Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Family becomes Billy, and not just the writer of love songs, but the political animal too. The ideologies he holds dear can all be boiled down to compassion, and what better manifestation of community than the family? As Billy states, ‘Family is a microcosm of the community, the community is a microcosm of the state.’ The Conservative government spoke of family values and back to basics, while the effects of their policies undermined communities from one end of the country to another: unemployment, benefit cuts, poll tax, pit closures, union bashing, the North–South divide and shop-a-sneak benefit fraud phonelines. ‘Family’ need not mean stifling Victorian values or sexual inequality, it can be a simple support system extended out of the house and into the street. That’s where Billy’s compassionate, humanist politics come alive: looking after your own without ignoring everyone else. Socialism begins at home.

  Billy’s own memories of childhood are precious to him – all the more so for his father’s presence – and having Jack around has made life priceless since 1993. After a lifetime of relations with girls from many nations, Billy had come home – to Jack, Juliet and Jamie.

  That other important J, namely Peter Jenner, was happy for Billy, but nonetheless feeling a little insecure about his role in the new set-up. ‘I think Billy toyed with firing me,’ he says, at the time busy managing Robyn Hitchcock and Gallon Drunk. ‘I was quite expecting to be fired, and quite happy about the notion of it. It was perfectly natural. I’d done my bit. I couldn’t do any more. Billy felt that I didn’t respect his judgement and that I was always bullying him, and never listened to what he had to say. I said when he started – Give me five years. And it wasn’t until we got to nine years that he screamed, “Halt!”’

  Jenner assumed that Billy would want Juliet to manage him, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne style, but, according to Billy, ‘that was never on the cards. Pete’s too plugged into my life as a friend. I obviously didn’t make it clear to him that the last thing Juliet and I wanted to do was work together.’

  In fact, Billy and Jenner’s professional relationship would be strengthened by the enforced break: Billy reclaimed his life; Jenner realised that it was time to ease off the work rate.

  ‘Something had to change,’ reasons Tiny. ‘It was important that Billy became a bit more of his own man, and did things the way he wanted to, with less Pete influence on it. His appendix gave him room to change the rules.’

  In fact, the appendix break and the pregnant pause gave everyone around Billy occasion to reflect.

  ‘I’m more open now,’ Jenner says. ‘I’m easier about Billy saying no. Over the last couple of years we’ve built our relationship up. I give him more space. I always used to assume that I could get him to do anything. Now I don’t assume. Once he says he’ll do it, he’ll always do it. But equally, if he says he won’t do it, it’s really hard to get him to change his mind. The art is to try and prevent him saying no! We won’t ask him until the right moment.

  ‘He was too easy to manage for a long time: he would do anything. The only big crisis we’d had in our relationship was this feeling that I would send him anywhere. He didn’t know how to shut me up and tell me no – because I’m a lot older, because he relates to me as his dad. I’ve been doing everything for ever and I’ve got a loud mouth and I can talk for an hour and a half about anything. It got too much.’

  ‘My entire life did a loop-the-loop in that period,’ says Billy, ‘I’m surprised so many people still talk to me.’

  Wiggy and Billy temporarily drifted apart after the demise of the Red Stars, the sudden evolution of two good friends into A Couple, and the birth of Jack. The tour had put undue strain on Billy and Wiggy’s friendship – after years of playing employee – employer (in both directions), the Red Stars finally put them on a more even keel, and then, without warning, it was all over.

  ‘Wiggy felt that the Red Stars was his band,’ says Billy. ‘And it was to an extent. But he was outside the focus of it all. He was just enjoying himself. He put up with the stupid hours and the stupid places we went to, but the bottom line was he just wanted to play, and he lived for that, he didn’t care where it was, he just loved it.’

  Fun, fun, fun, till Braggy took his tour pass away.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time that Wiggy had been in this situation,’ says Billy in his own defence. ‘I’d done the same thing to him when I skipped off to France and when I joined the Army. But it is unfortunate that we fell out over it.’

  Wiggy examined his lifelong friendship with Billy and realised that they were not actually as close as they seemed, and the financial returns didn’t make up for all the years: ‘It’s a strange relationship. He’s always been there, we know each other inside out, but he’s much more like family than a mate you go round the pub with. When we’ve got something to do, and we’ve got a mission, we do it really well. We’re both professional about it, we get on with it, without whinging. On the road, we didn’t tend to be in each other’s pockets. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a pub with him and had a pint.’

  In the fallout period of 1994 and 1995, when Billy rebuilt his life, Wiggy claims they ‘got as far apart as we ever have been. It was a bit annoying really. There was a lot of water under the bridge, none of which we ever sat down and dealt with.’

  Wiggy eventually wrote Billy what he classes a ‘horrible letter’. Billy wrote back, saying why he thought Wiggy was wrong to feel the way he did. It helped clear the air. Billy said to himself, ‘I can’t keep doing what I do for the sake of Pete Jenner or Wiggy. I have to ask myself, What’s happening in my life?’

  It wasn’t a very jolly episode but ultimately it brought Billy and Wiggy closer together and forced them to address the prickly issue of money between pals. It taught Wiggy that his lifelong friend was ‘good at speaking his mind about issues, but not about how he feels. As far as I’m concerned he’s very bad at that. He’s not very forthcoming on that front – he channels it into his writing.

  ‘Billy’s an entertainer. He’s quite often the centre of attention. Put him in a room and he’ll do the gig. But he’s very difficult to get close to deep down.’

  At the end of 1993, Billy’s quietest year, Jenner struck a licensing deal with Cooking Vinyl, a small but respected folk-tinged indie label who’d released Michelle Shocked’s records in the UK and boasted such Bragg favourites as June Tabor and the Oyster Band. Ownership of copyright still rested with Billy, but it meant that his back catalogue could be repackaged and remarketed (repackaged in the sense of a Cooking Vinyl logo where the Go! Discs logo used to be).

  It was a smart deal for Billy, in that his records were in what he and Jenner knew to be sympathetic hands, and it was rewarding for Cooking Vinyl as they gained a prestige artist. ‘It helped put Cooking Vinyl on the map,’ says Jenner. ‘And Billy likes that folky tradition they’re involved in. There aren’t very many good indies left. He would’ve felt uneasy being on a relentlessly trendy label. He’s not relentlessly trendy, he never has been.’

  In December, to mint the new relationship, the whole Bragg catalogue (except The Internationale) was reissued on CD, and sent out to the press for review. Or, more to the point, revaluation.

  While at one end of the critical spectrum, Mojo, the newly launched beard-stroking music monthly, gave Billy’s ten-year career a reasoned hearing (a sympathetic Richard Lowe concluded, ‘He’s part of the furniture, an occasional table in the back parlour that comes in ever so handy every now and then’), over at the inkies, it seemed as if his time was up.

  In Melody Maker, a self-styled new-breed upstart Taylor Parkes tore into not just the records, but the man: ‘The clutter of the unspectacular rings these records like an electric fence, nothing passing in either direction, a tiny, sealed cell full of weak tea and jumpers, a lone voice drifting out like a factory hooter.’ The NME’s Paul Moody called Billy ‘a relic of somehow less exciting times. A pre-boom post-style magazine era when a singer with a horrible woolly shirt and a crap haircut was practi
cally revolutionary … Undecided to the end, these albums serve as further proof that we’ll only really love Billy Bragg once he stops wringing his hands and lets us know what he really wants.’

  Although fleetingly hurtful to Billy – this was a life’s work, after all – these reviews did not keep him awake at nights (Jack was doing that), they merely signalled the end of another relationship. In his ten years of playing, the staff at the music weeklies had changed thrice over. The angry early-80s punk writers had been replaced by optimistic late-80s acid house writers and again by early-90s cynics. Somewhere along the line, Billy Bragg had become a symbol of the Old Days, someone your big brother used to like (the one who now gets Q and Mojo or doesn’t buy a music magazine at all).

  It was clear to him that his constituency had moved on, and so must he. There’s nothing more embarrassing than your dad on the dancefloor at a wedding.

  All remained quiet in 1994. Billy refers to it as his ‘wilderness period’, but in fact he never stopped gathering words and ideas. This was a key stretch for him as a songwriter, just like starting over. ‘What do songs written by Billy Bragg, someone’s dad, sound like?’ he asked himself. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t written any.’

  It took a while to formulate entire songs. The first one he completed that would make it on to his next album was ‘King James Version’, with the telling first line, ‘He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in’, and the mini-manifesto, ‘Compassion has to be the greatest family value’. It was an admirable start. ‘Rather than not writing, I just wasn’t finishing songs,’ Billy explains. ‘I was making a lot of notes. But I was wallowing in parenthood, and not being afraid of it taking up all my free time. Little by little, you get it back, and you’re so happy to get it back, you utilise it better. That’s the effect it had on me.’

  In June, Billy enjoyed a completely unexpected comeback, as, it seems, did politics in pop. The Anti-Nazi League had returned, and this time they were really pissed off. The Anti-Nazi League Carnival, backed as before by the SWP, was a show of unity against a new tide of fascism in Britain (in the Isle of Dogs, Derek Beackon of the British National Party had become the country’s first fascist councillor in November 1992, leading to a resurgence of interest in the ANL). On the day, 130,000 turned out for a gig at Brockwell Park in Brixton – site of many a musical protest in the 70s and 80s – fiercely supported by the NME, who seemed to have found their political feet after five years of dancing or gazing at them. For the over-30s, it was just like the old days, for the NME’s younger readers, it must have seemed like a revolution.

  The NME organised a float to make the journey from Kennington to Brixton, and invited Billy to play on it. He was flattered, and leapt at the chance. ANL? SWP? NME? It was like coming home. He was joined on the truck by S*M*A*S*H, a young punk group of questionable ability but inarguable appeal from Welwyn Garden City. If this was Old meeting New, then Old certainly had all the songs and the stagecraft, even if New had all the front covers: either way, it was a shot in the arm for Billy (both the politicised zeal of the new kids on the block, and the renewed relevance of his own position).

  The NME’s on-the-spot reporter for the day was Stuart Bailie, a man old enough to have a bit of perspective: ‘You suddenly realise that in your mind, you always had Billy down as a kid – the upstart who pulled brazen strokes through the 80s, who made folk music and protest funny and accessible. Now you watch him and you notice that his hair has turned fag-ash grey, that he’s a doting father, and that he’s viewed as a senior figure in today’s celebrations.’

  The Manic Street Preachers and the Levellers also turned out for the ANL, and the sun reflected off a thousand bright yellow placards and stickers proclaiming ‘Shut down the BNP’ and ‘Stop racist attacks’. Billy injected some humour into what might, in more naive hands, have been a rather po-faced day, singing ‘Just because you’re gay, Mr Policeman, I won’t turn you away’ at the edgy constabulary, and announcing, ‘I’ve always wanted to be the carnival queen’. The NME coverage majored on S*M*A*S*H, awestruck political toddlers to a man, but it would, wouldn’t it? Billy wasn’t complaining. He’d done his bit, just when he was thinking his bit was no longer wanted on pop’s voyage.

  Come Glastonbury, June 1995, Billy was ready to take on the world, with almost a new album’s worth of songs, and a son old enough to take to his first rock festival. It was a modest, mid-afternoon slot in the acoustic tent, but he was still nervous. He’d planned to give the Glasto crowd a gentle set on his 335 semi-acoustic, including a rewrite of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ with British place names, tailored to fit the growing road protest movement. Much to Billy’s surprise, prior to going on stage, the crowd were chanting ‘Bill-ee! Bill-ee!’ In the pre-gig confusion, his guitar fell forward off its stand and the neck snapped off. He would have to use the more conventional Burns electric. Tiny handed him a cup of festival tea that she’d accidentally put salt in, and a mixture of discomfort and despair took hold of Billy as he walked through the curtain to the baying audience: ‘I was wound up. The audience were wound up. They went spare, and so I hit the ground running and did a full-on Bragg punk set. It went down a storm.’

  The tent was so packed, Juliet and Jack couldn’t get in to see Daddy play. A reassuring return.

  In July, he chanced a short US flit, but not headlining. He and Cara Tivey opened for Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, a quirky bunch of busker types who’d played at Billy’s last Hackney Empire. He tried out the new songs on the Americans and they went down well. In November, he was back in the States, ‘playing places where I’ve always been traditionally strong’, in other words the big college towns. While he was out there, he recorded some new instrumentals for a forthcoming independent film, Walking And Talking, a romantic comedy starring Anne Heche (five old Bragg songs would also appear on the soundtrack).

  Back in London, and it was into Cathouse Studio in South London with Grant Showbiz to start work on the really difficult seventh album, William Bloke. Looking back on it, Billy concludes that ‘1995 was the first year of me trying to build it back up in a way that was more conducive to my new lifestyle.’

  To preview a line from that album’s opening track, ‘From Red To Blue’:

  We must all bend a little if we are not to break.

  14. NEW BILLY

  Back in office, 1996–1997

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour

  William Blake, Auguries Of Innocence, c. 1803

  The only thing they hate more than each other is the Tories

  Proposed Labour Party poster featuring

  Oasis and Blur, 1996

  IF BILLY’S LIFE took a new course in 1994, so did that of Britain’s Shadow Secretary of State for Home Affairs Tony Blair, but not as the result of a birth.

  On 13 May 1994, of all papers, the Sun wrote, ‘Britain’s next Prime Minister died yesterday.’ The obituary was for Labour leader John Smith, who’d had a sudden heart attack at his flat in the Barbican. While a tragedy that blurred party-political divides across Britain, the death of Smith paved the way for Tony Blair to lead the Labour Party to a landslide victory in May 1997.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that without Blair at the helm, the rebranded New Labour would never have got in. This, however, is to undermine John Smith’s steady hand. A natural successor to Kinnock, and no less a believer in the modernisation of the Party, Smith is described by Andy McSmith in Faces Of Labour as ‘not only a decent man but a potential Prime Minister’. It is fanciful to speculate whether or not Smith could have translated decency into electability; certainly Blair’s conspicuously youthful dynamism was a big factor in Labour’s turnaround in the public’s confidence.

  By 1996, Blair had overseen the removal of Clause IV from Labour’s constitution (a thorn in party reform’s side, it basically p
ledged to nationalise everything), which was symbolic of his eagerness to please, and alienated many an Old Labourite. Arthur Scargill quit the Party and set up his own, The Socialist Labour Party, which stood 63 candidates in the 1997 election (none of whom got in). Scargill remains a very public critic of New Labour: ‘[Blair’s] ditched all commitment to socialism. In many ways he’s like Clinton, and he’s turning the Labour Party into a corporate organisation.’

  In return for a few Old Labour defections, the party doubled its membership between 1994 and 1996 to 400,000. On stage at the Brit Awards in January 1996, Noel Gallagher proclaimed, ‘There’s only seven people doing anything for young people in this country: the five members of Oasis, Alan McGee and Tony Blair.’ Any more solid-gold support like that, and Labour’s spin doctors would be out of business.

  Billy let his Labour Party membership lapse a lot earlier than Scargill did. In 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, he became disillusioned with Kinnock’s refusal to oppose military action, and that was that. (‘I was so disappointed that Labour weren’t able to come up with a different analysis of the Gulf that condemned the war but supported our troops. They were so scared to say anything other than the government line – which was the American line.’) He still votes Labour, and has little time for breakaway parties, but it’s interesting to see how far apart the man and the party had drifted by the time of their rise to credibility.

  Asked if he’s disappointed by Billy’s lapsed membership, Neil Kinnock is very clear: ‘I’ve spent most of my life recruiting people to the Labour Party, so, unless people have broken the rules of the party, I always regret any departures. No matter what the political circumstances, I’ve always believed that ideals must be organised if they are to have any real effect in a democracy, and I hope Billy will reflect further on that since I know that he understands it.’

  In the autumn of 1996, the Labour Party magazine New Labour New Britain emblazoned the face of Noel Gallagher across its cover, officially fanfaring Blair’s courtship with Britpop. It would all end in tears, but for the time being, in the run-up to the 1997 election, rock musicians were back on Labour’s top table. Billy Bragg was not among them – a New Deal that suited both parties.