What on paper looked like a tough enough tour itinerary would, in reality, take on a life of its own: impromptu gigs, two-shows-in-a-night, shoehorning an extra date into what Jenner refers to as ‘that day off after Plymouth’, benefits, debates, day events, friendship meetings – all these add-ons put extra demands on Billy’s time. Thanks to his pathological approachability, meet’n’greets would invariably seep into what ought to have been his quality time (especially in all those exotic new countries, where chatting to punters takes on the mantle of cultural ambassadorship). Billy often jokes that he had no life between 1982 and 1992, but there is a grain of truth in this: he’d purchased his own flat but could he really call London home? It’s little wonder that his body eventually ordered him to stop working. In ‘Sexuality’, he sang ‘I’m sure that everybody knows how much my body hates me’, but he had no idea.
He was also 34. A certain age. His diplomatic immunity from the levels of self-abuse that are the rock musician’s stock-in-trade afforded him an unusually hearty bill of health; however, unlike the road, Billy Bragg just couldn’t go on for ever. The grumbly appendix took a while to get itself heard. Doctors assumed his stomach pains were a case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (diet- but also stress-related, which was a clue), and prescribed him plenty of All Bran. But in August, during a break in touring, while Billy was up in Manchester working on some new tracks with Johnny Marr, the pain became more than just irritable.
He saw a homeopath and had some X-rays. He was put on a course of antibiotics and ordered to take three months’ rest, the first two weeks without solids. ‘He finally got a doctor’s note,’ says Wiggy. The rest of the tour was cancelled.
Juliet, who came to his aid while he was bed-bound, says, ‘He looked bloody awful, really gaunt, with deep, dark circles underneath his eyes.’
‘My piss had turned to syrup,’ Billy adds.
Juliet helped Billy hump his mattress into the front room, where he set up permanent base camp. From his sick bed, he watched the entire Barcelona Olympics. Sally Gunnell, Carl Lewis, Linford Christie, first South African team for 32 years, Bosnia under their own flag … Billy can probably tell you who won gold, silver and bronze in the Women’s Fencing.
In effect, he’d won a holiday.
This period of enforced exile happily coincided with a new dawn for Juliet, too. In May 1992, her divorce from Andy had come through, and she was in the process of untying the knot with Go! Discs. Having first decided to leave in early 1991, she’d relented and stayed on, solely to work on Don’t Try This At Home. Then there was Madstock, the live Madness reunion, which she helped get off the drawing board, into Finsbury Park, on to Channel 4 and on to a Go! Discs contract (the group’s Chas Smash aka Cathal Smyth was working for Go! in A&R, and he effectively signed himself to the label). Madness actually asked Billy to play one of August’s two all-dayers after Morrissey had pulled out – his onstage dalliance with the Union Jack had not gone down too well with the indie kids, and his gold lame shirt had upset the fat skinheads. Billy was unable to step in at the last minute, on doctor’s orders.
Having also helped sign Paul Weller to the label, Juliet finally left Go! Discs in September to pursue a solo career in film and video production.
After a spell of playing Florence Nightingale and wounded soldier, she and Billy began to spend more time together: although they’d known each other for nine years, they’d never been in a position where they could really talk – in fact, they realised that they’d never really been alone together in all that time. Billy was concerned that Jamie, now four years old, had grown up without his godfather really knowing him. There was catching up to do, and Billy became very attentive in that department.
Not really up to anything too strenuous, Billy discovered the perfect day out. By 1992, the crop circle phenomenon had really taken off. It was estimated that over 2,000 of these mystifying alien wheat-etchings had been discovered at that stage, and experts were still divided as to their origin (scientists claimed wind vortices, psychics looked to the significance of the ancient sites where the circles cropped up, ufologists watched the skies, hoaxers said ‘It was us!’ and farmers just got cross). Billy, a self-taught student of ancient history and a lover of the English countryside since Auntie Pat’s farm, wanted to have a gander, and August’s unscheduled lay-off gave him ample opportunity.
Having been up Silbury Hill near Avebury, along with many other circle-watchers, where he’d seen an amazing half dozen crop formations, Billy talked Juliet into regular drives up the M4 to seek them out. It got him out of the house, and out of town, filled his lungs with fresh air, recharged his battered batteries and gave him the chance to talk to Juliet for the first time. ‘We’d always had a good rapport,’ she says. ‘But we started talking in a way we never really had before – about life stuff rather than work stuff.’
First, some work stuff. Summer 1992 saw Billy’s final break with Go! Discs, which was an inevitability, but it still took a masterful display of wheeling and dealing to tie up. Billy says his Don’t Try This At Home deal was ‘bleeding the company dry’. Miraculously, minus recording costs, he still had the remainder of the £250,000 in a savings account (‘I hate spending money’). Billy could see that the next instalment of his £1 million advance would be crippling for Go! Discs – and the threat of laying off staff was unacceptable – so he came up with a cunning plan that would see everybody all right, including himself. He paid back the rest of the first advance, and regained ownership of his back catalogue in return. Result: Go! Discs were in pocket; Billy was a free man who now owned the entire Bragg canon. In order not to put the company in a tailspin, Billy agreed not to tell anyone he’d left (he didn’t plan on making an album for a while, so had no need to make any announcements).
One final, post-modern wheeze: Billy went into Go! Discs for an ‘un-signing session’, and asked Juliet to take a photograph of him handing over a cheque for £100,000. They’d tried, they’d done their best, it hadn’t worked, Billy had been right.
Andy Macdonald, if the truth were told, was relieved. He was free of a distortedly expensive contract, and conceded that Go! Discs had taken Billy Bragg to the perimeter fence of commercial possibility. Go! had changed, the offices had changed, the staff had changed, and, most importantly, Macdonald himself had changed: his role model had apparently evolved from Stiff boss Dave Robinson (cheap, cheerful) to Island’s Chris Blackwell (cool, glamorous) to Richard Branson (rich, powerful). Or that’s how Billy saw it. Although Go! were in fact having a very tough year.
Back to the life stuff. Billy and Juliet’s friendship blossomed, bloomed and busted out all over. Because they’d known each other for so long, the lurve curve was gradual and organically grown. ‘When we realised we had the basis of a relationship, rather than just friendship, it was a shock to us,’ says Billy. It took the pair of them a long time to admit it to themselves, a longer time to admit it to each other, and the longest time of all to admit it to the rest of the world. But neither of them had any intention of going into this with their eyes closed.
‘We also thought, “Why bring this grief to Jamie if it’s just a fling? Why put him through it?”’
The um-ming and ah-ing went on for a long time. Juliet in particular was concerned about what people would think – even though there had been no cross-over with her marriage, it was still a ‘good story’ (record company director steps out with pop star). In October, they finally felt ready to go public, and the first person they told was Andy Macdonald, for Jamie’s benefit, and also to stem any salacious rumours getting back to him. ‘I’m sure a lot of our friends thought, “Aaahh, how long have they been playing this?”’ says Billy, ‘But it was because Juliet was divorced and because I was off Go! Discs and out of my career that we found ourselves sitting around, socially, in the same space with nothing to do and no one to see. We saw each other for company.’
‘It wasn’t quite as sad as that,’ Juliet adds.
After months
of administrative foreplay, and what they both admit was a period of straightforward denial, Billy and Juliet tested out just how ‘Billy and Juliet’ sounded. At the back end of 1992, with Billy back on his feet but still taking it easy (Career plan? What career plan?), they came out. In other words, they went out – to the cinema, to gigs, up the football – as A Couple. They gradually let the important people know, and the fallout was minimal. Porky remembers the night Billy and Juliet ventured out to The Comedy Store in London’s busy West End where he was doing a stand-up gig. He still has a photograph of them in the bar afterwards ‘looking a bit guilty’. They broke the news to him, and like a good mate he acted surprised (he already knew). Unsurprisingly, Porky was delighted for the two of them – after all, what’s not to be delighted about? ‘Very often in life,’ says Porky, ‘two people are brought together to form a loving relationship when they’ve been in the presence of a disaster.’ He pauses, and adds, ‘I’m not saying Andy Macdonald is that disaster.’
On 5 December 1992, a gloomy announcement went out to the trade papers and the music press: due to ‘the continuing recession’, the workforce at Go! Discs was to be cut by 25 per cent. In shop floor terms, this meant that the staff of twenty would be streamlined to fifteen, the first time in the company’s nine-year history that they looked to be slipping down the table. Rumours abounded that PolyGram were moving in to take over, denied by Andy Macdonald as ‘idle industry gossip’.
The early 1990s were pretty lean for Britain, with the economy experiencing a cyclical bust after the 1980s boom. We were, as Billy had sung, living in a ‘North Sea Bubble’, ‘trying to spend our way out of trouble’. Job losses characterised the early Major Years, unemployment crept back up towards three million and Britain’s recession turned into the longest since the war. So Go! weren’t the only company in town forced to tighten their belts, but the entertainment industry traditionally thrives even in times of depression (look at music hall during the war), so it’s always a bad sign when record companies lay off staff.
The Conservatives had managed to defy the opinion polls and hobble back into office at the general election on 9 April – their ticket amounted to little more than a pledge not to raise income tax (this was, without doubt, a time of patting your wallet).
Although the Tories’ majority had shrivelled from 102 in 1987 to just 21 in 1992, it still spelt five more years of trouble, and Billy admits that the election result ‘knocked the stuffing’ out of him. Even America seemed to be softening, politically, with the election of their first Democrat president for twelve years – on saxophone, Mr Bill Clinton. But still Britain clung to Tory self-service and what had become the status quo.
In October, Billy had turned out for the miners once again, as 150,000 demonstrated outside Parliament against pit closures (John Peel and Joe Strummer were also there, and the new indie elite – by and large, worryingly apolitical – at least threw up support from Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and The Wonder Stuff). Billy spoke out: ‘The anger aroused by the government’s attempts to destroy the mining community shows the willingness of ordinary people from all walks of life to recognise injustice and take a stand against it remains undimmed.’ You’ve got to take your rays of hope wherever you can get them.
The Hackney Empire got its annual dose of Bragg at New Year. It was a chance for him to reunite with the unemployed Red Stars and ‘give them a bit of Christmas money, having pulled the rug out from under them’. In Caroline Sullivan’s review in the Guardian she noted, rather cruelly, that his ‘annual Empire residency is the perfect place to divest yourself of any lingering Christmas cheer. There can’t be many less festive sights than that of Bill, miners’ collection bucket in hand, orating about the events of April 9.’
But even the Queen was miserable in 1992, the year she called her ‘annus horribilis’. Sarajevo ablaze, Michael Heseltine closing down mines, floods in Pakistan, hole in the ozone layer, civil war in Somalia, General Motors and Ford announcing their first losses in over 80 years, and Canary Wharf, tallest building in Europe and symbol of Mrs Thatcher’s Docklands, standing nearly bankrupt and half-empty.
As 1992 faded away, Billy bid goodbye to what had been his ‘annus appendicitis’. In January 1993, although five years away from becoming a Labour anthem, D:Ream released ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.
In April, as if to prove the song right, Juliet got pregnant. They’d timed it impeccably. No tour on the horizon; no duff album to make in order to fulfil some binding contract; a father who’d previously spent so little time at home it was a big commitment to buy a pot plant, suddenly sitting around with days, weeks, even months on his hands. This truly was turning into a unique chapter in Billy’s life – all the platitudes that usually come with birth but tied in with the sort of solid-bond relationship that neither he nor Juliet had expected or had been actively looking for. And no gig in Bochum.
Juliet made a deal with Billy: she’d do the hard part if he agreed to do three things in return during the next nine months:
Learn to drive
Learn to type
Learn to cook
Although the third ‘might as well have been tightrope walking’ as far as Billy was concerned, he agreed. At 35, after ten years on the road, it was high time he joined the motoring classes (whether it was Katy, Tiny, Brenda, his mum or Juliet, he’d been reliant on women with cars all his life). Subjecting the good people of West London to the hazard that is a great big BMW (Juliet’s) with L-plates, Billy put the hours in, and duly passed his test in Isleworth on 6 September at 8.45 a.m. His driving examiner had passed pop rapper Betty Boo a week earlier. Confident that Billy’s steely determination would see him through, Juliet had already had a cake made with a confectionery effigy of Billy on top beside an old jalopy and a baby’s cot, with nappies everywhere. The L-plates were on the cot.
Juliet bought him a word processor, and Billy was soon Grade A at the two-fingers-quite-fast technique, essential now that he was being asked to do so much writing for publications like New Routes, the New Statesman and New Socialist.
Cooking was less successful. Following the scriptures of Delia religiously, Billy mastered the quiche. Sadly, it would take him all day to make, while Juliet could rustle something Mediterranean up in minutes. A registered meat-and-two-veg man, Billy was never going to be able to do Sunday lunch unless he started on Thursday night. Still, two out of three ain’t bad. ‘I didn’t want to feel I was just sitting around waiting for Jack to be born,’ Billy claims, ‘I was doing stuff.’
Radio 4 invited him to make three programmes about anything he wanted: he did one on the history of Barking, one on the mystic power of Avebury, and one on the cultural role of the British Museum, further exploring his potential fallback trade, broadcasting, and exploiting his keen interest in history. Juliet summarises: ‘He wallowed in being an anorak.’
He appeared on Newsnight. He presented an edition of BBC’s One Foot In The Past on the Cerne Abbas Giant: a giant chalk figure carved into a Dorset hillside with a prominent erection (it was while on location for this film that Billy became intoxicated with the area, and it eventually led him and Juliet to buying a bungalow called Sea Change, on the coast). There was also Billy’s first ever commissioned soundtrack work, for a TV film Safe by Antonia Bird (who went on to direct Priest and Face), and the odd gig.
The inaugural Phoenix Festival, held on an airstrip at Long Marston near Stratford-upon-Avon, saw the last ever performance by the Red Stars, in a tent sponsored by Durex. By now, Juliet was visibly with child, which raised a smile. ‘Don’t bring Juliet out,’ joked Billy. ‘We’ll lose the sponsorship!’
In December, the specialist indie radio station XFM enjoyed a limited, one-week trial in London (it would take them another three years finally to land a licence), and Billy hosted his own show for four nights. It would have been five, but the last was on Christmas Eve, and the baby’s due date was 25 December.
Billy and Juliet had a quiet Christma
s Day at her house, waiting for the three wise men to turn up. Jamie was staying with his dad just in case they had to dash off to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in the middle of the night. It was the first TV showing of the film Ghost, and Juliet was determined to see it to the end before the baby came. They ate Christmas dinner in stages, so as not to waste any, but the day passed without antenatal incident.
Juliet’s waters finally broke early on Boxing Day morning. Billy was concerned, because one of his mum’s other grandchildren was born on 26 December, and if his was, it would leave her in an eternal quandary over whose house to go to on their birthdays. He didn’t trouble Juliet with this niggle at the time.
Jack, as he would be christened, was eventually born 33 minutes after midnight on 27 December. Phew. (Incidentally, he was christened at home by CND boss Monsignor Bruce Kent, as Jamie had been.) Billy was present at the birth. ‘I would recommend it to anyone,’ he says, defining the father’s job as chiefly one of communication. ‘It’s about listening to what the midwife is saying and what the mother is saying and translating. I likened my role in the previous nine months to Juliet swimming the Channel with me in the rowing boat saying, “Go on, girl!” Men are used to being the one who gets in there and sorts a problem out, but you can’t do anything in those nine months except make cups of tea.
‘At the birth, you finally get to take part!’
Billy was a dad. And in a very real sense Jack woke up his neighbourhood.
Billy and Juliet had been up all night, moving the goal posts. From this day forward, everything changes.
Billy Bragg Page 30