Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Kinnock had disappeared to Brussels, but Billy had been much more visible in 1996. By circumstance rather than design, he was New Billy. Whichever clause it was in the Bragg constitution that said he must play ‘the day off after Plymouth’ had been scrapped. This was a leaner, fitter, more focused troubadour, free of some of the outdated baggage that characterised Old Billy (an anachronistic beast more suited to the struggle of the 1980s). New Billy had a new family and new responsibilities, and was led by realism not ideology. The change had done him untold good.

  ‘I think I would’ve had to have that time off anyway, with or without Juliet and Jack,’ Billy concludes. ‘It was coming. People have that in their careers – they work ten years and run out of steam, or run out of ideas, or get bored or get stale or take drugs or fall off a motorbike. Everybody does it, it’s just whether you can use it in a positive way.’

  After intensive recording from February through April, Billy played a clutch of gigs intended to test the water of his old electorate. On May Day, he ventured out to Clapham Common to play at a festival organised by the unions. ‘This was a London audience, not a Glastonbury audience,’ he says, and the difference is not hard to surmise (London: hardened, seen-it-all-before; Glastonbury: whacked out of their gourds on scrumpy and blowbacks). There were a number of tents set up, and a smorgasbord of entertainment laid on, so Billy was understandably nervous once again. Before his slot, the tent was practically empty (every performer’s cold-sweat nightmare). Then, out of nowhere, thousands poured in through the flaps. They were soon spilling out on to the common, just like Glastonbury.

  Billy had been away, but the fans were still here. He played key new songs like ‘Upfield’ and ‘From Red To Blue’ with conviction, defining his new outlook on the world (‘Upfield’ contains the soundbite ‘socialism of the heart’, and ‘Red To Blue’ looks at the changing political landscape and bravely asks, ‘Should I vote red for my class or green for our children?’). ‘There was an electric atmosphere right to the back,’ says Juliet. ‘No one was talking, which is always a good sign. And they must’ve shouted out for “The Saturday Boy” fifty times.’

  Next, although less revealing in exit-poll terms, Billy agreed to ‘fill’ for half an hour at the Roskilde festival. But this was no ordinary half an hour. At midnight, after a set by Björk, the organisers had a necessary, scene-changing interval before that summer’s number one draw, a re-formed Sex Pistols. ‘I got the call,’ says Billy, who found the chance to support the Pistols irresistible, regardless of any ideological controversy surrounding their money-motivated reunion. A teacher from Jamie’s primary school asked Billy if he’d get her the Pistols’ autographs, so, armed with a T-shirt, he sought them out backstage and paid his respects (‘It had to be done’). Predictably, they drew ladies’ breasts and a rudimentary penis on the T-shirt. Once a bunch of foul-mouthed yobs, always a bunch of foul-mouthed yobs (if the money’s right).

  Mindful of his own extended absence from the crazy world of pop, Billy went for the traditional single-and-video gambit as a taster for the forthcoming album. ‘Upfield’, a suitably upbeat, brassy hello, was unleashed in August, Billy’s first new release for Cooking Vinyl. The video was summery and relaxed, and the fanfare provided by old pal Dave Woodhead on trumpet and Terry Edwards on sax seemed a fitting wake-up call. ‘Upfield’ got to Number 46.

  After Glastonbury and Clapham Common came the crucial third stage in Billy’s confidence-building live experiment: the Reading Festival, a former piss-bottle rock weekender transformed into a cosy (and lucrative) indie T-shirt parade by London–Irish promoter Vince Power. ‘Not a Billy Bragg festival,’ notes Billy. ‘And not a Billy Bragg audience. I thought, “This’ll be a test. It’s not easy, let’s do it and see if we can get a reaction.”’

  It was raining, and the crowds disappeared to the safety of the other tents for ethnic food while Billy was setting up, leaving a result wide open. ‘There was just a knot of people at the front of the stage. I walked out there, and I knew I had a job on my hands: does anybody give a shit about Billy Bragg any more? I was gonna find out.’

  Sure enough, after three or four songs, the crowd had filled out again, right back to the mixing desk (a crucial plimsoll line), and Billy was treated as a minor homecoming hero, even by this conspicuously young mob. After four years away, the enthusiastic response at Reading allayed Billy’s worst fears for good.

  ‘Those three gigs gave me a lot of confidence,’ he says, all too aware that a warm hand on his entrance was no foregone conclusion. ‘I’d become unfashionable. Politics wasn’t even fashionable. Weller had started to recant. Nobody really wanted to know. And also a generation had turned.’

  But they hadn’t turned away. On 9 September, William Bloke was released – for no more than £9.99. As Billy sees it, the album said, ‘I’m still here. I hope you’re still interested in what I’m doing.’ He played a gig on the eve of release at London’s most famous train shed The Roundhouse. He was still nervous, and remembers going for a solitary post-soundcheck walk along the canal up to Primrose Hill where he got his head together. The gig went well, the punters comprised a heartwarmingly wide age range (defusing fears that Billy might not connect with a new generation) and the William Bloke songs sounded tip-top.

  After the stylistic cul-de-sac that was Don’t Try This At Home, Billy surrendered himself to whatever came naturally on William Bloke, which is why Jack and Juliet are all over it, and why the music really had gone back to basics.

  It had been a very gradual, unforced process. He’d put down the very first, tentative demos back in November with Grant Showbiz, and remembers sitting up late the night before he first went into the studio, with snatches of lyrics spread out on the coffee table and the makings of five tunes in his head. ‘King James Version’, the difficult first song, came out of that apparent chaos, as did ‘Brickbat’ – his first song to Juliet, whose lyric contains rare Bragg usage of the phrase ‘I love you’. (Billy has constantly shied away from the three little words, always preferring three little euphemisms. This way, he’s managed to keep ‘I love you’ sacred. Saving it for a sunny day, in effect.)

  He didn’t play ‘Brickbat’ to its intended that night, he simply went in and recorded it the next day: ‘When it came back out of the speakers it really moved me. I realised I can write songs about this situation I find myself in, I can write songs that are just as powerful as ones I’ve written about other stages in my life. There was a sense of relief and wonder.

  ‘Me and Juliet have made something really great in our relationship out of something really ordinary: two people being together. It’s really hard to say that in a song.’

  ‘The Fourteenth Of February’, another no-holds-barred ‘Juliet’ composition, came about as a tune while Billy was playing his guitar for Jack at bathtime, something he did often (Jack liked the hand movements). A brand new songwriting system had emerged.

  William Bloke’s politics were trickier to assimilate. Billy’s head was in an indistinct place at that time, still dedicated to the notion of international socialism but slightly deflated on the home front (‘If we can’t beat ’em without Thatcher what can we do?’). Not only that, his pet subjects of old were literally disappearing around him: no Berlin Wall, no Cold War, no Thatcher, no Apartheid, no Soviet Union, no Reagan, even Nicaragua had calmed down since the elections. The direct result of all this was the central thrust of ‘Upfield’ – positive, determined, direct:

  The angels asked me how I felt about all I’d seen and heard

  That they spoke to me, a pagan, gave me cause to doubt their word

  But they laughed and said,

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’ll help us in our art

  You’ve got a socialism of the heart’

  He’d written ‘Upfield’ in September while driving himself down the M4 to a miners’ benefit in Rhondda. He had to park at a service station to write the lyrics down, and later sang it all the way home again.

>   The lyrics throughout William Bloke betray a new spirituality in Billy. Mention of angels, souls and the symbolic horizon of a new morning are straight out of William Blake, the eighteenth-century English poet and engraver who lent the album its title and so much more. William Bloke – arguably Billy himself – is ‘the archetypal Londoner. A spiritual person who goes to football. Someone who can appreciate the beauty of the sunset, or stand on the brow of a hill and be moved by the shadows of the clouds as they roll across the countryside.’

  The ‘tree full of angels’ in ‘Upfield’ is an image taken from a story about Blake’s childhood: as a boy, he claimed he’d had this angelic vision, but when he told his parents they smacked him for telling lies.

  Parenthood had definitely unlocked a new emotion in Billy – as an artist he was stimulated by the unconditional, irrepressible feelings he had for Jack. The album begins with ‘From Red To Blue’ in order to make an opening statement about Billy’s political state of mind before the show goes on: ‘There’s your politics, that’s where I’m at. I’m older now. I accept things have changed. I accept that we all make compromises and get on with our lives, if you don’t bend you’re going to break, all those things. I’ll still carry on. The world’s changed, but the struggle continues.’

  One line, from ‘Brickbat’, came to sum up New Billy, especially with critics looking for a handle: ‘I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms/But now you’ll find me with the baby, in the bathroom.’ Billy is keen to point out that this line does not connote surrender, merely rearmament at a different armoury.

  Musically, William Bloke is a continuation of Workers Playtime, not Don’t Try This At Home (which is now viewed by Billy as an anomaly, if a rigorous, thoroughly realised one). It is sparing, considered, and in the case of ‘From Red To Blue’, ‘A Pict Song’ and ‘Northern Industrial Town’, positively nostalgic.

  Of all the old running mates involved in the recording – Grant Showbiz, Cara Tivey, Dave Woodhead, Nigel Frydman, even Fionn O’Lochlainn – one is conspicuous by his absence: Wiggy. He wasn’t asked.

  Wiggy was obviously hurt to be excluded, but, having made it up with Billy since, he is stoic about it today: ‘It was probably good for him to do something without me around in any shape or form. It was a bit confusing for me. Pissed off is not the right phrase, but I definitely felt left out. It didn’t help our relationship at the time.’

  Billy invited Wiggy to be in the ‘Upfield’ video, but it felt to him a bit like crumbs off the tea-table. Porky, who had become much closer to Wiggy during Billy’s fatherly exile, thought it a curious gesture so deliberately to shut him out of the party until most of the balloons had burst, but Billy explains that it was a clear signal to Wiggy that there was no full-time job for him at Camp Bragg any more (no more Red Stars, no more huge tours, slower pace of work). Wiggy had to break out on his own, and, by the time of the ‘Upfield’ video, he had (he’d set up his own studio and his own band, Click). It was not an easy break for either of them, but there was kindness in the apparent cruelty.

  As a record, Pete Jenner believed that William Bloke was ‘short of a toe-tapper’, possibly the song Billy had been working on with Johnny Marr, ‘The Boy Done Good’ – but Billy was adamant he wasn’t going to put this on (at any rate, Marr was too busy making the second album with his side-group Electronic to finish the track in time). Jenner didn’t push the matter, which was good for both of them, and indicative of their new, improved, laissez faire relationship. ‘These are the songs this record’s about,’ Billy said to him. ‘This is the record I want out, end of discussion.’

  ‘It’s your record,’ said Jenner.

  William Bloke charted at sixteen with a respectable 10,000 copies sold in its first week. It went on to sell what was now the statutory 60,000 in the UK and roughly the same again abroad. The way the Billy Bragg business works, he can happily make his money back at this level of sale.

  ‘He makes good money,’ says Jenner. ‘He does very well on gigs. He doesn’t spend much on making his records. We more or less made the money back on William Bloke on UK sales alone. Every record sold is money in his pocket. We own everything. Cooking Vinyl make a reasonable amount of money, we pay all the costs and pay them a percentage.’

  The William Bloke tour was not as other Bragg tours. ‘More gaps’, is his succinct summary. It was paced so that he didn’t have to be away from home for weeks at a time. The tour ended in Ilford.

  Back at Billy’s alma mater, Go! Discs, all was not well. On 19 August, Andy Macdonald announced to the press that he was leaving. The company had finally been bought out by PolyGram after eighteen months of wrangling. Macdonald characterised the acquisition as ‘oppressive’. Of the label’s future, PolyGram’s UK chairman and former rock lawyer John Kennedy admitted, ‘It is unrealistic to think everything will be the same without Andy.’ Go! Discs was Gone! Discs.

  Billy and Jenner resisted saying ‘I told you so.’ Macdonald walked away a rich but unhappy man from the label he’d built up from nothing and promptly launched a new one, Independiente, taking some of the Go! staff with him, but none of the bands, who were divvied up among the PolyGram labels (even the Beautiful South – the only act with a ‘key man’ clause that entitled them to walk away from Go! Discs if Macdonald did – opted to stay).

  The trust fund Billy had set up with what used to be his five per cent share was now worth around a cool million pounds. When PolyGram bought out Go! Discs, around 30 employees – some of whom had left, such as Porky and Tiny – received a handsome windfall on top of their severance pay calculated on a sliding scale according to the number of years’ service. This came as a shock to many of them, who either had no knowledge of Billy’s deal or had simply forgotten about it (some of them had never even met Billy). Porky, who received £18,000, went public about the trust fund in Men’s Health magazine in December 1997, when various notables were asked to nominate their hero. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before,’ he wrote of the payout.

  A musician giving thousands of pounds to the employees of his record company? Nothing like that has happened before.

  After today, the Tories must not only rediscover the secret of what it takes to form a government; they must urgently find what it takes to survive as a functioning and truly national party at all.

  Peter Kellner, London Evening Standard, 2 May 1997

  Election Year: the very words filled Labour supporters with icy dread – or at least, they had done for eighteen years. But there was something in the air in 1997 – something in the Blair.

  It was a very different election from the last one for Billy, when his old tea-drinking partner Kinnock was still at the rudder. In 1992, he’d turned out to play for Clare Short in her Birmingham Ladywood constituency, and for Bruce Kent, who was standing in Oxford. ‘At least in 1992 I had my contacts within the party,’ Billy says. ‘Now they had a completely new leadership.’

  He would have to play this one from the outside if he was going to play it at all. And even though the opinion polls showed a Labour lead, Billy took Blair’s own advice and remained cautious. He feared that potential Labour voters might be antipathetic to Blair’s agenda (‘a progressive agenda, but not a socialist one’) or stay at home because they saw a Labour victory as a foregone conclusion – ‘and somehow the Tories would sneak in again, which would destroy the party. So I went out and played around some of the marginal Labour towns in April, some of them safe seats, some not, and basically wound people up. I wanted to steady the Bragg vote – those cynics who say, I really love your music, Bill, but I’m not voting for those bastards again.’

  In the approach to 1 May, aside from simply geeing people up to use their vote, Billy was also, in his own words, ‘banging away about compassion. I asked myself, What did I believe in before I believed in ideology in the early 80s? What was it that got me to the position where I could define myself as a socialist? It was my fundamental humanitaria
n ideals. And what are they based on? Compassion. If we have compassion, perhaps that’s the place to build the new left ideal, whatever that’s going to be.

  ‘I think socialism is an idea that’s in a state of flux, if not drained of all meaning. It’s a world-changing idea that’s been crushed mercilessly between capitalism and Stalinism, one side saying it’s this, the other side saying it’s that. It needs to be rebranded!’

  The irony of using one of Blair’s dreaded buzzwords is not lost on Billy. But you can’t be too careful – the smart BBC2 satire show Friday Night Armistice asked Billy to appear on their alternative election night special, singing a pro-Tory song. It was a reasonable gag, but he declined, and the Armistice lot became quite shirty with him. ‘That sort of thing comes back to haunt you,’ he says in his own defence.

  Tiny Fennimore – who was now Billy’s PA, full time, working from home after the birth of her son, Sam – took a lot of calls, pre-election, from broadsheets like The Times and the Telegraph angling for a Bragg soundbite and expecting him to rubbish the Labour Party. ‘They were very keen for him to be in Arthur Scargill’s party,’ she says, only too happy to disappoint the Tory press. ‘We often declined to comment – after all, we wanted Labour to win!’

  On the day, this was not to be a problem. On 1 May, Billy did an election night gig at the Mean Fiddler, Red Wedge heartland and site for so many supporters of that crushing defeat in ’87. This one couldn’t have been more different. As Billy says, ‘It has already gone down in the annals as one of the all-time great Billy Bragg gigs.’

  Wiggy was there, as were Jenner, Juliet, Tiny and Norma Waterson – in Billy’s eyes ‘possibly Britain’s finest female folk singer’ – on whose miniature television they watched the election in the dressing room. Before Billy went on, he remembers Juliet, Jenner and Norma in a huddle round the TV, posing the hypothetical: What would be the ultimate result on this night? They all agreed it would be Michael Portillo being ousted in Enfield – except Jenner, who plumped for Home Secretary Michael Howard. All fun and games at that stage, of course.