It gave him the time to reflect on the passing 1980s – a decade in which reflection, for him, had been at a premium. Ten years of Thatcher, eight years of gigging, the two not entirely unconnected. Billy had watched the world fall apart, but some things stayed in place: his friends, his commitment to socialism, the NME crossword. Ten years ago, there was no Billy Bragg, no Go! Discs, no Utility, no Red Wedge and no Portastack. The dictionary contained no compact disc, no Thatcherism, no AIDS, no yuppie, no global warming and no Reaganomics, and Star Wars was a film. It was a long decade, a white-hot crucible in which ideas and hopes and fears had been forged, and, spiritually, it wasn’t over yet, oh no.
Go! Discs came out of the 80s smiling, having seen a mighty phoenix rise from the ashes of The Housemartins – namely, The Beautiful South, whose debut album Welcome To The Beautiful South hit Number Two in November. In February, Housemartins bassist Norman Cook’s new outfit Beats International scored a Number One single with Dub Be Good To Me. While PolyGram sat back and smiled benignly at its new investment, Porky decided he’d had enough of the stifling, junior-corporatism of the new Go! and resigned his post. Within five days of handing in his notice, his girlfriend announced she was pregnant. To their eternal credit, the Macdonalds offered him his job back, but he stuck to his plan and struck out into the big, wide yonder, concentrating full-time on being a big, wide stand-up (good decision, as it transpired). Tiny Fennimore had also left Go! – having concentrated her energies so unashamedly behind Billy, it seemed wise to go and work for him. She joined Sincere.
Billy’s own relationship with Go! Discs was also up in the air at this point: unbeknown to Andy Macdonald, Pete Jenner was talking to other record companies.
In February, to get away from all this back-stabbing and subterfuge, Billy went somewhere more democratic: the Nicaraguan elections. As one of a staggering 3,000 international observers, Billy watched in disbelief as the Sandinista government were ousted by Violeta Chamorro’s National Opposition Union (which, as the NME’s Michelle Kirsch noted, is ‘a shit name for a new Clash album’). Billy’s optimism after the release of Nelson Mandela and the defeat of Mike Tyson by Buster Douglas on the same day less than a week previously was misplaced. He wrote an incisive report for New Socialist magazine about his visit, dubbing the election results ‘a different kind of earthquake’. The Nicaraguan people simply wanted an end to the war, and a reversal of the US trade embargo that was crippling their country’s economy – it was, on the day, deciding which of the two parties could best haggle with the Yankees. These chose Chamorro’s fourteen-party coalition. It was Peter Jenner who, in a moment of either inspired irony or foot-in-mouth disease told the NME, ‘If you have a good, right-on cause, don’t ask Billy to play a benefit, because you’ll lose.’
At least Billy got to meet another of his heroes in Managua, Jackson Browne – ‘After Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter that really got me’ – they shared a house, and played each other’s songs (‘If only Wiggy could’ve seen me!’)
The self-styled ‘champion of lost causes’ was unbowed. He appeared onstage for the finale of Easter Monday’s International Tribute To Nelson Mandela concert at Wembley Stadium – albeit by accident. Billy had been asked by Melody Maker to write a report for the paper, which he duly did (‘When Nelson Mandela walked out on to the stage and smiled like he had just seen 72,000 of his grandchildren, Wembley erupted. It cannot have echoed to such a tumult since 1966 and there were people on the pitch then too’), but was roped in by Peter Gabriel to join the closing sing-song of ‘Sun City’ and ‘Biko’ alongside Chrissie Hynde, Jerry Dammers, Simple Minds, Daniel Lanois, Little Steven and others. He had but one thought among all the pop unity and political triumphalism: ‘I hope Wiggy’s videoing this.’
Billy’s next Big Important Gig was Washington DC’s Earth Day, where he performed with Michael Stipe and Elektra labelmates 10,000 Maniacs. Backstage, he enthused about his experiences in the former East Germany. ‘How does that work?’ asked Stipe. ‘Well,’ Billy replied, ‘you get on a plane and get off the other end.’ He was booked to do a short tour of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Finland and the USSR in June and invited Stipe and Maniacs singer Natalie Merchant along. They happily accepted.
May saw the release of Billy Bragg’s most important album since Life’s A Riot, his seven-track collection of political songs The Internationale. It was important for two distinct reasons: it was released on Utility and not Go! Discs, to prove to Andy Macdonald that he could do it, and, self-evidently, it was political at a time when – apparently – all of Billy’s causes were either evaporating or being crushed underfoot.
‘It was Not The Next Billy Bragg Album,’ he explains. ‘It confused the fuck out of Elektra in America, and pissed the fuck out of Andy at home. It was a reassertion of my rights as an individual … and a childish two-fingers.’
From the album-defining rewrite of ‘The Internationale’ itself with brass band and Welsh choir (‘The Internationale unites the world in song’) to the heart-rending anti-war lament ‘My Youngest Son Came Home Today’ (‘While in his polished box of pine/Like dead meat in a butcher’s tray’), this all-too-brief album baits those who would seek to stereotype Billy as one-dimensional and over-earnest. On closer inspection however, its broad sweep of anthems and ballads actually presents an artist who’s hungry for more. These songs are, for the most part, steeped in history, yet Billy manages to contemporarise them and point them at the future. A far harder album for him to tackle than another one of bruised love songs.
‘The Marching Song Of The Covert Battalions’ is far and away the album’s biggest coup with its near-comedic chorus of ‘Tra-la-la-la/We’re making the world safe for capitalism’ linking decades of local US military intervention from Mexico through Haiti, Cuba and – implicitly – Nicaragua (‘We’re here to lend a helping hand/In case they don’t elect us’). By tackling ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Red Flag’, Billy exposes himself as punk’s first dedicated historian, not just some lyric-mouthing tub-thumper, and his a cappella go at ‘Nicaragua Nicaraguita’ brings new meaning to the term ‘brave’. The Internationale may be the least-played of Billy Bragg’s back catalogue in many fans’ collections, but it is difficult not to like.
For a low-key, non-populist, side-salad release, it was afforded plenty of space in the music papers, met in some quarters by a furrowed brow, others with a raised fist. ‘He continues to expand his musical horizons and his uncompromising stance … Bragg reflects the hopes and fears of a people,’ wrote Dave Jennings in Melody Maker. ‘A post-revolutionary utopia should be fun,’ complained NME’s Stephen Dalton, who also decided that Billy’s literal interpretation of ‘The Internationale’ was unadventurous. Folk Roots’ Colin Irwin saw it as a nice idea that lacked authority. Its 34 placing in the chart was not bad in the circumstances.
The release of an album, however modest, meant another full tour from here to Kalamazoo (no, really). The UK leg in May included a show for 90 inmates of D-wing at Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison. (Respect, as they say, is due to Cara Tivey, who braved the all-male environment just a month after the riot at Strange-ways Prison and the others it sparked off.)
On the road from Barcelona to Valencia in May, with no guitar to hand, Billy wrote his English football hooligans song ‘The Few’ using the tune of Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’, which is why, if you so wish, you can play one to the tune of the other.
On 3 June, he debuted ‘The Few’ to great effect at the Big Day shindig, a free festival marking Glasgow’s status as European City of Culture. At Custom House Quay on the banks of the Clyde, before 2,000 non-paying punters, Billy was joined by Stipe and Merchant for some choice covers, and then the three of them took off for Berlin, accompanied by affable country-rockers The Coal Porters.
Although on familiar turf for Billy, Stipe was freaked out by Eastern Europe, not least for the fact that no one looked at him twice in restaurants. At Cottbus, which is a pretty heavy fascist town, they played Ju
gend Greizert Zentrum, a youth club with a tiny stage, where one punter said to Stipe, ‘Are you American?’ He nodded. ‘Say hello to Michael Jackson.’ Billy explained that the East German kid hadn’t assumed Stipe knew Jacko because he was Stipe, simply because he was American – he’d never met one before.
Billy made the tactical error of singing ‘The Internationale’ at early gigs. The audiences took it badly in Prague, where – just six months after the Velvet Revolution and on the verge of their first free elections – the old Russian National Anthem still stung. Czech singer-songwriter Vladimir Merta tried in vain to translate Billy’s explanation of the song’s pro-democratic significance, but a strategic re-jig of the set seemed a more sympathetic solution. In the next town, Olumouc, he dropped it.
The sights and sounds were captivating in this stunning country that was more like picturesque Austria than hard-faced Germany: eating fondue in a Gypsy restaurant to violin accompaniment; Billy and Stipe wandering around Olumouc’s empty town square and taking pictures of each other; the empty plinth with balloons tied to it, where Stalin or Lenin had once been. Two days away from the election, it became clear that they were witnessing history (one of Billy’s hobbies, of course, but humbling for Stipe and Merchant, who stayed on in Czechoslovakia after the shows were over).
22 and 23 June saw a remarkable, cross-border joint festival hosted by Joensuu in Finland and Sortavala in Karelia, USSR. The newly opened border was so new the tarmac was still wet. The border post comprised one sentry box, and a guard saying ‘Come in, come in!’ Since it didn’t actually get dark at all, Billy and Wiggy were unable to sleep, and they recall sitting in another empty square and seeing former Talking Heads singer David Byrne cycle past in a white suit. Somehow, it wasn’t even that weird. The World Cup was being played over in Italy, but it couldn’t have seemed further away.
In July, Billy managed to squeeze in a week’s holiday in St Johns, Newfoundland. Some students found him and made him do a gig.
Life goes on as it did before
As the country drifts slowly to war
Billy Bragg, ‘Rumours Of War’
The world was arming for peace once again in August 1990, when Iraqi tanks and planes entered Kuwait, and President Saddam Hussein was roundly condemned by the UN, who quickly proposed mandatory economic sanctions. Within a few days, Jordanian demonstrators were burning the Stars and Stripes, President Bush was ominously warning the American people about ‘personal sacrifice’, troops from twelve of the Allied nations were building up outside the Iraqi border, and on TV Saddam was asking British hostage six-year-old Stuart Lockwood if he was getting enough cornflakes.
Meanwhile, hoping like the rest of us that it was all a big show of strength and ‘the new Hitler’ would back off, Billy toured Canada and the USA. While he was in Boston, he ran in some valuable studio time at Fort Apache, the very first work he’d done on his next album, Don’t Try This At Home. The situation in the Gulf hit stalemate. Germany announced reunification. Billy joined Johnny Marr at his studio Clear in Manchester to work on the album’s first track, ‘Sexuality’. War clouds loom, life goes on.
On 8 November, the Guardian printed an angry response from Billy Bragg in their letters page to an allusion they’d made to Essex Man typifying thuggish, right-wing Britain: ‘We have had to endure the snobbery of the Home Counties often enough without being misused in the media’s search for a caricature of the xenophobic national chauvinist.’
Three more nights at Hackney saw the New Year in once again, Billy’s people celebrating the recent Tory revolt against Thatcher and getting off on his Essex Suite (covers of Dr Feelgood, Depeche Mode and Eddie & The Hot Rods) – but mindful throughout of George Bush’s line in the sand. He debuted ‘Rumours Of War’, prompting Q’s John Aizlewood to note, ‘Bragg’s black-and-white certainties have been leavened by an edgy paranoia, revealing doubt, puzzlement and shafts of grey.’
The entry for 17 January 1991 in Billy’s appointments book says it all:
‘Accountants 4 p.m. WAR.’
Over the weekend of 18, 19 and 20 January, while ‘our boys’ were out in the desert getting Gulf War Syndrome, at Wembley Arena, self-styled music biz mogul Jonathan King was hosting The Great British Music Weekend: all the indie news that was fit to print. Wall-to-wall baggy tops captured the zeitgeist at an event dominated by fashionable bands from Manchester (Happy Mondays, Northside, 808 State, James), but a welcome blast of realism was provided by South London agit-popsters Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, whose anti-war single ‘Bloodsport For All’ was making the BBC nervous, and of course Billy Bragg, whose speech went: ‘We have to struggle against the destruction of all human beings. It’s not a fucking video game – it’s the Third World War!’ (Radio 1 axed his words from the ‘live’ broadcast.)
A new image of Billy Bragg circulated round the music press: the one ‘bothering’ other groups backstage. In truth, he did buttonhole Carter and also Blur in their dressing rooms to support the anti-war movement – to do something – but at a time of taking Ecstasy and pretending to be Mancunian, you can understand his urgency. As The Fall’s Mark E Smith had famously said when faced with the shower of up-and-coming new indie groups: ‘God help us if there’s a war.’ Well, there was, and God help us. Fortunately, the so-called mother of all battles was over by 28 February, when Saddam acquiesced to a cease-fire. Final score: Allied forces 120,000 – Iraq 343. The Kuwaitis lost an estimated 5,000, the price of freedom.
Meanwhile, amid rumours of peace, Don’t Try This At Home was taking shape at Cathouse Studios, Pavilion and Sonet. It was another giant’s step for Billy Bragg: ‘It was the culmination of me trying my hardest to stay true to what I do but make an album that was commercially acceptable to a wider audience. I was trying to deal with that artistic compromise for a number of reasons, most important of which was that those were the sort of songs I was writing: big, sexy pop songs.’
In Manchester, Johnny Marr had co-produced and collaborated on ‘Sexuality’, transforming Billy’s ‘Louie Louie’ guitar riff by sprinkling his own magic fairy dust on it (half-chords, apparently) and in doing so, creating not only an instant Bragg classic but a benchmark for the whole record. Billy knew they had struck gold. ‘“Sexuality” threw the gauntlet down,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t make a conventional Billy Bragg-style record with “Sexuality” on it.’
Back in London, Billy and the record’s main producer Grant Showbiz raised the game, ‘aided and abetted by’ Wiggy, as it eventually said in the album’s credits – carefully phrased so as to acknowledge Wiggy’s input without undermining Showbiz’s role.
Don’t Try This At Home was going to be big. That was the idea anyway.
Pete Jenner liked the idea of a full-on pop album, because he worked out that it would make a fantastic calling card with which to broker the next record deal. He and Billy firmly believed that they’d taken the Go! Discs relationship as far as they could: now that Billy was established and no longer a novelty act, his albums hit a steady sales peak of around 70,000 in the UK. He wasn’t going out of fashion – he’d never been in fashion – but a plateau appeared to have been hit. ‘There is a frustration in that,’ Jenner admits. ‘Which is why, before Don’t Try This At Home, we were getting ready to leave. We didn’t know where we were going, but it had become fairly difficult to deal with Andy Macdonald, he’d become convinced he was God Almighty.’
If this sounds like one-way traffic, Jenner is quick to own up to his part in the problem: ‘I know all the answers too – so you’ve got two people who know all the fucking answers. Catastrophic!’
Jenner and Macdonald had always enjoyed a spirited professional relationship characterised by a free and frank exchange of views and some swearing. ‘Both of them were a bit volatile,’ Billy ventures.
Diplomat to the end, Macdonald calls Jenner ‘a fair-minded person’.
‘Billy would be quite good at knowing all the answers too,’ adds Jenner. ‘So there’d be th
ree of us! Quite a lot in one room.’
Porky confirms the volatility of the situation, one he’d experienced from close quarters: ‘When he was in a good mood, Macdonald was one of the loveliest, most beguiling people you ever met – but “when he was in a good mood” was the limited proviso on that. When he was in a steaming rage, you’d be in fear of your life.’
‘The problem was,’ reasons Billy, ‘could anyone bear a continuation of the Macdonald/Jenner ding-dongs? No amount of money was going to get over the fact that those two had a bit of difficulty. It was getting on everybody’s nerves, particularly Pete’s wife Sumi.’
Regardless of personality clashes, Jenner felt that ‘Andy had got Billy as far as he could get him. All the albums did much the same. We spent more on Workers Playtime, it had more instrumentation – it didn’t make much difference.’
‘I was ready to call it quits in order to remain friends with Andy and Juliet,’ Billy says. ‘The relationship had run its course – let’s go and find pastures new.’
On 27 April 1991, Billy announced to them that he was going to sign to Chrysalis. Understandably Andy and Juliet weren’t going to let it lie. In order to dissuade them from pursuing the matter any further, Jenner deliberately raised the stakes to an unrealistic amount of money – £1 million over four albums – this way, Go! would be forced to retire gracefully, Billy could sign to another label, and everyone would remain friends. That was the idea, at any rate.
But Andy came up with the money: £1 million over four albums, PolyGram-approved. Billy and Jenner didn’t know what to do: the money didn’t overcome the deterioration of the relationship. ‘Is it worth the aggro?’ they asked themselves, as they mulled it over in a hotel room in Georgia. Crucially, Juliet had intervened.
Billy Bragg Page 28