Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  A US-only live EP was issued on Elektra, named Help Save The Youth Of America, and also containing the politically charged tracks ‘Think Again’, ‘Chile Your Waters Run Red Through Soweto’, ‘Days Like These’, ‘To Have And To Have Not’, and ‘There Is Power In A Union’. The personal message on the back implored buyers ‘to take part in the democratic process … you are electing a President for all of us. Please be more careful this time.’

  On the fourteen-state, 22-date tour that went with it, Billy hooked up with the Democratic Socialists of America and various Central American support groups, and made it a campaign trail. At New York’s Roseland Ballroom, as reported in Rolling Stone magazine, he apologised for his hoarse voice: ‘It’s nearly gone from me leaning out of taxi windows and shouting “Asshole”, at cars with Bush bumper stickers.’ Jane Garcia, reviewing the Los Angeles University show for the NME, noted, ‘Billy said everything about American politics you wished Bruce [Springsteen] would say because it would have more effect.’ In the event, the Republicans walked it, and Bush became president.

  While Billy was out there, he had a Number One hit single over here. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was Billy’s contribution to an all-star remake of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, Sgt Pepper Knew My Father, coordinated by the NME’s Roy Carr and in aid of the charity Childline. He recorded it during the Workers Playtime sessions in late ’87, thinking it no big deal: Cara Tivey played the tune, Billy did three vocal takes and it was down in a couple of hours. In May, it became half of a double-A-sided single with Wet Wet Wet’s ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Thanks to support from BBC’s That’s Life (host Esther Rantzen had founded Childline), it topped the charts for four weeks and raised £700,000. Billy might call it his ‘honorary Number One’ – in that the Wets’ track received most airplay – and try and offload the credit to Cara, but no amount of humility can disguise the fact that it’s a magnificent achievement, cover or no cover, charity or no charity.

  ‘WHO THE HELL ARE WET WET WET?’ asked Billy’s T-shirt on the cover of the self-congratulatory NME.

  Top Of The Pops showed the Wet Wet Wet video three times, but on the fourth week, Macdonald begged the producer, ‘Let Braggy on!’ They relented, and Billy repaid their generosity by making a pig’s ear of his appearance. To be fair, he’d just flown in from a five-week US tour, and he’d only ever sung the song three times, but making up the words during the camera rehearsal didn’t please the people upstairs in the control room (needless to say, he was adamant about playing live), so he taped the lyrics on the floor beside him. Wiggy and Dave Woodhead played recorder.

  During the actual recording, the BBC dry ice started, obscuring the lyrics, and half-way through, Billy watched a Norman Wisdom figure with a fifteen-foot ladder distractedly lean it up against nothing – it fell over with a crash that caused the audience to look round. Assuming this would spoil the take, Billy meandered to the end, at which the director said, ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

  He was at his mum’s on the Thursday of transmission, mortified that an event she was clearly so proud of was, in reality, going to be so naff. ‘It was awful,’ he says. ‘If you know where the ladder gets dropped, you can hear it.’

  A packed June and July later, Billy grabbed some ‘little bits of holiday’ with a string of ladyfriends in August: messing about on the canal with Texan folkstress Michelle Shocked (a barge from Tottenham Hale to Richmond that broke down near Putney Bridge); a romantic trip to the Lakes with ‘a woman from Stockholm’; a bunk-up with ‘someone else’ in Salisbury – quite a tally, but Billy was on the rebound after Year Mary.

  In August, things went ‘a bit Wendell Road’ at Son Of Go! Mansions and ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards’ came out as a single. Billy was pretty much trapped in the singles loop by now, but it never reaped great dividends. Since ‘Between The Wars” pioneering work in the Top Fifteen (and discounting May’s ‘honorary’ Childline squirt), Billy Bragg singles hadn’t troubled the business end of the chart – ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’, released after the album whence it came in November ’86, had reached 58.

  Some valuable Billy Bragg compositions and fine covers have appeared as B-sides down the years (Brunette’s twelve-inch contained Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportees’ and The Smiths’ ‘Jeane’), but it seems that Bragg fans are albums-buyers and gig-goers by nature. ‘Great Leap Forwards’ threw up an unfortunate incident: Billy caught Andy Macdonald with a car bootfull of seven-inch promo singles marked ‘DJ Edit’. On closer inspection, he discovered that the first verse had been edited off. Billy explains his ire: ‘I was angry from an artistic point of view – that nobody had asked me about this – and at the naïvety of Andy and Pete, thinking that chopping off the first verse would get it played on Radio 1. It was so ridiculous. The only way we would’ve got it played was to get Trevor Horn in to produce it at incredible cost, and cut the politics! But the first verse? Really fucking dumb.’

  With a sad inevitability, it got to Number 52.

  Workers Playtime, the album, was released on 19 September and went Top Twenty. In full, ‘Great Leap Forwards’ provided it with a fitting, sing-song finale, one of the few songs on the album not about Mary or inspired by the Mary experience.

  ‘The Short Answer’, which actually names her (‘Between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary there was Mary/Between the Deep Blue Sea and the Devil that was me’) is actually about a number of Billy’s obsessive relationships, and, in true Bragg style, uses actual events as a starting point and takes off down fictional tangents. For instance, there is talk of being duffed up by ‘her’ two brothers; Mary did have two brothers, but they never took him outside, as it were. Billy will readily admit to using real names in song – as far back as ‘Richard’ from Riff Raff days, whose protagonists are people he knew (‘Richard belongs to Jayne/And Jayne belongs to yesterday’) – but it is wise not to take every word he writes at face value.

  That said, ‘Must I Paint You A Picture’, ‘The Only One’, ‘The Price I Pay’, ‘Life With The Lions’ and ‘Little Time Bomb’ are all fundamentally Mary songs (‘Sometimes I think that fate has been against us from the start’). Equally, they can be taken as polaroids of Billy’s attitude towards women, towards himself and towards relationships as he viewed them in 1988. Opening jangler ‘She’s Got A New Spell’ – the title of which comes from a phrase Alan Wigg used after a female neighbour was banging and wailing next door – is more general, hinting at the witchcraft of female sexuality first explored in ‘Strange Things Happen’. ‘I’m not saying they’re all witches,’ he explains. This perceived hormonal alchemy has come a long way since the boyish frustration of ‘A New England’ and ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ and the disappointed sigh of ‘A Lover Sings’ and ‘The Myth Of Trust’. Billy has become more analytical of love, but no happier, frankly.

  David Fricke in Rolling Stone called it ‘broken-heart surgery’.

  Porky remembers with some distaste a meeting between Andy Macdonald and Pete Jenner after Mary and Billy had split where, albeit jokingly, they rubbed their hands together at the thought of the album they would surely get out of it. They were, however, on the money (apt, really) – Workers Playtime was a fine cycle of injured love songs. With a bit of politics.

  ‘Valentine’s Day Is Over’ examines violence towards women from a female perspective. ‘This is a song by a bloke about how it is unacceptable to beat up women,’ Billy explains. ‘I’m not writing it for women, I’m writing it for other blokes to hear.’

  ‘Great Leap Forwards’, featuring some of Billy’s most memorable lines, pulls off the difficult trick of boiling down the whole pop-and-politics-don’t-mix argument. Billy elucidates: ‘What I’m trying to say is, the role of the artist is not to come up with answers but to ask the right bloody questions. It’s the audience’s job to change the world. The artist can talk about the world, and evoke the world, and paint a picture of the world, but the answers aren’t given to singer-songwriters. For
fuck’s sake, my first famous song said “I don’t want to change the world”, however … and the important thing is the “however” – while I’m here, there are one or two things I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind, other than just my guitar and the length of my hair. Some people take that and run with it and get a lot out of that, other people are opposed to it, but I recognise that it’s a contradiction. I am not kidding myself.

  ‘I was trying to communicate to people that I was aware. It was my post-Taxman declaration of who I was. My caveat to Red Wedge: I’m really interested in politics, however, I don’t know what’s going to happen if Labour win the election.’

  It’s a mighty long way down rock’n’roll

  From Top Of The Pops to drawing the dole

  If no one seems to understand

  Start your own revolution, cut out the middle man

  In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune

  But this is reality so give me some room

  So join in the struggle while you may

  The Revolution is just a T-shirt away

  It is Billy Bragg’s ‘Song For However’. It builds and builds until, apparently, everybody Billy knows is singing backing vocals (Porky, Cara, Wiggy, Michelle Shocked, a junior Jenner and Jayne Creamer – the very Jayne mentioned in the song ‘Richard’, then working at Go! Discs). What a way to go. He always did know how to end an album.

  Having rehumanised himself through the songwriting process on Workers Playtime, Billy put himself back on the rack for what he refers to as The Tour That Went On For Ever, but was no more punishing than any other. The American leg started on 7 September in Halifax, Nova Scotia and ended 1 November in Montreal. (From there it was Scandinavia, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Christmas.) The Volvo had been outgrown since Billy stopped playing with himself, replaced by a rented van, containing him, Cara, Jenner, Wiggy and Grant Showbiz aka Grant Cunliffe, sound engineer and producer who’d experienced the early days of The Smiths (‘the punk Hollies’, as he’d described them) and also worked with The Fall.

  Halfway through the American trek, between LA and Dallas, the Bragg party detoured via the Grand Canyon and almost ended the tour there and then. With Jenner driving, and Billy sitting in the front, they came round the mountains at one in the morning at European speed and two huge National Park elks darted across the road in front of them. The van missed the stag but hit the doe, which was killed outright. Mercifully, there was no other traffic, and Jenner managed to keep control of the vehicle and stay on the road, but it was nearly a nasty accident – Cara, six months’ pregnant with her first son George, was asleep across the back seat. It shook everybody up, and cost them deer.

  A week later, Cara gave them a return shock in New Orleans, but a rather more pleasant one. 9 October is Columbus Day, so there was no gig to be had, and it was designated for laundry. But Cara’s boyfriend Mick had joined them, and at 11 a.m., without warning, the party were summoned to the courthouse to witness their wedding. Fortunately, they’d all bought cowboy gear in Austin and were able to dress up. Everyone cried, except Cara and Mick, and despite the public holiday, a visiting Tiny managed to rustle up something old, blue and borrowed. It was a happy occasion, but it meant that they never did get their undies spun for the entire tour.

  (Cara’s baby was born in December. She worked right up to her ninth month, and was back out on tour when George was three months.)

  On 31 December, Billy played the first of what became his annual Hackney Empire New Year’s Eve specials. He traditionally spent New Year’s Eve at Brenda and Joe’s in Oundle (their parties were legendary), but 1987 had seen him and Wiggy wandering the streets of London after a Wangfords gig, eventually washing up on Andy and Juliet Macdonald’s doorstep – so Pete Jenner stepped in. He’d find something for them to do. Work.

  Marginally fewer gigs had been notched up in 1987 and 1988, but many more miles travelled. Billy was hopping an average of twelve countries a year, many of them covered twice, usually a couple visited for the first time – in ’86 it was East Germany, Russia and Japan; in ’87, it was Australia, New Zealand and Nicaragua. In 1989, although he didn’t know it yet, it would be Mexico, Bolivia and China.

  ‘He was working me hard,’ says Billy of Jenner. ‘But the things he kept coming up with were too fucking interesting to turn down! It wasn’t just, Let’s go and tour Germany again, it was, Let’s go to China, let’s go to Mexico, or Nicaragua. The only thing that used to bug me about it was that there was no time in between, no time for me to assimilate the fact that I’d been in China, and think to myself, God, that was really incredible, and let it sink in. I’d get home, and bang, I was in Mexico! Then back in New York again.

  ‘I’d say to people, It’s nothing to do with me, I just go where he tells me!’

  Jenner defends his merciless slave-driving tactic: ‘You’ve got to ride the tide, you’ve got to do it all. If you can do everything, you should do everything. If you don’t open up those markets, you’re gonna bore them in England: There you are again, another album, another tour. If you’ve got a career in all these other countries, you don’t have to overwork the UK. When you’re happening, get to Prague, get to Germany, get to America, get to Canada. You’re offered the chance to go to Russia, you go to Russia.

  ‘I wanted to get Billy happening all over the world, which was hard for him, I know, because he never liked flying. He had to screw up his courage and go on dodgy airlines on cheap tickets. I could never afford to book with whoever flies direct from Minneapolis to Denver, so we’d have to go via Memphis. That sort of shit.’

  ‘Pete’s so intrepid,’ says Tiny. ‘He always wants to go somewhere else.’

  She remembers him in a German airport brandishing a 1970s-looking brochure saying ‘Come To Kazakhstan!’ containing a photograph of the local delicacy, boiled sheep’s head in its own juices (this was intended as enticement). Tiny assumed he was joking, but you can never tell with Peter Jenner.

  It was a mighty long way round rock’n’roll, especially the way Billy Bragg was doing it, but aside from the lack of feet-ground interface, it was still the life for him: ‘I didn’t feel it was pointless. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway.’

  If nothing else, Brenda and Joe’s postcard collection was looking healthy. Ever since Billy left Oundle in 1980, he’d sent regular letters, Christmas cards and tapes to his old mates. It became a custom once he started travelling the world, and the couple were in regular receipt of esoteric missives from far-away armpits or beauty spots. Their anthology today is impressive: postcards depicting the three-storey Uniroyal Tyre in Detroit, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, a rainforest in Queensland, moose calves in Alaska, the Pope in Rome and the people’s underground station in Moscow (actually, he bought that one in Camden). These bulletins, often brief and written on knees in transit, are exhausting enough simply to look through, so heaven knows what it must have been like on the other end of the biro.

  Here, there and everywhere, but forever writing home: that’s Billy Bragg all over.

  In February, 1989, he was in the GDR again, by which time perestroika was in full swing – not as groovy as it sounds, since the conservative East German State were clamping down in response to Gorbachev’s revolution in the head. The place was like a pressure cooker, and the ten-day trip was a depressing one. The optimism they’d experienced in ’86 had gone. Billy remembers that nobody in their party spoke a word on the flight back from East Berlin to Amsterdam.

  Billy asked about the elusive glasnost after gigs, but no one was particularly open about openness. At the House of Russian–German Friendship in East Berlin, he inadvertently started some big trouble by saying that perestroika and glasnost wouldn’t work unless the Berlin Wall came down. The next day, he was called in by the state-run promoters to be taught a lesson: they took him to the museum at the Brandenburg Gate. As their coach drew into no-man’s land between East and West, Jorg Wolter’s antennae began twitching. There were TV cameras wai
ting for them, which meant that Billy’s little visit would be on that evening’s news. ‘Whatever you actually say,’ Wolter told Billy, ‘you’ll be saying that the Berlin Wall is a good idea on TV.’

  Billy refused to get off the bus. Wolter lost his temper, got off and walked back to East Berlin, straight through the guards without a care. The whole farrago was ‘piss-poor PR for the East Germans’, as Billy puts it. While they were between the walls, in an area about 200 yards wide, Billy noticed that it was full of rabbits, which struck him as sweet.

  Suddenly he was Mr Refusenik: he declined to play the lightbulb factory again, so they offered him an army barracks where the border guards were based. Here, Billy had a fascinating friendship meeting with the border guard officers – an old timer fixed him with his beady eye and revealed that he actually took part in the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, explaining that it’s there to keep the fascists of West Germany out of East Germany (the ‘anti-fascist dam’ they call it). Billy’s response was direct: ‘There aren’t any. We are not trying to invade your country – I know it and Gorbachev knows it.’

  The lesson from all this was that things change. Politics change. That’s why Billy admits he can’t keep up with the Labour Party today. Things had changed all around this old guard officer and he hadn’t even noticed. Billy did the barracks gig and sure enough, a happy, smiling photo with the guards appeared in the newspaper. He said his Berlin Wall piece again, and got in trouble again.

  The closing gig at the Sports Hall was televised live. Never mind Radio Free Europe, this was Channel Free Bragg: through his interpreter, Billy suggested that the Wall was built to house a rabbit sanctuary. ‘The time will come when the rabbits of East Berlin will be free to roam in West Berlin,’ he said.