Over a well-chosen soundtrack of ‘NPWA’, leaning against a gatepost and facing a prevailing wind, Billy urges, ‘Forget the Tories and the Liberal Democrats – at the next election our biggest enemy is going to be apathy.’ Summing up the secondary mandate, he says, ‘One tick in the box and you’re sorted.’
He put forward his proposal at a debate called ‘A Democratic Lords: the Third Stage?’ hosted by the Fabian Society at the House of Commons. This was flagged up by a hugely supportive comment piece by the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland (‘It is not poetry, but it is a compromise that could work – which is what practical politics is all about’). Hain and Falconer praised the Bragg plan publicly.
Billy thrashed it out with anyone who’d listen – Shirley Williams, Tory peer Lord Strathclyde – but kept being told, ‘You’ve got to convince Prescott on Lords reform; if you don’t – forget it.’
So it was that in April, between the soundcheck and gig at the Barbican, he was taken to the Commons canteen by deputy PM John Prescott. They had a long conversation about the Lords, ‘but there was something else preying on his mind, and I realised what it was when we came to the end of our plates of egg, bacon and chips. He said, “Did I see you with your eye on that spotted dick pudding?” I said, “Yeah, it did look pretty good. With some custard, I thought.” He said, “Yeah, it looks really, really good.” I said, “I shouldn’t really be having this, I’ve got a gig in half an hour.” He said, “I shouldn’t be having it either.” I never did convince him about Lords reform, but we achieved unanimity on the spotted dick.’
In June, Billy was asked on to the august bill of a Lonnie Donegan memorial at London’s Albert Hall (Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Rolf Harris). He was squeezed between the Barron Knights and Rick Wakeman singing with a woman from Cats. Donegan’s widow, Sharon, had seen Billy play in Newcastle, and invited him to come and do a Woody song. It was good to be part of. England were playing Croatia in Euro 2004 that night and Billy will always remember watching the game backstage with Gerry Marsden and a wizened old guy ‘like Albert Steptoe’, who turned out to be Chris Farlowe (Number 1 in 1966 with the Stones’ ‘Out Of Time’). ‘I was the youngest person there!’ he laughs. ‘The audience was prehistoric!’
Billy had been lucky enough to meet Donegan, the father of skiffle, a few years before his death in 2002, through John Peel. Billy was summoned to Broadcasting House – another canteen in a government building – for no discernible reason, other than Peel wanted him there. Billy duly went along. He and Donegan talked about Woody, a bit of politics, a lot of skiffle, but Peel said nothing for the entire time. Not a word. On the drive home, Billy asked his plugger, Dylan, who’d set the meeting up, what had been up with Peelie. It turns out he was too in awe of Donegan to speak.
Six months later, Billy was doing the Peel show at the DJ’s Suffolk home and, off-air, asked him about the incident: ‘How could you not speak to Donegan?’ In response, Peel went off and came back with an original 10-inch of New Orleans Joys, the 1954 Chris Barber album with Donegan’s version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’ on it, and started misting up. ‘It said a lot about Peel. That he was such a fan.’
On 26 October 2004, John Peel died after a heart attack, while on a working holiday with his beloved wife Sheila in Cuzco, Peru. Billy received the grim phonecall from Porky, now the breakfast DJ on digital radio station BBC 6 Music, just before the story broke. If anything, the waves of national bereavement went further than Joe Strummer’s. Billy, who shared his feelings with the listeners of 6 Music that very afternoon, says, ‘People always think of the John Peel who helped bands like me and The Smiths and The Fall, but they don’t understand how important he was to Led Zeppelin, the Faces, Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Donegan story proves that he was still able to use music to take him back to the first time he heard it.’
The funeral, held on 12 November in Bury St Edmunds, to which a thousand people turned up, and at which eulogies were read by Paul Gambaccini and Peel’s brother Andrew Ravenscroft, was ‘very, very, very difficult. In the church, I was behind the Undertones and next to Robert Plant, and I came home on the train with Joe Boyd. You expect these people to be around forever, Peel more than anyone else, because he’d been around forever.’
The loss of Peel, whose absence has created an unfillable vacuum, not least at Radio 1, threatened to cast a pall over the rest of the year. But a lift, for Billy, came with the publication of Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1. ‘The phones started ringing as soon as the first books came out,’ he says. Billy got a mention in Bob Dylan’s back pages.
For the record, it’s toward the end of Chapter Two, ‘A New Land’. Dylan goes to see the ailing Woody Guthrie in Greystone Hospital, New Jersey (‘an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind’). Woody tells him to go to the house at Coney Island, speak to Margie, his wife, and get his hands on a bunch of songs and poems that had never been set to music. Dylan treks out to the end of the subway line and through a swamp, to Mermaid Avenue, but Margie’s not there, just their ten-year-old son Arlo and a babysitter. Dylan stays awhile but never does see those songs. ‘Forty years later,’ Dylan writes, ‘these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them.’
And that’s the mention. ‘It’s like getting a knighthood!’ Billy proclaims.
Billy cleared the decks as 2005 rolled around. He was writing his book. No more gigs.
Actually, there was a General Election on 5 May, and he’d promised a lot of MPs he’d turn out for them, those who’d helped him with Lords reform, or those facing the BNP. He played Leeds and Burnley in one weekend, the NUM in Barnsley, in Dewsbury for Labour candidate Shahid Malik, and at a school in Keighley on a Sunday afternoon where Ann Cryer was standing against BNP leader Nick Griffin.
Criticism came Billy’s way during the campaign for supporting pro-war Labour MPs. We’ll call it the Oona King Problem. King, who’d voted for the invasion of Iraq, was fighting what had become an unsafe seat in Bethnal Green and Bow, East London, against Labour-rebel-turned-independent George Galloway, running for his own Respect Party. Billy made an appearance.
‘It put me in a difficult position,’ he concedes. ‘It would have been simpler to duck out, and it did cross my mind when an agent made a speech before I went on stage comparing Galloway to Oswald Mosley. When you get involved in local politics like that, shit hits the fan. My name was added to the list of people Galloway condemned when he got elected. I can live with that. If anyone wants to know where I stand on the war, I made my feelings explicit and I continue to do so within the Labour party. You can’t work with politicians without getting some shit on you. I’ve always known that.
‘I can’t remember being involved in a General Election campaign where I didn’t get called a scab by the SWP. It’s par for the course for me. There are bigger fish to fry – to keep focused on the BNP and the Tories.’
Thanks in part to an unconvincing performance by creepy Tory leader Michael Howard, Labour squeaked home to history: a third term but with a majority of just 66, losing safe seats to the left, the right and the centre. Labour held Barking and Dagenham, but the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook overtook the Lib Dems, a worrying trend after the party’s showing at the September 2004 council elections, winning the Barking ward of Goresbrook with 52% of the vote. If nothing else, the shifting of the political plates brought Billy’s book into sharp focus. ‘Is that where I come from?’ he asked himself. ‘What happened to me to make me different from those people who voted for the BNP?’
Answer: he’d heard The Clash when he was 19.
‘I’ve spent all my adult life fighting those people and the first seat they win in the London area in a generation is in my home town. A real shock.’
Billy, the author, was looking at a virtually clear, commitment-and gig-free three months until Christmas. But Maxine Eddington got in the way, and loo
king back, Billy’s grateful that she did. Back in February, he’d been sought out by Rosetta Life, a fantastic charity that sends artists and musicians into cancer hospices to encourage those living with the disease to express their feelings in song, or art, or film, or poetry, whatever captures their imagination. He ended up visiting the women at Trimar Hospice in Weymouth for six consecutive coffee mornings.
‘I wanted to do it because when Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1975, they sent him home from the hospital and said the best way to deal with it was not to talk about it. So we never talked about it. And I deeply, deeply regret that.’
He played them ‘Tank Park Salute’, and encouraged them to talk about their experiences, which he would help interpret as songs. After a tentative start, he began to ‘get a vibe’ in week three. One woman wrote a poem. Another had some ideas about a road and a shining light. Another brought in a photograph of herself and her 15-year-old daughter, taken when she was diagnosed: all done up, smiling, laughing. She said, ‘I did this because I want her to remember me when we laughed.’ This was Maxine Eddington. Week four, Maxine didn’t turn up, she was too ill. But she asked her carer to pass an envelope on to Billy.
It contained 36 handwritten pages – ‘Do you remember when we went swimming with a dolphin off Portland Bill? And we laughed. Do you remember winning that medal for belly-dancing? And we laughed.’ The song wrote itself.
Rosetta Life had sufficient budget to record three songs, using a band recruited by Billy, led by a vocalist he’d found singing in the pub called Helena. ‘We Laughed’, ‘The Light Within’ and ‘My Guiding Star’ were made into modest videos, using family photos, home movies and studio footage and made available on a website. (Artists involved in parallel projects included Michael Nyman, Roots Manuva, and Jarvis Cocker, who conducted a live ‘Cyber-jam’, linking between Great Ormond Street and a hospice in South Africa.)
It all went off beautifully. They’d done what they set out to do.
Then, in August, Maxine, now in remission, started pestering Billy about putting ‘We Laughed’ out as a single. He told her it wasn’t as easy as that. ‘There’s no point putting it out next year,’ she baited him. ‘I haven’t got that much time.’
In the week before World Hospice And Palliative Care Day in October, marked by 74 countries across five continents, he and Maxine appeared on Jeremy Vine’s lunchtime show on Radio 2. She told her moving story and Vine played the song. The BBC were swamped with calls: people who wanted to share stories with Maxine; a lorry driver forced to pull onto the hard shoulder in tears. Listeners loved the song, which was not available in the shops.
So Cooking Vinyl pressed up a thousand copies for free and put it out. Thanks to Vine, and local support from the likes of the Dorset Echo, ‘We Laughed’, credited to Rosetta Life Featuring Billy Bragg, went to Number 11 in the Official UK Chart in November. Maxine was a star, and well enough to join Billy at some in-stores. One, in Poole, ‘was like a religious meeting. They were coming to her and she was literally laying her hands on them. It was incredibly powerful. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Which just goes to show, you never know how a year is going to pan out.
Maxine had been given a matter of months to live when Billy met her at the beginning of 2005. She kept going, powered by the human spirit, until finally succumbing to cancer in September 2006. ‘She was a truly inspirational person.’
By February 2006, Billy had writer’s block. He’d produced 40,000 words – out of 80,000 – but couldn’t get to 50,000, and it was driving him ‘fucking bonkers’. Then he was asked by his publishers to talk up the half-written book at a sales conference in Amsterdam. He went on before Bill Bryson, and ‘it suddenly got real.’
The experience unblocked him. He had 70,000 words by the time he went to America in March to promote the first Billy Bragg box set, ‘pretentiously titled’ Volume 1. (Pay no more than £46.99, or nearest offer.)
The box came about because Elektra records (‘who’d been very kind to me for 20 years – they got my records out there’) was effectively boarded up after 54 years. Parent company Time Warner sold the Warner Music Group to private investors, who weighed and measured Elektra and decided to merge it with the better-performing Atlantic. Such decisions are rarely tainted by sentimentality. Still, due to the ‘reversions’ in his contract, Billy’s catalogue all came back to him.
He struck a deal in the States with Anti, who would put out his new records, and Yep Roc, who’d look after the old stuff – hence Volume 1 (and, in October, Volume 2), whose bonus-disc unreleased rarities were mined by Wiggy and Grant. ‘It was nice to be boxed,’ Billy says. ‘I wanted to do something tactile before music became the clicking of a mouse.’
The handsomely-tooled box pulled in some nice retrospective reviews (the Chicago Tribune wrote, ‘Bare and unvarnished, the records function as messenger pigeons whose emotional fury and empathetic pleas fly in the face of empty-headed love songs, harken back to the urgency of first-wave punk and co-opt the spirit of civil rights-era soul’), including a big up in the NME. It further cemented Billy’s standing among the next generation of bands: rising stars Hard-Fi, from Staines, invited him to support them for five nights at Brixton Academy; Sheffield popsters Milburn got in touch, and he joined them in the studio.
At the local elections on 4 May 2006, the BNP won 12 seats out of the 13 it contested in Barking and Dagenham, after a High Court ruling on the 12th. Nationally, it more than doubled its number of councillors, from 20 to 52: Epping Forest, Sandwell, Stoke-on-Trent, Burnley, Kirklees, Redditch, Redbridge.
‘It gives me no pleasure to say that I got my retaliation in four years early’ – i.e. England, Half English – ‘but it encourages me that my cultural antennae can pick up stuff as it’s happening.’
In June, the cover of trade magazine The Bookseller was wrapped in the cross of St George – a powerful teaser ad for The Progressive Patriot (‘a stunning, timely polemic from a straight-talking icon: hardcover, £17.99, October’). The book itself wasn’t actually finished. The author had hoped to sign it off by the World Cup. But the proliferation of England flags flying from cars and vans across the land in a wave of optimistic patriotism merited a new chapter. He handed it in on 31 July. England went out in the quarter finals. Some of those flags, tattered and forlorn, are still flying.
One more act of defiance and principle: MySpace, the online social networking platform that seemed to be leading the way in the mid-noughties – and still provides a free, user-friendly marketplace for music – had crossed a critical Rubicon in July 2005, when News Corporation bought it for $580 million. Open to anyone with a hotmail address, it was also now prime advertising real estate for Rupert Murdoch. Still, in essence ‘What a great idea!’ says Billy, without irony. ‘You’re sitting in your bedroom in your parents’ house. You’ve written all these songs. Now you’ve got to find a bunch of guys, form a band, learn to sing, get some gigs, get a manager, and maybe one day get a record deal, and then people out there will get to hear your music. With MySpace, you write the songs, click click click, and there they are, everyone’s got them.’
Sarah Hyde in Billy’s office had set a MySpace up for him in October 2005 (he would always need an initial leg-up into Cyberspace). But it took Fionn O’Lochlainn’s manager, Sue Ellen Stroum, to bring to their attention the small print of the terms and conditions, through which MySpace claimed a ‘worldwide royalty-free licence’, giving them the right to sub-license, use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, store, reproduce, transmit and distribute content on and through the service. In May, smelling a rat, Billy pulled his songs off the site, with a message saying, ‘We wouldn’t grant these conditions to a record company, we don’t see why we should give them to a corporation owned by Rupert Murdoch.’
The press picked up on it. Debate ensued. The official defence was that Madonna puts songs on MySpace and clearly they don’t own Madonna’s work. ‘Yeah, but Madonna has a lawyer and a recording contract
and a publishing contract. The majority who put their stuff up there have no legal contracts at all.’
The argument pinpointed a paradigm shift in the music industry. Previously, you’d sign to a record label for life copyright, and they own your records until they can’t make money from them any more. Record companies traditionally invested in the physical production and distribution of discs. Now all they do is drag songs onto iTunes, so the necessity to sign isn’t there. Billy gives the example of Ian McLagan: ‘Whenever we’re on the road in the UK and we stop at a service station, there’ll be a compilation of 60s hits in the shop with a Small Faces track on, from which he earns no money whatsoever.’
This, he reasoned, could be the fate of some future breadwinner on MySpace. (Billy would never sign for life copyright with Go! Discs. ‘Whose pension should this be?’ he would ask Andy Macdonald. ‘Yours or mine?’)
A week later, MySpace changed the ‘proprietary rights in content’ clause in their terms and conditions: ‘MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials, collectively, “Content”, that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose etc. etc.’
The dominoes fell. After MySpace came Bebo, a then fashionably like-minded, UK-founded social networking site pitched at the McFly demographic. Billy told the Guardian, ‘If this new medium is to attain its full potential, it is crucial that artists are able to post content secure in the knowledge that doing so will not hinder their future career and earning potential. I believe that all sites which host member content should follow this lead by modifying their own terms of use.’
At the time, the next stop seemed to be YouTube, followed by the internet channel MTV Flux (which actually closed in 2008). Meanwhile, Facebook, launched on American campuses in 2004, and Twitter, in 2006, would soon reach their own critical mass. An activist can never sit on his hands, as the frontiers keep on expanding.
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