Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  She and Andy had been in the process of separating since January, but she’d agreed to stay on at Go! to help conclude Billy’s renewal. (Jenner and Billy knew she was leaving, but no one at PolyGram did yet.) As part of the revised, £1 million deal, Juliet offered to remain at Go! and be their main point of contact, thus removing what Jenner called ‘the grief factor’. After all, her role had often amounted to mediator between the two fiery fellows. This ‘third way’ did the trick – though it meant that Juliet now had to stay on at Go! for the duration of the album. (This was fine until June, when her and Andy’s separation turned to divorce. He moved out in July, but they agreed to be ‘civilised’ and continue to work together.)

  At any rate, as of 13 May, the impasse was solved: Don’t Try This At Home would come out on Go! Discs. In keeping with its Big Pop theme, they would extract three singles from it, and make pricey promo videos for each of them – just like everybody else does.

  The deal – a compromise of the what-have-we-got-to-lose? kind – was signed. In the event, Billy could’ve got a matching offer from front-runner Chrysalis, but Billy felt they owed it to Go! Discs, and Jenner respected his wishes. ‘I felt we’d fucked Andy about so many times with these wacky singles and no videos,’ says Billy. ‘We agreed to go straight down the middle. This was certainly the record to do it with.’

  Of coming up with the large wad of money, Juliet says, ‘We’d always made it very, very clear to PolyGram that Billy was the heart and soul of the company. They always understood that. To their credit, they never argued with why we placed such value in Billy, and why it was important for us to spend that amount of money. Plus, the staff that were there would’ve been devastated if Billy had left.’

  It was like taking one more cream cake when you’re full. Oh, I shouldn’t. Oh, go on then, you’ve twisted my arm …

  In the last week of June 1991, Billy was back on the front cover of the NME, headlined ‘ESSEX SYMBOL’ – a decision not without some debate in the NME office, as someone who was there will tell you (this was, after all, the time of ‘Madchester’ and flares, not Acton and big turn-ups). The ultimate decider in Billy going on the cover was twofold: ‘Sexuality’, the single, and ‘Sexuality’, the video.

  It may have represented an ideological compromise to Billy, but the ‘Sexuality’ video was made without any grudges, and entirely in keeping with the matey, DIY Bragg ethic. Porky, now trading as Phill Jupitus, had been invited over to listen to some mixes of the album – not exactly textbook still to be mixing the album the week its first single is released, but it had been a prolific session. During ‘Sexuality’, he suggested some video ideas to Billy – basically visual gags based on the notably humorous lyrics (‘I look like Robert De Niro/I drive a Mitsubishi Zero … I feel a total jerk/Before your naked body of work … I’ve made passes/At women of all classes’ and so on). At Billy’s behest, Porky went home and drafted his ideas as a cartoon strip. The result – as relaxed and likeable a display as anyone in the promophobic Bragg camp could have hoped for – is virtually as per the Porky cartoon, gag for gag. The amateur storyboard artist and conceptualist received what he describes as ‘a lot of money’ for his efforts.

  ‘Totally inspired,’ says Juliet, who produced the video. ‘No pressure, shitloads of ideas, and it worked.’ Perhaps inappropriately, the CD and twelve-inch B-side was a ‘consummate Mary song’, ‘Bad Penny’ (‘It’s hard to love a girl so near yet so far out of reach … She steals more than she buys, you can see it in her eyes’).

  All in all, ‘Sexuality’ was the perfect pop package. It even came complete with two de rigueur dance-style remixes – this from a man who’d been de rigueur all his life. The NME cover; the eyebrow-raising subject matter; the dance angle; the irresistible video – ‘Sexuality’ could not fail. But sales didn’t match the amount of money spent: it charted at Number 27. Disappointment #1.

  ‘He doesn’t look like a pop star,’ is Andy Macdonald’s view. ‘It put him into a difficult space.’

  It did well on the radio, despite initial misgivings about the G-word (‘Just because you’re gay/I won’t turn you away’), and, in truth, it felt like a bigger hit than it was. A slow week meant Billy was invited back on to Top Of The Pops, which all concerned thoroughly enjoyed (Cara, Wiggy, Grant), as Billy even conceded to miming: ‘I’ve done it my way all this time, I’ll do it their way.’ And to think they said Kinnock sold out when he moved away from unilateralism!

  The lowly chart placing for such a tailor-made Top Ten smash did not dent Billy: ‘It wasn’t disappointing to me. Nor was it a surprise.’

  At the time, No. 1 magazine ran a short interview with Billy headlined ‘I Hate Being In The Charts!’ To an extent, it was true. In the same way that he’d learnt lessons from the way absolute adherence to a single political line had crushed The Redskins, he made a mental note of the fate of The Housemartins (rent asunder by a Number One hit) and The Smiths (weakened by an endless stream of singles). ‘I’d also seen pop stardom make it impossible for Weller to get on a bus from Marble Arch to Shepherd’s Bush,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t really want any of that. When fame has lifted up its skirt to me, I have made as much accommodation as I can, but I’ve resisted … whatever metaphorical phrase you want to stick in.’

  On 16 September, the lavishly-tooled, sixteen-track Don’t Try This At Home was released, advertised full-page, full-colour, everywhere from the NME to the New Statesman. ‘Including the HIT singles “Sexuality” and “You Woke Up My Neighbourhood”,’ it screamed. Except ‘You Woke Up My Neighbourhood’ had only reached Number 54 – despite its guest stars Michael Stipe and co-writer Peter Buck from R.E.M. – Disappointment #2 (but that’s advertising). The album went Top Ten, which was a tonic in the circumstances, but only sold the usual Bragg 70,000 copies. Disappointment #3.

  This was no reflection on the reviews, which were uniformly positive about Billy’s new direction. ‘Bragg has done the inconceivable,’ raved David Quantick in the NME. ‘Shrugged off the demons of despond and made his best album.’ Mat Snow in Q played the football analogy: ‘Surely there can be no doubt now that Billy Bragg, love man, football fan and worried working-class hero, will be there or thereabouts among the honours come the end of the season.’ Michelle Kirsch, now writing in new glossy Select, awarded the record five out of five boxes: ‘It’s been a long time coming, but he’s made that leap.’ Even Folk Roots, whose target audience it seemed least likely to appease, jumped for joy, top man Ian Anderson concluding with ‘Stimulating, pleasurable, thought-provoking, entertaining and inspiring; a perfect combination. Are we good enough for it?’

  There is plenty in Don’t Try This At Home to make a song and dance about. There is plenty in it, period – 57 minutes to Workers Playtime’s 42 and Taxman’s 38. But filler is nowhere to be heard. The album’s benchmark, ‘Sexuality’, comes half-way through – a wise move, since it lifts the record rather than precipitates a downward curve. Razzamatazz abounds, on the noisy ‘Accident Waiting To Happen’, the pan-rattling ‘You Woke Up My Neighbourhood’, surrogate Smiths song ‘Sexuality’ and the Riff Raff-and-ready ‘North Sea Bubble’, but it’s not just the fast ones that are loaded up on production value: slowies like ‘Cindy Of A Thousand Lives’, ‘Dolphins’ and ‘Moving The Goalposts’ ooze multi-layered atmosphere, and benefit from the attention. At times, it’s as if Billy Bragg has accidentally wandered into somebody else’s album. Even his voice is improved.

  The lyrics become the listener’s comfort blanket as they travel through this new and challenging theme ride: they are instant Bragg, if not always his most truly inspired. ‘Moving The Goalposts’ is a lucky bag of various choice couplets thrown together in the name of a cracking tune: ‘I put on my raincoat to make it rain/And sure enough the skies opened up again … Heavens above/Can this sticky stuff really be love? … Robin Hood and his Merry Men/Are never, never, never coming back again’ – these are nice lines but they are not necessarily related. (‘It was a rea
lly nice tune, and you have to write some words to it,’ Billy says. ‘And they were the words. I’m really sorry. I was throwing lines at it to see what stuck. I don’t often do that.’)

  The aforementioned ‘Sexuality’ and ‘The Few’ are solid gold Bragg lyrics – insightful, crafty and wry – and the achingly simple ‘Trust’ explores the dread of AIDS in a sensitive and original way, relating fear of lethal infection with the age-old fear of pregnancy (‘He’s already been inside me/And I know it can’t be good’). Quite apart from these gems, one song on Don’t Try This At Home ranks among the most important Billy has ever written – indeed, listening to it, with its music-box accompaniment and the eerie echo on the voice, the inkling that it is the most important is hard to shake off. ‘Tank Park Salute’ is, after fourteen years, Billy’s tribute to his father: intensely personal (only the two of them will ever know what the title means), exquisitely moving (‘Daddy, is it true that we all have to die?’) and universal. Hearing it live can be more difficult for audiences than it is for Billy to play, but that’s the power of the song.

  On an album that was like a fireworks display of invention, variety and special effects, it was easy to miss ‘Tank Park Salute’, but more than any political statement, it rescued Don’t Try This At Home from the abyss of sell-out. Under all the pomp, circumstance and overdub, Billy’s heart was still beating.

  Andy Macdonald has no qualms about the aggressive marketing behind Don’t Try This At Home: ‘We wanted to reach more people with those songs without making it an undignified exercise.’

  Billy was compliant (‘I’m happy to jump through hoops if it makes a difference’), and his more approachable 1991–92 hairstyle certainly seemed to signal a softer product, but, after telling The Face he once spent £70 on a jumper, miming on Top Of The Pops and playing the fool in the ‘Sexuality’ video, the charm offensive had made not one iota of difference to either his record sales or his public image. Billy looks back on it with no bitterness as ‘a very long-range attempt to convert the ball between the posts. It went in the general direction and at the last moment, it sort of spun off into the crowd. But it looked really great. The crowd were going, “Oh great! Braggy’s going to score!” It was up in the air for a long time before it veered off.’

  But, come the round-ups at the end of 1991, when the papers said Billy had ‘reinvented’ himself as a pop star, he was frustrated. ‘I was just enjoying myself! But it had become a bit of a cul-de-sac for me. I realised I should be concentrating on connecting with my audience and not trying to draw people in.’

  Macdonald is reluctant to call the whole Final Push a failure, even though, on paper, it undoubtedly had been: ‘You have to look at what you’re competing against. There’s a certain category of artists that you don’t judge by sales reached over a three-month period. It’s like a big old ship sailing out there, it could keep sailing on for ever. I genuinely believe that Billy’s songs will have decades and decades of relevance.’

  It hadn’t been a wholly happy experience. ‘You Woke Up My Neighbourhood’, perhaps the biggest commercial blow of the lot with its 54 placing, had been an unpopular choice with Wiggy and Showbiz (‘Picking singles was not our strong point, which is why we don’t do it very often’). It was actually chosen by Macdonald and Garry Blackburn of radio pluggers Anglo as a compromise because Billy wouldn’t let them put ‘Cindy Of A Thousand Lives’ out. Why? ‘Because “Cindy” represents the upper end of the album’s weirdness. If that had been a huge hit, there would’ve been nowhere else for me to go.’ Even the video for ‘Neighbourhood’ crackled with negativity. Porky was happy to storyboard it, but didn’t want a time-consuming, hands-on directorial role at the shoot as he had with ‘Sexuality’, due to his new-born baby. ‘It’s the only time I’ve ever been cross with Bill,’ he reveals. ‘He made me do it.’

  (This unexpected bad blood, borne entirely of pressure and panic, meant that the two friends didn’t speak much for a couple of years, but for Porky this was a welcome natural break: ‘Everything in my life from 1984 to 1991 was in some way connected with Billy, the jobs I did, the gigs I did, the fun I had, it was all related to Billy.’)

  And then there was the tour. Boy, was there the tour.

  Providing I don’t become a parody or hugely successful, I think I can keep on at this level

  Billy Bragg, talking to The Face, September 1991

  ‘It went on and on and on,’ says Billy of the Don’t Try This At Home tour. He means the length, but he might equally be referring to himself on stage. For this was the biggest show he’d ever taken on the road – in order to reproduce the new album live, a full band was unavoidable – and the awkward combination of one man spinning off into lengthy monologues while the rest of the cast sat on stage and twiddled their thumbs was perhaps the tour’s defining image. That or the ping pong table they demanded at every venue – ‘which gave us something to do other than drugs’.

  It was by no means all bad. For Wiggy, so long sidelined or left in the wings with his tuner in his hand, Don’t Try This At Home was his big moment, payback for all those years of indispensability. Promoted from Billy’s Mate to musical director, he set about recruiting a full touring band, The Red Stars. Wiggy’s time had come. ‘I thought, This is it!’ he recalls. ‘Sort the band out and play guitar – instead of carry the guitar. I loved it.’

  The Red Stars line-up was Wiggy, Cara Tivey, Rob Allum on drums and Nigel Frydman on bass. Hardly an orchestra, but, what with the attendant guitar techs and drum tech and the five-hander soundchecks, it was all a long, long way from Billy Bragg on Shepherd’s Bush tube platform with the Roland Cube.

  Wiggy may have been happy as a sandboy, but he was under no illusions about how Billy felt: ‘He didn’t really enjoy it that much.’

  Pete Jenner concurs: ‘It was a tough tour. Longer soundchecks, more hanging around, more people with claims on Billy’s time, more agendas on the road. He was becoming more distant from the audience, there was more security around, more bubbles, less contact with the world. In the old days, it would be four people round a restaurant table, suddenly it’s a palaver, it’s more social.’

  The Red Stars’ first gig was in Berlin on 1 October. Their last was in August 1992. In between, Billy’s worst nightmare gradually became flesh:

  ‘Nobody articulated this to me, nobody inferred it to me, no one gave me the slightest hint of it – but I definitely felt that towards the end of that tour I was becoming a parody of Billy Bragg. This is something I personally felt, because I was bored. It wasn’t in the music, it was in the gigs – but you have to remember, I’m a live creature. If the records make sense it’s because I’ve concentrated what I do live.

  ‘On stage, my monologues were getting longer. I am completely capable of going off on a tangent for twenty minutes. The Red Stars used to get bored shitless with me, it was so annoying for them. It was only because they were there that I realised how much of their time in the gig was spent hanging around. I became aware that some of what I was doing on stage was to entertain myself, not to entertain the audience. I was the only one who wanted to pursue these monologues beyond a couple of funny asides. It was for my benefit.

  ‘Not only that, I was fucking around with the lyrics. The punters were losing songs that they really loved. I was breaking their little hearts.’

  Ben Thompson hit the nail on the head in his review of 1991’s Hackney Empire New Year’s show in the Independent On Sunday: ‘A speech about the Europe-wide advance of racism makes some good points, but then goes on a bit. There probably aren’t too many people in a Billy Bragg audience who think racism is a good thing anyway.’ In the NME, Gina Morris went one step further: ‘Racism blah blah fascism, communism blah blah ism ism ism. SHUT UP! Shut up, SHUT UP! We know, Billy.’

  As if to accentuate the endless nature of the tour, in March 1992, they hit Germany for the second time (‘I thought, This is it! We’re gonna go round again! We’re not going to stop!’). In May, Billy�
�s spirits were lifted by some good old-fashioned Braggmania in Australia. Booked to play a Brisbane boxing arena, they were worried it wouldn’t sell, but in the event, it was packed with punters, some of them actually screaming. The Red Stars were The Beatles. There were even fans hiding in the bushes back at the hotel, who were invited to an amusement arcade that had been booked all night for an after-show and a half. As Billy played air hockey with his people, life seemed sweeter. They wound up doing a total of six shows in Sydney.

  Japan, USA, Canada … after nine years of touring, what used to be a pleasure and never a chore had turned upside down.

  ‘It got to be a real strain,’ Jenner remembers. ‘He wasn’t enjoying it. Apart from the odd day, it was the only time I got to thinking, Fucking hell, I’ve got to go out with Billy on tour. He felt the same way: Here’s Jenner again, what’s he gonna have me doing? It became a situation where he’d dread me phoning up and I’d dread phoning him up.’

  Something had to give, and it was Billy’s appendix.

  13. TRY THIS AT HOME

  Rethink, 1992–1995

  To kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey

  Marcel Proust, Cities Of The Plain

  ‘HE HADN’T TOLD me he was in pain, he was just grumpy,’ says Peter Jenner of Billy’s escalating appendix trouble.

  After nine solid years of getting on with it, of turning up and doing the gig, Billy’s refusal to admit there was something wrong with him was consistent with his Catholic work ethic. It was a case of heads down, mustn’t grumble, when’s the soundcheck? But his appendix had different ideas.

  ‘If I believed in those things,’ says Billy, ‘I’d say it was my body telling me to have a break, do something else.’

  It doesn’t take a gargantuan leap of faith to believe in ‘those things’. Give or take the odd barge holiday and the odd album, Billy had been touring constantly since he broke out of the London pub circuit in 1982. Many bands build up a following and a reputation through constant gigging, and a lot of albums are written on the road, but there were two important factors that made Billy’s schedule more punishing: his play-anywhere, all-weather versatility, and his political convictions.