, right or wherever.

  ‘I’ve watched the Redskins, I’ve seen Chris Dean, when he’s on one, brow-beating the audience into submission, without any hint of doubt or self-effacing humour or anything. It’s like making people eat dry bread for an hour. Either they are on your side already or they’re just going to be put off. You’re never gonna get those people who come up to me and say, “I vote Tory, I’ve voted Tory all my life, but I really like your love songs.” I’ll say, well that’s cool, mate, you don’t have to buy it, the very fact that you’re in the room when I’m saying it is enough.’

  The whole issue of pop and politics, so vividly animated by the events of 1984–87, left Billy even more convinced that the case was not closed. Debate has always been his favoured tool, and one piffling election defeat hadn’t blunted it.

  Paradise postponed.

  11. BROKEN-HEART SURGERY

  Great leaps forward, 1987–1989

  At any foreign airport you will meet your sophisticated compatriot who will tell you that everything you are about to see is a cliché and that the real life is behind the scenes. But he himself is the cliché. You will learn more from the local man with the bad shave who sells you dark glasses

  Clive James, Flying Visits

  The stars look very different today

  David Bowie, ‘Space Oddity’

  UNWASHED AND SOMEWHAT slightly dazed, Britain woke up on 12 June 1987, with a hangover. Eight years of partying with yourself takes its toll. Paul Weller decided to play Stalin and airbrush himself out of the Red Wedge photos: ‘I had reservations about joining in to begin with and I wish I’d just stuck with my instincts from the start. On the Red Wedge tour we were made to feel guilty for talking about each other’s shoes. It was like, “How dare you? Clothes are a bourgeois trapping.” I love clothes. I’m just not interested in anything political any more.’

  Writer Pete Davies had painted a nightmare local futurevision in his cheerless 1986 novel The Last Election. With the fictional, senile Nanny at Number 10, employment a thing of the past, the mass
es numbed by drugs and snooker, and political broadcasts by the Money Party promoting ‘the splendour of our guns or the worldwide sales of nancy boy pop groups’. It was a facile bit of 1980s satire but typical at a time when, if the voice of dissent was to be heard anywhere, it was in the arts, in alternative comedy, in Spitting Image, on Channel 4, even in sitcoms about unemployment like BBC’s Bread and ITV’s We’ll Think Of Something. It was in The The’s deceptively soulful tune ‘Heartland’:

  This is the land where nothing changes

  The land of red buses and bloody babies

  This is the place where pensioners are raped

  And their hearts are being cut from the welfare state

  Britain had turned into a client state, a missile base for America, and a privatised bloody mess. And the Labour Party had lost Paul Weller. The Blow Monkeys asked how long can a bad thing last? Well, at least another five years.

  In July 1987, prosperity reached Go! Discs, who moved out of Wendell Road into a smart office in King Street, Hammersmith (Son Of Go! Mansions). Porky and Tiny were offered real salaries and job titles (Porky had been on £100 a week, now he was on £15,000 a year). Further staff were hired, and Andy Macdonald set up his office a floor above the rest of them. The stars looked very different from up there, and Go! Discs had gone legit. The family atmosphere was still there, as were the fey, whimsical press releases, but they had to be worked on. (‘Whenever Billy’s stuff was on the schedule everything went a bit more Wendell Road,’ Porky recalls.)

  After what seemed like the Last Election, Billy had a two-month tour coming up, starting in Canada and ending in Rhode Island – if ending is the right word, as it led directly into a week at the Mean Fiddler, Italy, Hungary, Austria, the UK again, and Scandinavia and the USSR before Christmas. Do not pass Go!

  He and Mary talked themselves out of getting married, having got as far as looking at the hall in Ilford where they were going to hold the reception. Billy broke it to Jenner on the way to the airport: ‘I don’t know who was more relieved, me or him. I have absolutely no regrets about the fact that it didn’t come to anything. It would definitely not have worked. It would’ve ended in divorce, suicide, boredom, and probably some of the worst-decorated houses you can imagine.’ (Mary married the boyfriend-before-Billy a year later.)

  After Canada, Billy made concrete his support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (and indeed, his increasing interest in Central American music and poetry) by playing at the International Book Fair in Managua. He’d been invited by the poet, Catholic priest and Minister of Culture, Ernesto Cardenal. It was his first visit to the third world, and to a country with a fine tradition of dissent. He stayed at the Hotel Las Mercedes, built by the Sandinista government to compete with the American-owned, CIA-favoured International (where Howard Hughes once lived). The 1972 earthquake had killed 20,000 people, and as good as knocked Managua down, a situation not helped by the fact that former dictator Anastasio Somoza Jnr had been siphoning off foreign aid and increasing his own personal fortune to £1,600 million. Here was a country at war, and yet, as Billy told Nicaragua Today magazine, ‘it’s more free than Britain is.’ For a socialist regime, it was energetic and fresh, unlike the ‘staid and dour ambience’ of the Eastern Bloc.

  There were gigs at the Sandinista Cultural Workers Union and a four-hour meet-the-people session where 300 of the festival’s delegates questioned government ministers, the Foreign Minister, the Vice President and the President, Daniel Ortega. ‘This impressed upon me how far this experiment in social democracy was progressing,’ Billy wrote in the NME. ‘Can you imagine a Labour government laying themselves open like that?’

  Billy had a moment of clarity on the flight home as he cruised over the Northern Honduras, ‘where the Man From Delmonte reigns supreme over the seemingly infinite pineapple and banana plantations. I realised the score. The US government wants to snuff out the Nicaraguan Revolution because if the people of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala follow the Sandinistas’ lead, the interests of the American United Fruit Company and their successors will be toppled.

  ‘I learnt a lot, not least that the Nicaraguans don’t seem to like my music very much.’

  Nonetheless, as with so many relationships Billy forged, he and Nicaragua would meet again.

  In August, Billy deputised for Andy Kershaw in his 10 p.m. slot on Radio 1, his first real taste of broadcasting. In the minutes of the following week’s departmental meeting, it was noted that ‘he needed very little guidance’ from producer John Walters, and was commended.

  Billy’s week-long Mean Fiddler residency ran from 23 to 27 August. For one night only, Riff Raff reformed with Porky on bass, marking ten years since they arrived at Bearshanks. Another notable aspect of that week was keyboard wizardess Cara Tivey’s Billy Bragg debut. He’d seen her playing with Everything But The Girl in America, and the two of them would make some sweet music together (not that kind).

  If Talking With The Taxman had been ‘difficult’, the fourth album would surely be ‘really difficult’. In October Billy started recording Workers Playtime at Pavilion Studios with Joe Boyd – a proper record producer whose work included Fairport Convention, R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs (hence Billy’s interest). Jenner had known him since the 60s, and effectively pulled him out of retirement with the threat, ‘Either you produce it or I will’ (PJ had produced ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ for Ian Dury and a few Roy Harper albums).

  Wiggy earned a co-production credit by, as he tells it, ‘putting my oar in’. Expanding on Taxman’s dalliances with instrumentation and knob-twiddling, Cara came on board, as did Mickey Waller on drums, Wiggy on guitar and old hand Danny Thompson on double bass. (To illustrate Thompson’s heritage, when, in 1991, Billy recorded Fred Neil’s ‘Dolphins’ with him, he explained how he wanted it to sound – like Tim Buckley’s version live at the Festival Hall. Thompson nodded, listened patiently, and said, ‘Yeah, I played bass on that.’)

  A curio came out at that time, a single called ‘Ballad Of A Spycatcher’ by Leon Rosselson, which featured Billy and The Oyster Band. It caused a minor stir because its specially written lyrics repeated an allegation from Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher, then banned from sale in Britain due to an apparent national security threat. You could buy the book in America, naturally. These things tickle a man who has been to Nicaragua.

  In divine retribution for voting Mrs Thatcher back in, the beautiful South of England was devastated by a freak hurricane in October. Winds of 110 mph left the area between Cornwall and East Anglia with a bill of £300 million, and seventeen people were killed. Three days later, just in case those Tory voters thought it a coincidence, the stock market crashed, and fifty billion pounds was wiped off share prices in London in one day. They called it ‘financial meltdown’, and all those City boys who’d taken Harry Enfield’s character Loadsamoney at face value and waved their wads in Docklands wine bars, kissed goodbye to their Christmas bonus. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

  Billy’s return trip to the Soviet Union in November, via Sweden and Finland, took in Estonia, Moscow and Leningrad (very much the rock capital of Russia). This trip was superbly documented by Chris Salewicz and photographer Adrian Boot in the book Midnights In Moscow: snow, trains, an assortment of funny hats, cross-cultural community singing in an Olympic weight-lifting hall, exquisite buildings, unexquisite buildings, black marketeers who looked like Alexei Sayle in Gorky Park, vodka, chocolate and the Kingston Gas Board (KGB).

  Six months later, and in marked contrast to that trip’s open-armed, inquiring, fact-finding perspective, Billy returned to the USSR, to play the Vilnius Rock Festival in Lithuania alongside West Midlands cartoon rap-rock group Pop Will Eat Itself. With Art Troitsky as mediator (what an admirable cultural go-between he was) and with the NME’s James Brown in tow, the Poppies’ story was the polar opposite to Midnights In Moscow. All they seemed to talk about was the lack of beer and decent food (they led audiences in a chant of ‘Beer, beer, we w
ant more beer’ and made a mockery of the press conference with the same parched theme). ‘Really sad,’ Billy concludes. ‘English people abroad. If you’ve got any interest in learning anything from these places, you’ve got to put your own feelers out. Otherwise you’ll just meet the boring people from the Ministry. It’s like being shown round the Glastonbury Festival by John Selwyn Gummer.’

  On the way home from Leningrad, Billy had a Russian soldier’s hat confiscated from his luggage by customs officers.

  Memo to Generation X: pull your pants up, turn your hat around and get a job

  P. J. O’Rourke, Fashionable Worries

  The Housemartins split in January 1988 with the self-penned statement, ‘In a world of Rick Astley, Shakin’ Stevens and the Pet Shop Boys, quite simply they weren’t good enough.’ They told the NME before they told Andy Macdonald. In February 1988, Billy Bragg played no gigs for the entire calendar month, the first time this had happened in six years (they were sculpting away at Workers Playtime).

  A track from Taxman took on new life in April 1988. Called ‘Help Save The Youth Of America’ (‘A nation with their freezers full/Are dancing in their seats/While outside another nation is sleeping in the streets’), it was a warning against complacency in the Land Of The Free aimed specifically at the sons and daughters of the Baby Boomers, whose idealism was in danger of fading away. May ’88 saw the primary elections for the next president, a chance perhaps to replace Ronald Reagan, the man who coined the phase ‘evil empire’ with a younger man (Reagan was 77) and even a Democrat, Michael Dukakis. It wasn’t much of a race, and despite the news images of flag-waving, partisan fervour at US election time, only about 40 per cent of voting-age citizens even bothered to turn out at the polls, but Billy was keen to do his bit for consciousness-raising. (His American fans, largely college types, tend to be at the soft-left, T-shirt-slogan end of the spectrum, but there is always work to be done in a country that produced the bumper sticker ‘Guns, God and Guts made America great’.)