Billy Bragg Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by Billy Bragg

  Preface: How did I get here?: This bloke, 1957–2006

  1. London A to B: A bit of history

  2. Alice is bent: Childhood, 1957–1973

  3. Exile on Magnet: Forming a band, 1974–1977

  4. Big in Clopton: Riff Raff, 1977–1980

  5. I Vow To Thee My Country: The army, 1980–1981

  6. Licensee: Jack Ruby: Birth of Billy, 1981–1983

  7. Go!: Signing off, signing up, 1983

  8. A great friend of Dave Gilmour’s: Take-off, 1984

  9. The world turned upside down: A bit of politics, 1984–1985

  10. How long can a bad thing last?: Another bit of politics, 1985–1987

  11. Broken-heart surgery: Great leaps forward, 1987–1989

  12. Stop playing with yourself: A bit of business, 1989–1992

  13. Try this at home: Rethink, 1992–1995

  14. New Billy: Back in office, 1996–1997

  15. Life begins at Woody: Another bit of history, 1998

  16. The Bard of Burton Bradstock: On the map, 1998–2002

  17. The full English: A range of distractions, 2002–2006

  18. A writer not a decorator: Keeping faith, going to jail and becoming a Guitar Hero, 2007–2013

  19. Delivery man of human love: Who is Billy Bragg then?

  Towards a Braggiography: Discography of UK releases

  Bibliography and sources

  Index

  Bringing it all back home

  Acknowledgements to the first edition

  Acknowledgements to the second edition

  Acknowledgements to the third edition

  Acknowledgements to the fourth edition

  Copyright

  About the Book

  He was a punk. He was a soldier. He was a flag-waver for both the Labour Party and the miners. He is Billy Bragg, best known as a passionate protest folk singer and a tireless promoter of political and humanitarian causes all across the world.

  His life encapsulates so much about his generation: born in the late ’50s, passions forged by punk, politics shaped by Thatcherism, hope provided by what he sees as a post-ideological twenty-first century. Serious about compassion and accountability, he likes a laugh too, and is enduringly popular.

  Billy Bragg remains to this day a much-loved songwriter and performer whose campaigning has now spanned four decades and shows no sign of relenting. Still Suitable For Miners is his official story, updated for the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, and including the recording of his tenth album as a solo artist, Tooth and Nail.

  About the Author

  Andrew Collins is a writer and broadcaster. Having worked for NME, Empire and Q, he regularly broadcasts on Radio 2, Radio 4 and 6 Music. He is Film Editor of Radio Times co-writer of BBC sitcoms Grass and Not Going Out, and author of Where Did It All Go Right? and Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

  This book is dedicated to two people: Julie Quirke, for showing me heaven, and Reg Ward, my grandfather, for political inspiration.

  FOREWORD

  THE FIRST TIME that I ever got to sit alone with Paul Weller was at the Solid Bond Studios sometime in 1984. While we discussed life, the universe and everything, his hands were busily occupied with cutting articles about himself out of newspapers and magazines and filing them away for his scrapbook. It impressed me greatly that, although arguably one of Britain’s premier pop stars, he still did his own chores. I also felt a sense of relief that someone whom I admired so much might feel the same way that I did about preserving material, to the extent that he felt it was not a job he could safely entrust to someone else.

  When I began to get notices in the papers, I would buy two or three copies, not so much from self-obsession, more to check that they were actually saying something about me in every copy. That sense of disbelief wore off after a couple of years, but I still kept my cuttings and tour passes and itineraries. It would have been better to keep a diary you might think, but with a diary you need time for reflection and then even more time to get your thoughts down clearly. And I just didn’t have that time, nor those clear thoughts. I was tearing round the world, returning to my flat in West London only to check my mail and empty my bags. The place filled up with what I can only characterise as stuff, junk that I hung on to for the sake of posterity. And one day posterity knocked on my door in the shape of Andrew Collins.

  I had been approached by a few would-be biographers in the past but they were mostly earnest young men who I feared would portray me as some working-class hero whose life had been one long hard struggle. These were the same kind of people who described my friends as being ‘a bit lumpen’. Andrew at least knew enough about me to realise that the personal was at least as important as the political, and that my life was a mess of contradictions rather than a shining path of political correctness. A feature he wrote in Q magazine convinced me he was the right person for the job. He had astutely taken a number of minor events in my career and threaded them together as a series of epiphanies. It was informative and insightful but, better than that, it was entertaining.

  With an impeccable sense of timing, he began this project just as I started the long process of emptying my flat and fifteen years’ worth of stuff started raining down on him (the rest was at my mum’s. He helped me load it in to the back of my car). A nice young couple are now ensconced in my old place and a considerable amount of junk has been divided up between my attic, the local charity shops, the town dump and a lock-up in Acton Vale. But not before Andrew had had a chance to pore over it, just for the sake of posterity.

  This leaves me with a lot of empty shelf space to stare at, but, as I write, Pete Jenner is concocting another tour itinerary for me, with, hopefully, that precious day off after Plymouth, and I feel that it can only be a matter of time before my living space attains once more the fabulous clutter to which I am accustomed.

  Thanks to all my dear friends who took the time to contribute their thoughts and memories to this book and to Andrew Collins for matching my sense of history with his sense of humour.

  Billy Bragg, 1998

  PREFACE: HOW DID I GET HERE?

  This bloke, 1957–2013

  AS A CAT who was wiser than he looked once sang, you won’t fool the children of the revolution. Tragically, the sloppy workmanship of a garage in Sheen killed the cat in 1977. As a result, he never lived to see how the children of Britain’s newest revolution would turn out.

  They turned out just fine.

  Punk rock was, for those who lived through it and came out permanently scathed, far more than a musical movement or a collection of diminishing guitar bands. For certain art-schooled agents provocateurs in London it was a situationist joke, but a good one, and a long one. For kids in the provinces and faraway towns, it was a clarion call. For a group of journalists in the right place at the right time, it was day one of a job-for-life. For the huddled wannabe masses still in the dark after ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, it was all the excuse they needed to stop miming with a racket and start making one.

  For Stephen William Bragg, exiled in Essex, punk was the flame that lit his fireworks; it was all the excuse he needed to change his name to Billy Bonkers and take in those ‘Lionels’. (Lionel Blairs: flares. An example of hand-me-down Cockney rhyming slang forged in those far-off days when the grinning Palladium hoofer was the first Blair who came to mind. Funny.) On 9 May 1977, the nineteen-year-old Billy and his gang, from the relative safety of the Finsbury Park Rainbow balcony, witnessed the sleeveless fury and airborne masonry of the White R
iot tour. Realising that The Clash were just a tighter, younger, sexier Rolling Stones – using the same amps, throwing the same shapes – Billy never looked back.

  The cleansing fires of punk. This poetic notion arises again and again when you talk to or read about Billy Bragg, almost as frequently as reference to Lionels. Now in his forties, just like Strummer and Weller and Rotten, Billy is a textbook child of the revolution, born just three years after rationing was finally phased out in Britain, a year after that business in Suez, and halfway through a thirteen-year Tory administration that would eventually end not with a landslide but a polite cough. Anything could happen, but not much did.

  They’d never had it so good, in the immortal words of Harold Macmillan (Prime Minister as superhero, thanks to Evening Standard cartoonist Vicky). Sure, out there in the Arts, down at the newly concreted South Bank, the Young Men were a trifle Angry – but in the real world of the latter 1950s and early 1960s, Britain felt fine: three television channels, full employment, Hancock’s Half Hour and a staggering range of soap powders that washed whiter than white.

  The decade rapidly deemed ‘swinging’ was one of insular national pride, of Merseybeat, Twiggy and Bobby Moore. A knockback by de Gaulle when Britain first tried to join the Common Market in 1961 served only to heighten its island mentality. In 1964 Labour scraped in, under Harold Wilson, but little changed on the landscape.

  This was Britain Rebuilt, where working-class people owned cars and Kenwood mixers and went on package holidays to the continent, where homegrown rock’n’roll shook and rattled America, and where tower blocks were the very height of modern architecture. But no one really knew that Russians loved their children too. And it was to shape an entire generation born between the wars (Two and Vietnam); ten years too late for the idealism of the Baby Boom and just old enough to know that you must never trust a hippie. Here were the young men and women who would soon learn that they couldn’t change the world, but would create a New England in the process.

  Generation Bragg reached voting age in the mid-70s – not that the political parties took much notice. In 1974, Edward Heath’s skin-of-its-teeth Tory government was undone by the miners, who refused to call off their industrial action during the brief run-up to a rushed February election. ‘Who governs?’ it asked the electorate. ‘Not you,’ the electorate replied. Labour seized only four more seats than the Conservatives (301 to 297), but the government stood down anyway, and Harold Wilson bumped it up to a narrow majority of 319 to 276 in the October rerun. Politically, the country was in the grip of don’t-know.

  Labour survived until 1979 only by backscratching the Liberals and the nationalist parties, but it couldn’t go on, and, after nearly twenty years of self-defeating tug-of-war between left and right, budging an inch this way, then an inch that way, the first election in which Billy Bragg was actually eligible to vote, 1979, was to be a pre-packaged humdinger.

  He didn’t vote.

  Why? Partly because the parties had yet to realise the power of mobilising the evasive youth vote, and partly because he fancied himself as an anarchist. So did a lot of young folks, anarchy being a pretty stubborn punk hangover (a capital A with a circle round it looked as good on the back of a jacket as it had done on pencil cases). While punk was undoubtedly empowering, energising and truculent, its ethos was one of no-future nihilism. Those untrustworthy hippies had done a lot of proactive sitting down, and they started up some cool magazines. The punks, unimpressed, took over the magazines, and jumped up and down, but at no point in the countercultural handover did party politics really enter the equation.

  Punks were, for the best part, passionate enough souls watching with distrust as the 70s turned into the 80s: many disagreed with the British presence in Northern Ireland; most fancied that the police were fascists-in-waiting, and the smartest ones recognised that homosexuality wasn’t a communicable disease. Although punk had been a rock’n’roll phenomenon and peculiarly white, it was shot through with black influence, especially reggae, the embrace of which by Britain’s musical youth reflected an unforced, widespread new belief in racial integration. The cool kids knew that Eric Clapton was a twat for agreeing with Enoch Powell. In short, this was not a generation of political regressives or inactivists, merely one disillusioned by and excluded from democratic two-party tennis.

  However, they were about to enter the most political period of their lives: the Thatcher years. For the duration of the 1980s, the Tories turned every man into an island: they divided; they ruled. In their utopian free market, their nation of shopkeepers, the manager – rather than the customer – was always right. She was only a greengrocer’s daughter, but Margaret Thatcher knew when she had the country’s plums in the palm of her hand. This Iron Lady, this Tinpot Dictator, defied anyone to disagree with her, and who dared lost. The miners, the Argies, the print workers, the dissident Tory wets, the GLC, the old, the sick and the Scottish. ‘Margaret Thatcher made me a socialist,’ Billy will now firmly state. ‘She was going to start changing all the things I’d grown up with and taken for granted.’

  Thatcher was not all bad. Her seemingly unassailable reign gave us alternative comedy – which was, admittedly, not all good – but it also gave us Spitting Image, Boys From The Black Stuff, ‘Shipbuilding’ and Billy Bragg. In creating a climate of self-help and shove-thy-neighbour, she nurtured oppression’s illegitimate son: defiance. Her benign form of dictatorship even allowed for a ‘safety valve’ of anti-establishment satire, comment and heckling. So, being left wing may not have been supercool in the 1980s, but there were some great gigs.

  The Falklands, the miners, Cruise, Tripoli, Wapping, poll tax … the Thatcher government gave budding insurrectionists so much to get insurrectionary about; such a wide range of pricks to kick against and statues to upend. And Billy Bragg, who would turn 30 in the year of Thatcher’s historic third election victory in 1987 (‘A fantastic triumph,’ she gloated), became arguably the most famous lefty in Britain – after perhaps Ben Elton and one or two of the shadow cabinet.

  By the time of the Tories’ fall from disgrace in May 1997, celebrity Labour supporters were ten a penny, although very few of them were as active, questioning or informed as Billy Bragg. By then, he was, significantly, a lapsed party member, but still a pragmatic Labour voter. On the night of 1 May, on the very stage of London’s Mean Fiddler where he’d seen Red Wedge’s hopes turn to ashes, it all began to swing the other way, and Billy announced ‘the end of the 80s’. This triumphant declaration was, in an odd way, tinged with irony – as the 80s had been a great decade for being in opposition. And a great decade for being Billy Bragg.

  * * *

  But it’s not about politics. It’s about this bloke.

  Ex-punk, ex-soldier, ex-member of the Labour Party; one or two people and institutions have been left behind in 40 years, but it’s the names and places that stayed with Billy Bragg that maketh the man. He failed his eleven-plus and never went to college. Punk failed him and he joined the army. He passed basic training with flying colours and left after 90 days with a two-fingered salute. In 1982, he chose his weapon – the guitar – travelled the world, met interesting people and knocked them dead.

  It’s about this bloke whose mum still calls him Stephen, but who’s known and loved as Braggy or Bill or the big-nosed bard from Barking in every corner of the globe (except maybe France). He’s typical of his fortysomething generation in that he entered the twenty-first century as a caring parent, a homeowner and a careful carnivore who voted New Labour in at the 1997 election. He’s unique in that he’s a recording artiste who owns every last note of his own thirty-year back catalogue, and has become the chosen torch-bearer for the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie’s memory on earth. While a true internationalist with a passport held together by inks of the world, he also represents that corner of some foreign field that will be forever England. He is a protester and a politico, but he doesn’t half write a good love song.

  Billy Bragg has b
een striking chords since 1974. Let’s hope his story strikes one, too. Up in his old Chiswick office in 1997, the Braggphone rings and switches automatically to the ansaphone. Beeep.

  ‘Hi. It’s Lis Roberts from Radio Four, and I’d very much like to talk to you about the possibility of Billy presenting a programme for us about the history of unemployment …’

  That sounds like something for the book, I’m thinking.

  Billy laughs, but not unkindly. ‘If it’s not fucking bad enough being unemployed, here’s Braggy to give you his thoughts.’

  1. LONDON A TO B

  A bit of history

  Onward we went, the sun appearing

  Painted with faint light the meadows nigh

  When Barking’s fair Monastic archway

  And grey old Church we can descry

  Louisa Fry, from a poem written about the joy of travelling east out of London in the early 1800s

  If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness

  Take the A road, the OK road that’s the best

  Go motorin’ on the A13

  If you’re looking for a thrill that’s new

  Take in Ford’s, Dartford Tunnel and the river too

  Go motorin’ on the A13

  Billy Bragg, from a song written about the joy of travelling east out of London in the late 1900s

  A BOOK ABOUT Billy Bragg is a book about London and about Essex and the world beyond. But not just the clichés, the picture postcards and the tourist traps – rather, the story behind the signposts, the history beneath the cartography.

  ‘History, as we know it, is a flyover over reality,’ Billy says. ‘You can find out the history of World War Two down our street if you ask the right people.’

  Billy Bragg is a keen historian. His career as an urbane folk singer and mobile political animal has taken him all around the world, where, in contrast to the rock’n’roll norm, he hasn’t spent most of his time sitting in hotel rooms and loitering around lobbies. A bit of that has been unavoidable, but, for him, a Billy Bragg tour is a free geography lesson, with a bit of local history, sociology and politics thrown in.