Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  As for the novelty angle, Billy never saw Mermaid Avenue as that much of a departure for him: ‘It’s not like I’m doing a Frank Sinatra album. And it’s not exactly Celine Dion Sings Woody Guthrie. On paper, those people who put me in a ghetto, will find it easy to continue to do so.’

  In January 1998, an article about Labour and the arts in the Sunday Times glibly referred to Billy as ‘the 1980s protest singer’. The Woody Guthrie project would finally earn him the epithet ‘1990s protest singer’.

  Just in time.

  16. THE BARD OF BURTON BRADSTOCK

  On the map, 1998–2002

  Q: How can you tell when a hard Leftie has sold out?

  A: They name a road after him.

  Sun, 26 August 1999

  Let other vo’k meake money vaster

  In the air o’ dark-room’d towns

  William Barnes, ‘My Orch’d In Linden Lea’

  JUST AS FILM historians may divide Steven Spielberg’s career into two distinct acts – pre-Schindler’s List and post-Schindler’s List – Billy’s now hits a similar pivot at Mermaid Avenue, June 1998. The fifteen career years up to that precise point can be classed as pre-Woody, and the years since as post-Woody. It’s that much of a watershed.

  With the finished product such a richly inventive three-way collaboration and so warmly received, it’s a shame that it was tainted by a touch of bad blood between Billy and Wilco.

  Relations had been fine in Dublin; it was when they returned to their respective cities of London and Chicago that, as Billy puts it, ‘communication broke down completely’. Wilco got home and decided they wanted to remix Billy’s songs as well as theirs. ‘That was when it started to get a bit “oh dear”. I lost my rag with them a bit, they lost their rag with me a bit, and a few rattles were thrown out of prams.’

  A compromise was reached: Wilco could remix Billy’s tracks, but, if he didn’t like them, they wouldn’t go on the album. He didn’t like them. They didn’t go on the album.

  Anyway, despite this slight crimp in relations, the final cut of Mermaid Avenue hangs together well. It had been a new experience for both parties, and it allowed them to bask together in the light of some amazing reviews.

  Billy had amassed good notices in America before, but not like these. Rolling Stone awarded Mermaid Avenue four stars, and übercritic Greil Marcus wrote enthusiastically of its unique, co-operative spirit: ‘The record is a thing in itself, standing outside the stories told by the careers of its principals, as if already looking back on all their failures, saying this time you got it right.’

  In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that in ‘projecting the present back on the past in an attempt to make the past signify as future’, Billy and Wilco ‘create an old-time rock and roll that never could have existed’.

  Writing in the New York Times, Christgau (again) described the project as ‘the best of two worlds’. In Playboy, Dave Marsh said, ‘Billy Bragg and Wilco make the best music of their careers.’ Back home, even Steven Wells professed to like it (seven out of ten) in the NME: ‘Lovely,’ he cooed.

  Billy now had no say in the matter: such fulsome praise effectively married him to Woody Guthrie. This would be more than a side project or a dalliance. He was even invited to write a foreword for the new print of Joe Klein’s definitive book Woody Guthrie: A Life.

  The hoped-for live shows, however, didn’t happen. Billy and Wilco guested with each other on a few Mermaid Avenue numbers at various Fleadhs across the US – and they appeared on Letterman and Conan O’Brien together – but that was it. ‘I was at a completely different point in my career to them,’ explains Billy. ‘They were just about to make the difficult third album, Summerteeth, and they really needed to be Wilco – not Wilco and Billy Bragg.’

  Residual umbrage over the mixes? Possibly. But Wilco would be keen enough to record and mix some more tracks for what became Mermaid Avenue Vol II in 2000. ‘They were still committed to the project. They could’ve said, “Bill, we’ve had enough of all this bullshit – you’ve got plenty of tracks, just make it a Billy Bragg record and give us the session money.” I’d have said, “Fine,” and accepted that as an honourable way to say enough is enough. But they didn’t. They wanted to make the second album as good as the first.’

  But it was Vol I that shifted units in the US. ‘Last time I looked,’ says Billy, ‘Mermaid Avenue had sold more than all the other Billy Bragg records put together in America. Whereas, in this country, it sold the same as the average Billy Bragg record.’

  Don’t you just hate it when our colonial cousins prove they have better taste than us? It’s like Seinfeld – 30 million watched the final series in the US; 300,000 watched it here. We should hang our heads in shame.

  The Australians got it. Mermaid Avenue earned Billy his first-ever gold disc there, with sales of over 50,000. In fact, if you put the two volumes of Mermaid Avenue together, as you should, they’ve now racked up almost a million copies worldwide, with about half of those sold in America.

  Not bad for a ‘1940s protest singer’.

  In the event, Wilco’s reluctance to do a piggyback tour had its own positive spin. The London Fleadh, 6 June 1998, was to have been the first official Mermaid Avenue gig. Everyone hoped Wilco would come over, but no. So Billy set about looking for a band.

  The search, restricted to ‘people in the Sincere Management orbit’, threw up poly-instrumentalists Ben Mandelson and Lu Edmonds, who came into the frame via Billy’s then-road manager Jim Chapman. (They had been, among others, in the 3 Mustaphas 3, a not entirely serious, pseudonymous world music troupe, shrouded in self-generated mystery, but cult favourites.) They were augmented by Martyn Barker (ex-drummer in Shriekback) and bassist Simon Edwards (a long CV, which includes Fairground Attraction).

  An ad hoc bunch, they managed to get a decent Mermaid Avenue set together for the Fleadh. The Blokes were born. Sadly, there was no time to sort out work permits for the US, where Billy was booked to play the Fleadh tour.

  When he’d been in Austin, Texas, that March, for South By Southwest, the alternative music convention, he’d got a call out of the blue from Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan, keyboard wizard and founder member of the Small Faces and the Faces, now in his early 50s and living in Austin. They’d actually been introduced by Sid Griffin about ten years previously at McLagan’s then-local the John Bull pub in Pasadena (an expat hangout, surprisingly) – ‘Billy had to be carried out over Sid’s shoulder,’ Mac recalls of the piss-up. Also, by chance, Billy used to bump into Mac’s son Lee in Sainsbury’s, Chiswick, so there was a connection.

  Mac wanted to know if Billy would sing on a solo track he’d just written, ‘Best Of British’, as ‘a kind of duet’. He and his wife Kim had seen Billy on US TV one night and it made him think of England and Lee. The song, which Mac says he wrote ‘in about ten minutes’, duly contains an oblique reference to Billy: ‘I saw him on the box last night, tellin’ it true.’ Mac dropped a demo tape off at Billy’s hotel but unfortunately wall-to-wall Woody promo meant that Billy couldn’t hook up.

  Mac subsequently came to London, so they found a window and went and recorded Billy’s vocal at Wiggy’s basement studio (Mac even brought Lee along). Beneath the veneer of professionalism, Billy and Wiggy felt like kids again in Mac’s presence – how vividly they remembered playing along to A Nod Is As Good As A Wink and Ooh La La back in Barking in the early 70s. Life gets circular.

  ‘It was bloody magic!’ says Mac of the session.

  Anyway, as a convivial result, Mac offered Billy the rhythm section of his own Texas-based Bump Band (Don Harvey, Sarah Brown) if he should ever need rockin’ personnel when on American soil …

  So they hooked up for the US Fleadhs (along with ‘Mississippi’ Bob Egan on slide guitar); a firm friendship was forged with Mac. Due to American interest in Mermaid Avenue, Billy spent all of June, July and August toing and froing across the Atlantic – in the course of touring the album, he went to America and back a hea
d-spinning twenty times in eighteen months.

  Asked if Billy has ever behaved like a fan, Mac says, ‘Only once. When we were rehearsing in New York he took some snaps of my red brogues from underneath the Hammond. I thought it was a little odd.’

  On 30 June, the day England got knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina, they were playing the Trocadero in Philadelphia. Having watched the team lose, Billy remembers wandering over the road to the Pink Pastry Shop (he’s been back since, to verify that he hadn’t dreamt it) where they served tea, and rhubarb crumble and custard. ‘It fortified me. I thought to myself, there’s more to being English than winning penalty shoot-outs.’

  England FC may have been a lost cause, but there were always others to support. Back home, Billy donated a track to Creation Records’ Rock The Dock album, released to raise money for the Liverpool dockers, specifically for retraining. Their dispute had started in September 1995, when 400 were sacked by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company after a strike over conditions and casual labour. It ended, on paper, in January 1998, but many were still out of work without redundancy pay and, in any case, their struggle had become a powerful symbol – industrial action had not ‘gone away’ in the 80s. Billy said it ‘warmed his heart’ to sit alongside younger bands like Oasis, Primal Scream and Dodgy. All hope was apparently not lost, even if music had become woefully apolitical since Britpop.

  In October, Billy was back together with the Blokes: ‘four guys I’d never worked with before, committed music-makers, not just session players, who all knew each other and were all coming out of left-field musically’. So he recruited Mac McLagan, not just because of his Hammond mastery (‘contemporary Hammond players have two settings: Booker T and Ian McLagan’), but also as a kind of medium. This completed the ‘dream team’. As if perhaps to stamp their authority on given material, they took some of the Mermaid Avenue songs apart and put them back together again – a successful jamming exercise which meant that surprises were in store for UK audiences who already knew some of the set from the album. ‘Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key’, a delicate thing on record, became a hoedown; ‘Hoodoo Voodoo’ went ska, and Wilco’s slow-country ‘California Stars’ came out as a honky-tonk drinking song.

  It was, for Billy, a rebirth. Even an old standard like ‘A New England’ now sounded as if Eddie Cochran had written it. Collaborating with Wilco had opened his mind, and now the Blokes made that spirit concrete. They toured through November up to Christmas, sponsored by the GMB union, there to raise awareness for ROAR (Rage Over Age Rates). Their beef was that the introduction of a national minimum wage – one of the few tangible Good Things achieved under Tony Blair – had an insidious caveat: for 18–21 year olds, it was £3 an hour (compared to £3.60 for 22 and over). Labour governments – you can’t take your eye off them for a minute.

  As for Mac, as Billy puts it, ‘If he was some old-timer who we had there in an ornamental sense it would be really sad. The fact is, he’s not only playing at the top of his game, he’s really up for it, he loves gigging, he loves playing with us, and he’s making a serious contribution in writing terms.

  ‘The joy on the faces of my punters when they see him!’ These were some of the best gigs even old-time Bragg fans had witnessed. And union collection buckets were filled.

  The year was rounded off nicely with Mermaid Avenue on many a best-of list. It was named as one of the ‘albums that mattered in 1998’ in Rolling Stone (between Lauryn Hill and R.E.M.), and was similarly honoured by Q, Uncut, Spin and amazon.com, among others. The Sunday Times Culture supplement included it in ‘Albums for Christmas’.

  The Mermaid Avenue juggernaut thundered on into 1999. It was nominated for a Grammy award (‘the American music industry Oscars’ – as they must be described by law). The ceremony was on 24 February, but Billy opted not to go (he’d been through US Immigration enough times since June). So, fittingly, Nora Guthrie attended, with her kids (who got to meet ’N Sync) and Wilco. Billy believes that Mermaid Avenue is her album anyway and should have ‘Nora Guthrie Presents’ in the title.

  A great night was had by all, even though Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheel On A Gravel Road beat them to the little golden gramophone in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category. You still get a certificate and a losers’ medal (Billy awarded his to Juliet, ‘because she deserved it’ – not least for all the hours she put into co-producing the fine accompanying feature-length documentary, Man In The Sand).

  A year later, poetically, Woody Guthrie finally got his posthumous Lifetime Achievement Grammy. ‘I’m very proud,’ says Billy of all this industry recognition, ‘but I can’t stress enough how much it’s down to Woody not yours truly.’

  Such characteristic humility is one thing, but one afternoon, while touring Australia with the Blokes, Billy became all too aware of his own celebrity. First, a Melbourne record shop wouldn’t let him pay for his records when he got to the till, then a bookshop wouldn’t let him pay for a book, and when he went into a chemist to buy some Strepsils, they wouldn’t let him pay for those either. ‘It made me so self-conscious I wouldn’t go out of the hotel! I was Madonna for 24 hours.’ (Madonna never pays for cough sweets.)

  When he got back to the UK, with no new album in the pipeline apart from the second Mermaid Avenue in May (which was already in the can), Billy decided to spread his media wings a bit. He ‘depped’ for veteran Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker (who’d been suspended following drug allegations in a tabloid newspaper). He narrated BBC1’s new-recruits docusoap Soldiers To Be (quite a change from John Nettles and Zoë Wanamaker). He wrote opinion pieces for the broadsheets and appeared on Question Time and Newsnight with alarming regularity. He also contributed to The Ingerland Factor, edited by Mark Perryman – a compendium of essays on following England FC. And in July, Barking’s own Renaissance Man was all over the papers because of a photograph he’d taken.

  The saga of the ‘Battle of Portaloo’ began when Billy spied the following hand-written notice on some toilets at Glastonbury: ‘THESE FACILITIES ARE RESERVED EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS – PLEASE RESPECT THAT. THANK YOU’.

  This from a left-leaning, working-class band who’d always ruffled rock establishment feathers and were proud of their ‘man of the people’ credentials. Billy took a snap of the notice (‘as a bit of mischief’) and smuggled it to Select, who were producing an on-site daily news sheet in their wellies. People around the Glastonbury site sniggered. Word got out. And then it spiralled out of control. The NME picked up on the story, followed by the Guardian and other nationals.

  The Manic Street Preachers hit back at these aspersions of rock-star grandiosity in the only language bassist Nicky Wire understands. When they played T In The Park, before the song ‘Tsunami’, Wire said, ‘This is for Billy Bragg. I wouldn’t let his dick piss in my toilet for all the money in the fucking world. Get back in the army, you fucking dickhead, and stop stealing Woody Guthrie’s songs, you big-nosed twat.’

  ‘I underestimated how seriously they take themselves,’ says Billy. He called for a serious debate via the NME but the Manics weren’t playing. Please respect that, thank you.

  In The Times, Caitlin Moran’s piece on the matter was accompanied by Billy’s photo of the offending notice, with the headline, ‘This is their truth. Pathetic, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Another marker flag was planted in Billy’s life in August 1999, the same month the B-sides-and-bonuses compilation Reaching To The Converted was released to quiet fanfare and only intermittent dancing in the streets.

  But Billy had his own street now: Bragg Close.

  Boleyn and Forest Housing Association had built some new houses in Barking, behind the very pub, the Roundhouse, where Billy and Wiggy saw their first gig, Alvin Lee, circa 1974. It’s now a carpet warehouse. The association rather cunningly decided to name one of the streets after Barking’s most famous musical son. Billy was suitably flattered, and, on 24 August, agreed to cut the ribbon. While preparing his
speech, he checked out who else they’d ever named streets after in the area and found, in a cluster inspired by the labour movement: Bevan Avenue (after Aneurin, father of the NHS); Lansbury Avenue (after George, radical Labour MP who supported women’s suffrage); and Ben Tillet Close (more obscure, the leader of the dockworkers’ union during the 1899 strike, which sowed the seeds of the Labour Party). Now, Billy’s great granddad was a docker, and Tillet had been his union leader, ‘so I was able to make a connection between Ben Tillet and me’. At the civic ceremony, he claimed Bragg Close for his family, many of whom were present: his mum, his nephews, and Jack.

  The Sun had a pop, of course. But Billy’s just waiting for the day he can say to some rock luminary, ‘You might be in the rock’n’roll hall of fame, mate, but I’m in the A to Z!’

  Now that Billy was finally on the map in Barking, the Bragg wagon train was about to roll once again. While he’d been in the States over the summer of ’99, Juliet and Jack had lived almost permanently at Sea Change in Dorset, now more than just their second home. When Billy returned in September, Juliet informed him that Barton Olivers – a picturesque guesthouse further along the coast near the village of Burton Bradstock – was up for sale.

  They viewed it and fell in love with the place. The fact that it ‘needed a lot of work’ was music to the ears of the interior decorator within Juliet. October was spent buying and selling. By 20 December they’d done it: relocated, emigrated, escaped, decamped. ‘Mum was a bit put out,’ he admits.

  So the Braggs saw in the new millennium on the Dorset coast (they used Sea Change as a halfway house while the new place underwent major surgery). ‘People ask me, “What did you do for the Millennium?” I moved out of London.’

  One regret: Billy was now no longer eligible to vote for Ken Livingstone in the forthcoming London Mayoral elections. Ken did all right without him.