Having been awakened, politically, by the lack of love and justice shown by the Thatcher government – shockingly, not even a distant, dismal memory to first-time voters in this election year – Billy found he had plenty on his plate with the assorted failures and betrayals of New Labour. He’d been pragmatically pro the bank bailout of 2008 when world financial markets collapsed as a result of America’s subprime-mortgage bubble (‘If the money had stopped coming out of the cashpoints it would have had a terrible effect on millions of ordinary working people’), but when our Government used taxpayers’ money to underwrite those institutions considered ‘too big to fail’, such as the emblematically footloose Royal Bank of Scotland, it failed to follow through and curb bankers’ bonuses. Billy had ‘a right cob on’ about this one.
‘I’m not paying my taxes so you can pay for those bastards. The free marketeers base their argument on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, which is basically that if you leave the market be, the good will prosper and the bad will fall by the wayside. But the idea that the free market will solve all our problems is over. To carry on with business as usual and deny that the Thatcherite paradigm of the last 30 years is broken, that made me so angry.’
Angry enough to take to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park (‘a place where dissent can be freely expressed’), where he delivered a rousing oratory on a chilly February morning – filmed, of course – and announced that he was ‘breaking the habit of a lifetime’ by declining to pay his Income Tax. Quoting unlikely allies like Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King and super-financier George Soros, Billy presented the bank-bonus situation as untenable, and the paying of tax as an ‘expression of social solidarity’. He reminded his audience that RBS was now 84% owned by the people, and that its Chief Executive had justified an estimated £1.5bn bonus bill to a Treasury Select Committee by saying that he was a ‘prisoner of the market’.
Having made some much-needed noise, and drawn attention to the problem, Billy filed his tax late and was fined for his troubles. The lesson being: there is no talking with the taxman.
The general election held on 6 May was effectively an overdue vote of no-confidence in the New Labour project; an appetite for change seemed tangible, but it was no foregone conclusion. Billy voted Liberal Democrat, again tactically – the Lib Dems were the only side with a hope of worrying Oliver Letwin in West Dorset – but with a clearer heart. ‘I did think there was a lot of good stuff in their manifesto that wasn’t in Labour’s’ – not least scrapping Trident and university tuition fees – ‘And nobody ever told me I was a traitor to the cause for voting Liberal Democrat so I did what I always do. I would’ve thought long and hard before voting Labour anyway; they’d run their course.’
Billy exercised his democratic right by postal vote, because, instead of being in Dorset, he found himself in London for April and May, performing in a musical capacity in the play Pressure Drop at the Wellcome Collection gallery on London’s Euston Road. Named after the Maytals’ 1969 reggae perennial, written by Irishman Mick Gordon and directed by Christopher Haydon for the On Theatre group, it looked at belonging and identity among the white working class as a fictionalised far-right party tries to take over an old industrial town in East London. ‘Part play, part gig, part installation’, it unfolded across three stages representing pub, living room and chapel; on the fourth stage, Billy Bragg and his band, playing songs old (‘All You Fascists’) and new (‘Home’, ‘There Will Be A Reckoning’). With the audience encouraged to move around the space during the play, Billy acted as host, MC and crowd marshal.
The space was filled; the reviews were good. The Telegraph said it addressed the subject of immigration ‘with honesty and clarity’, The Stage praised the ‘power, anger and thoughtfully crafted lyrics’ of Billy’s songs, and, most pertinently, the London Evening Standard wrote, ‘Gordon’s muscular script … is far too sophisticated to descend into a Nick Griffin-bashing rant.’
Musical theatre’s least likely new diva may have been treading the boards by night, but by day, he was walking the streets of Barking and Dagenham trying to convince people not to vote for the sadly non-fictional BNP, whose ubergruppenführer and MEP for North West England, Nick Griffin had taken it upon himself to stand for election in Billy’s old backyard. It was such a shock, he remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news: ‘eating my tea at 7pm in a hotel room in St John’s, Nova Scotia, via the World Service on the internet. I did this apoplectic gig in St John’s. BNP: fucking bastards. I really took it personally.’
After its council victories in 2006, the BNP now considered Barking to be its citadel, so Dorset’s loss was Essex’s gain as Billy channelled all his energies into helping formidable pro-diversity, anti-extremism civil rights campaign group HOPE Not Hate keep the fascists out – and in particular to kybosh their plans to ‘take the council’. He kipped at his Mum’s.
During an often hot-tempered run-up, Billy had ‘a couple of close encounters’ with Barking’s deputy council leader and London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook. Out leafleting on a HOPE Not Hate day of action, during which 541 volunteers delivered 91,000 copies of the group’s newspaper, he found himself up Barnbrook’s perhaps symbolic cul-de-sac and came face to face with his nemesis. A finger-pointing clash of the titans took place, surrounded by cameras and a film crew, and a cheer went up when Billy said, ‘I’ll be back, Mr Barnbrook.’ (It’s on YouTube, naturally.)
Beyond the jostling for council seats, this was the first general election since 1979 where all three main parties fielded a new leader, two of them seemingly genetically modified from the blandly approachable, centrist Blair helix. But no clear winner emerged. The Tories, under former director of corporate affairs for a media conglomerate David Cameron, failed to achieve a majority; Labour, under Gordon Brown, a man whose campaign had been hijacked by a little old lady in Rochdale, sustained the predicted ‘bloody nose’, losing 91 seats; and the Lib Dems, under Nick Clegg, endorsed by the Guardian and inflated with optimism after ‘winning’ the first TV debate – out of which Brown’s repeated refrain, ‘I agree with Nick’, became an internet meme, a mug and a t-shirt – limped in third.
The resulting hung parliament meant that, in Billy’s words, Brown was wearing ‘dead man’s shoes’. He resigned on 11 May, uncharacteristically smiling with relief, as it emerged that the Tories had done a deal with the Lib Dems. This unexpected coalition was consummated in the Rose Garden at Number 10 a day later. Edvard Munch had painted the reaction of many of us back in 1893.
Having unwittingly voted in a Tory government by attempting to vote out a Tory MP (Letwin actually increased his share by 1.1%), Billy was put in a very difficult public position, as he no longer agreed with Nick, many of whose manifesto promises would soon be worth less than the paper they were printed on. ‘The outcome has laid me open to a great deal of criticism, as if I voted in favour of what the coalition are doing! The very tribal Labour people still don’t grasp why nobody wanted to vote for them any more.’
Billy has a certain amount of time for new Labour leader Ed Miliband, endorsed by grandees like Kinnock in the leadership election and victorious over his less cuddly older brother David thanks mostly to the support of six major trade unions: ‘He genuinely has a grasp of the problems, but he doesn’t seem to be willing to pull the levers that might generate the change people are looking for.’
It wasn’t all bad news on election day 2010. The BNP lost every single seat they had. ‘The blow that was struck in Barking and Dagenham has proved terminal for the BNP. Even left to their own devices, we can trust our neighbours – they are still capable of recognising an arsehole when they see one. They made me proud to come from there.’ Mr Barnbrook has since left the BNP, clings on in Europe as an independent, and, one hopes, won’t be back.
Whether or not Cameron’s Tories are worse than Thatcher’s is something we could hotly debate if we weren’t so busy trying to pay our bills, find an open library and adjust to sudd
enly commonplace concepts like ‘the working poor’ and ‘food banks’. Neil Kinnock’s premonition from 1983 echoes around a nation eviscerated by cuts: ‘I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.’ As we speak, council leaders are predicting ‘civil unrest’ if Osborne’s raids on the public sector continue and, over in America, where the ‘HOPE’ embodied by Barack Obama is still constantly thwarted by a Republican house, they’ve peered over a ‘fiscal cliff’; if nothing else, it ought to be a boom time for political singer-songwriters.
The financial crash saw belts tightened all round. Juliet’s design business suffered when the market for high-end, boutique refits faltered. This sharpened the resolve at Barton Olivers to turn Bragg Central into a home-run cottage industry, with Juliet bringing not just her years in the music industry to the table but also her design skills. Her and Billy’s appropriation of the means of production coincided with the ever-energetic Pete Jenner slipping into a more comfortable ‘consultative role’, busier as he was with the Music Managers Forum (‘going around the world talking to people about copyright’). While Juliet gave operations a facelift, Billy took over his own Facebook page and Twitter feed, cutting out further intermediaries. (‘My internet profile has never been higher. Bloomberg commissioned me to write something about the Leveson Report because they follow me on Twitter.’)
Once Jack left school and started sixth-form college in Yeovil, staying with mates for three days a week, Mum and Dad had more time on their hands, and this was one surefire way of filling it. ‘We’re independent, we’re free, and we’ve never worked so hard in our fucking lives.’
They work in an industry no longer defined by physical product or the best-laid plans of record companies. When they put out the box sets in 2006, cardboard was still just about recognised as a suitable case for music. By 2011, Billy had enough download-only singles from ten years of cutting out the middle man to fill a pugnacious, self-released compilation, Fight Songs; which included ‘The Price Of Oil’, an acoustic condemnation of the real reasons behind the Allied invasion of Iraq (‘the Stock Market holds the answer to “Why him, why here, why now?”’), given away free in December 2002, to ‘Never Buy The Sun’, a rapid reaction to the tabloid phone-hacking scandal of 2011 whose rallying cry, ‘Scousers never buy the Sun’ later chimed with a reversal of fortunes for the Hillsborough Families Support Group after a damning independent report. Such bulletins are now just a click away on the rebooted Billy Bragg website.
Billy’s tenth solo album, Tooth & Nail, says everything about the leaner, meaner business model he and Juliet have worked so hard to establish. Traditionally, Pete would have been ‘signing the cheques’ while an album was recorded, putting an arm’s length between cost and the creative process. Not any more. Tooth & Nail was self-financed, and recorded in five days in a basement without telling anybody. ‘The idea of making it over a long time and spending a lot of money was no longer viable. Now we need to make a record and be able to afford to tour it. Otherwise it’s just pissing it away down the money-hole.’ The net creative gain has been healthy, too.
In September 2010, it had been optimistically announced that Billy’s next album would be a collaboration with country queen Roseanne Cash, Johnny’s daughter, and the alt-rock singer-songwriter and prolific producer Joe Henry, Detroit-raised but now based in Pasadena, California. Henry had united the pair for a ‘song cycle’ he curated and produced at the international Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele festival in Germany, and they’d vowed to record together.
For prosaic contractual reasons, that album was not to be, but Billy and Joe kept the plate spinning, and Tooth & Nail took shape ‘under the radar’ at Joe’s home studio in January 2012. Joe regards five days as the optimum time for making a record. He tells me that, initially, Billy was ‘a tad reticent of that timeline’, but was quickly seduced by Joe’s thesis that ‘musicians discovering songs together in real time increases the odds of the songs feeling fresh and alive’.
Ever after Wilco and the Blokes, this was a brand new way of working. Billy sang and used his guitar mainly as a prop-cum-comfort blanket, surrendering himself to the dreamily unobtrusive, always sympathetic accompaniment of Joe’s trusted collaborators: idiosyncratic drummer Jay Bellerose, Greg Leisz on guitar, lap and pedal steel and mandolin, David Piltch on upright and electric bass, and Patrick Warren on piano, pump organ, autoharp and additional keyboards. After the Blokes, let’s call them the Dudes.
Like Mermaid Avenue, for self-evident reasons, the result feels like an American record, although Billy keeps it half-English, especially on the endearingly homespun ‘Handyman Blues’, a comic lament to his own impracticality (‘It takes me half an hour to change a fuse’). His voice has never been better: high and delicate on the opener ‘January Song’ (‘touch me and you’ll hear me sing’), raw on ‘Goodbye Goodbye’, impassioned on Pressure Drop refugee ‘There Will Be a Reckoning’, which harks back to Mr Barnbrook’s cul-de-sac.
The lyrics are broader but laser-guided, and peppered with evocative imagery: a burning bush, spinning atoms and a coffee pot gone cold. There’s a talismanic Woody cover, too, I Ain’t Got No Home, which feels in tune with a general case of homesickness.
Though country-tinged, it might be described as his ‘soul album’, or simply his ‘roots album’; certainly, its sad songs say a lot about a world in crisis, but venture a glass-half-full positivity to the ‘chorus of complaint’, not least on manifesto sign-off ‘Tomorrow’s Going to Be a Better Day’. The plaintive whistling reminds us that, for all the stylings of Americana, he’s still the milkman. Bear that in mind as Billy tours Tooth & Nail across the States with a brand new band and the self-written brief of progressing the way he is perceived there.
Joe makes this assessment: ‘Billy is a hero to many here in America, and I believe that historically he’s heard in a much broader context than perhaps he is in England. I sometimes feel that his work on behalf of truth and justice and his reputation as a political songwriter has allowed some to miss just how deep is his song craft – and just how broad his canvas really is.’
The melancholy mood of Tooth & Nail was inevitably informed by the sad and sudden death of Marie Bragg on 18 March 2011, another one of life’s markers that Billy admits he’s yet to fully process.
In ‘January Song’, he sings, ‘Tidy up the place for Monday, when she’s buried in her dancing shoes’, while ‘Goodbye Goodbye’ bids a more literal final farewell: ‘The time has come for me to go … the bells have all been rung, the songs have all been sung’.
‘The album isn’t about what happened, but it comes out of that experience, It’s connected to Mum’s passing in the sense that it made me think: You know what? I need to get back on and ride the bloody horse.’
He admits to ‘a catharsis’ at the end of 2011. ‘Going away to make the record allowed me to come up for air at the end of it, with something in my hand to go and do.’
In January 2011, Marie, still as active, fleet-footed and indomitable as she’d always been, was admitted to hospital with abdominal pains. ‘Completely out of the blue’, the doctors discovered that pancreatic cancer had spread into her liver and beyond. If the grim prognosis bore any kind of consolation, it was that Marie was compos mentis for most of her last month, able not just to make peace with her family and friends, but to stage-manage her funeral with ‘a steely determination’. She would have put the placemats out herself if she could, Billy half-jokes.
Though shocked to be bed-bound – she had been doing four dancing clubs a week with her new partner Reg – her stoic attitude was, ‘OK, this is where we are, let’s do this.’ She wanted the arrival of her coffin accompanied by what Billy describes as ‘a really naff line-dancing song called “Hillbilly Rock Hillbilly Roll” by a country and western band from Leicester’. She also requested Billy sing ‘that song’ – ‘Tank Park Salute’, inspired by the death of his Dad – a tall emotional order
. He said to her, ‘It’s hard enough singing that anyway, now every time I play it I’m going to think about you and your funeral.’ She said, ‘Good.’
Thronged with around 140 people, the chapel at the crematorium was so full, Wiggy’s Dad couldn’t get in. At the wake, there was a queue ‘out of the door’ for the tea urn. Billy pleaded with the organiser, ‘I can’t run out of tea at Marie Bragg’s funeral.’
In common with the other women in her family, Marie had never told anyone her age, and the plaque in the memorial garden simply bears the year of her death. Billy said a few words, breaking the ice with the in-joke, ‘My Mum packed a lot into her 29 years …’
Having Tweeted about his Mum’s passing (‘After a long and active life and a short illness, my mother Marie passed away yesterday, surrounded by her family’), he was nonetheless overwhelmed by the thousand or so condolences posted by fans on his Facebook page. ‘I still haven’t managed to read them all yet.’
Fortuitously, Marie had been present at Billy’s last gig of 2010 at the Troxy, a refurbished art deco cinema in Stepney, where she used to go to the pictures as a girl. But it was doubly significant.
Jack, on the cusp of turning 17 and with his own taste for rock’n’roll, had been out on the road, ‘hanging out with the support band’ after Billy had gone to bed. So, when Wiggy got up to guest on ‘A13’ at the Troxy, so did Jack, making his live debut. He got into it, throwing shapes, affecting a solo, even throwing his plectrum into the audience. As the last gig Marie ever attended, it was made magical for seeing her son and grandson playing together.
Jack was turning out to be a chip off the old Bloke, although Billy stresses that he never taught him to play. It all started at the NME Awards in 2008, when Jack was 14. Billy was there to perform a pan-generational duet with BRIT School-trained, MySpace-enabled singer-songwriter Kate Nash. A mash-up road-tested in January at the Big Day Out festivals in Australia, they segued her DIY number two smash ‘Foundations’ into ‘New England’, complementing each other charmingly. (He made her laugh by adapting a line to reference her still-warm Best Female Artist Brit award.)
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