‘Cosmonaut’ marked a watershed in my songwriting, the moment when I stopped using the music of the 1960s as my inspiration and began to write songs in a contemporary style. In early 1977, I saw the Clash for the first time and realised that there was something really exciting happening right here and right now in my city. I cut my hair short, swapped my flares for some drainpipe trousers and began writing songs inspired by the burgeoning punk movement.
My tunes became shorter, chord progressions less standard and, where I had hitherto written lyrics aimed at endearing myself to the listener, I began to compose songs that revelled in their outsider status.
‘I Wanna Be A Cosmonaut’ was the title track of a four-song extended play record by Riff Raff released on Chiswick Records in June 1978
When I was growing up, milk was delivered in pint bottles to almost every household in Britain by a milkman. If more was needed, a note would be left in the neck of an empty milk bottle asking for ‘an extra pint today please’. The idea that the milk of human kindness – a phrase coined by Shakespeare – could be distributed in the same way gave me a simple metaphorical image on which to hang this song.
Originally entitled ‘Love versus the Incredible Sulk’, the first version involved a longer list of promises, including, ‘If you are busy, I will walk your dog’.
This is the most political song on my first album and, like my attitudes at the time, the politics are personal rather than ideological. Me and my schoolmates had been educated to work at the car factory but in the early 1980s a new type of worker was emerging from the service industries set up to support the booming financial sector. The deregulation that allowed them to get on the gravy train consigned many of those in manufacturing, who had relied on social solidarity to provide them with job security, to the scrapheap.
My reasoned political arguments against these young upwardly mobile professionals weren’t yet formulated. Instead, the best I could manage was this visceral response.
I’d gone round to my friend Neil’s house to watch Nottingham Forest on their way to winning the 1979 European Cup. His sister Jayne had a new boyfriend named Richard who she insisted on telling us all about, despite the fact that we were trying to watch the match. For some reason, possibly to annoy her for annoying us, I started taking notes. When I got home, I turned these scribbled phrases into this song. At some point in the evening, someone said ‘every alpha particle has a helium nucleus’ but unfortunately this didn’t quite fit the scansion of the melody, so I tweaked it a bit, which you’re not really allowed to do in physics. This might explain why I failed my science exams.
Look and Learn was a weekly educational magazine for children that sought to explain the world and all its complexity through the medium of cutaway drawings.
‘Richard’ was the first song I wrote that I felt was distinctive enough to be considered a Billy Bragg song, and the only Riff Raff song that survived my transition to solo performer. I utilised other songs that I’d written during the time I was in the band, but this was the only one we’d ever played live.
One night, stargazing on the way back from the pub, I saw two tiny spots of light, flying alongside one another, slowly cross the sky. I assumed they were satellites, but the incurable romantic in me saw two star-crossed lovers turned into shooting stars by their passion for one another. I hurried home and wrote this song.
You might ask why this one never made it into the Riff Raff set, given its later popularity. The simple reason is that the very next day I wrote a song called ‘The Kitten’, which immediately worked as a band number, somewhat overshadowing my previous day’s efforts. As a result, ‘A New England’ was left on the shelf. When I dusted it off for later use, I was reminded of a line from ‘The Leaves That Are Green’ by Simon and Garfunkel. I had been twenty-one years old when I first composed this song. Now here I was, a year later, rewriting it to fit my changed circumstances. ‘Time hurries on,’ I thought to myself as I borrowed Paul Simon’s words for my opening lines.
The message of the chorus is a simple one: it’s exhausting trying to change the world and create a new society. Sometimes you just need someone to hug.
Taking its title from the writings of French novelist Alexandre Dumas, ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ sprang from my attempt to work out the chords to the Sandy Denny song ‘Fotheringay’, about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587. I never did work out how to play it, but I uncovered an interesting chord progression, which developed into this song.
I was never a brilliant guitar player, so it was tricky for me to play at first, being almost all barre chords. I persevered with it because it utilised a little musical trick that would later feature in tracks like ‘The Saturday Boy’ and ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’. It involves dropping the forefinger of the barre chord a semitone on the bottom E string to create a pleasing passing chord. Wiggy taught me how to do it. I think he nicked it off a Faces record.
‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’ was the title of an article in Woman’s Realm, a weekly magazine that my mother read. ‘Top Tips for the Gas Cook’, ‘The Daily Drill for Beautiful Hair’ and ‘The Truth About Pain’ all came from the same source. ‘Successful Secrets of a Sexual Kind’ sounds to me like I made it up, but it may have appeared there too.
Anna Ford and Angela Rippon were the first female anchors on ITV and BBC news, respectively, and quickly became style icons for that generation of women.
‘Lover’s Town’ was a Riff Raff song that spoke of a time when it seemed I couldn’t go anywhere without being threatened or beaten up by some gang or other. Joining a band gave me my own gang and saved me from having to put myself in jeopardy in order to socialise. ‘Lover’s Town Revisited’ is also from the Riff Raff period, and was originally titled ‘Summer of the Evening’.
The Times newspaper ran a series of adverts in the early 1980s with the slogan ‘Have you ever wished that you were better informed?’ One showed Julius Caesar smiling on the steps of the Forum while conspirators crept up behind him, daggers drawn.
When the British newspapers were all printed in and around Fleet Street in London, ‘The Street of Shame’ was a term used to describe the tabloid end of the market.
One Saturday in the summer of 1984, I went down to Hammersmith to buy some swimming trunks and, while waiting for the bus home, saw this amazing guitar for sale in a shop window. It was a Burns Steer, possibly the very first one made, and I took it home with me. It came to define my guitar style, perhaps best described as ‘chop and clang’. I found it too late into the recording of Brewing Up for it to make much of an impression on the overall sound of the album, but the spooky lows of the bass strings and cutting treble of the tops on this cut could only come from the Steer.
Vauxhall was a British car company that was taken over by General Motors in 1925. In the late 1950s they produced the Velox PA SY, perhaps the most American-style car ever manufactured in the UK. It had tail fins, a three-part rear window and a massive bench seat in the front. When it came time for me to write a car song, there was only one model that would do the trick. The title is paraphrased from a Bob Dylan song.
A Saturday boy, or girl, is a youth of school age who works part time in a shop at the weekend. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, I was the Saturday boy at a hardware store called Guy Norris on Station Parade in Barking. I spent my days helping people to choose their wallpaper, weighing out nuts and bolts, and making copious cups of tea for the staff. The great attraction of the job was that the shop also contained a record store in the basement, where, as a member of staff, I got a discount. My weekly wages were invariably spent before I got them home.
When word got out that I worked at Guy Norris, I became popular with the girls in my class as someone who could get them cheap copies of Hunky Dory, but not popular enough to be considered as a slow-dance partner at the school disco.
‘La La Means I Love You’ by the Delfonics spent ten weeks in the UK charts in 1971 and was a popular slow dance at the school disco.
The Falklands War of 1982 came just a year after my short spell in the British Army, so it should be no surprise to find that when I chose to write a song about the conflict, it should be from a soldier’s perspective.
Salisbury Plain is the site of a huge military training area in southern England.
It was reported during the war that some Argentine troops were equipped with British-made weapons. Birmingham was traditionally the centre of British arms manufacturing.
The Sun newspaper was accused of gross insensitivity when it used the headline ‘GOTCHA!’ to report of the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives.
Three-quarters of the couplet ‘Me and the Corporal out on a spree / Damned from here to eternity’ is borrowed from the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Gentleman-Rankers’.
Swithin (or Swithun) was a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon saint-whose feast day is 15 July. An old proverb holds that, if it rains on St Swithin’s Day, it will continue to rain for the following forty days.
The song was originally called ‘St Crispin’s Day’, but for some reason I can’t recall, I changed its patron saint. This confusion is reflected in the fourth line of the song. The Battle of Agincourt was fought on St Crispin’s Day in 1415.
This is another track that benefited from the arrival of the Burns Steer. Its ringing tones between each verse were the basis for the song, sounding to me like the pealing of church bells.
Page 9 of the New Musical Express dated 24 March 1984 carried a full-page advert for the new single from Prefab Sprout – ‘Couldn’t Bear to Be Special’. Featuring a portrait of Prefabs front man Paddy McAloon looking pensive, the layout left wide empty margins on either side of the picture. I was travelling on a train when the lyrics to this song began to come to me and, with no notepaper to hand, I jotted them down in the vast open spaces of the advert.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 produced a sudden plunge in temperature of the Cold War. Reagan’s belligerent attitude to the Soviet Union, echoed in Europe by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, made the possibility of nuclear conflict seem highly likely. So tangible was this sense of impending doom that when, in October 1983, the ABC network screened a television film about a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was watched by over 100 million people in the US. The Day After remains the TV film with the largest audience in history, and is perhaps the most bleak.
In the UK, the government added to the general sense of unease by printing thousands of leaflets to be distributed in the event of nuclear war. Entitled ‘Protect and Survive’, they offered handy hints about how to build a nuclear shelter in your living room. The Soviet Union played its part too, nervously shooting down a Korean Air Lines flight that it felt had strayed too close to Soviet airspace in September 1983.
It was against this backdrop that I wrote ‘Between the Wars’. The terrible sense of drift towards world war, coupled with soaring unemployment and rising union militancy, gave the impression that we were back in the 1930s, and I peppered the lyrics with images from that period.
‘From cradle to grave’: those who built the welfare state in the post-war years believed that the government should provide all citizens with social security – free health care, free education and decent, affordable housing – ‘from the cradle to the grave’.
You meet this girl and you’re immediately attracted to her, not least because she’s really clever. You build a relationship, but then she goes off to university and meets new and exciting people. Where does that leave you?
By the time this song was released as the B-side of ‘Days Like These’ in December 1985, I had spent two years explaining my politics to people and dealing with the expectations that were aroused by my more polemical songs. At the same time I had to defend myself from the spurious idea that, because I sold a lot of records, I was somehow disqualified from talking about inequality. I wrote this as a response and still hold it to be my credo.
The title is a pun on the chorus of Spandau Ballet’s ‘Chant No. 1’.
An ex-girlfriend – whose name wasn’t Shirley – sent me a postcard to tell me that she’d dyed her hair, signing it ‘Greetings from the new brunette’. The phrase stuck with me and then attached itself to this song.
The 1984 miners’ strike was my political education, intro-ducing me not only to socialism but also to sexual politics. While I found this pretty straightforward on paper, it could prove a little tricky in relationships. I clearly had a lot to learn and this song attempts to chart that process.
‘Lie back and think of England’ is the Victorian mother’s advice to her daughter when asked what to do on her wedding night.
This dates from a time in my life when I was getting through relationships with the speed and commitment of a flat stone skimming over a lake. Throughout this period, there was one woman who kept banging on about getting married – my mum. This song is directed at her rather than at any specific girlfriend.
The Clash were the band that turned me on to radical politics – their support for Rock Against Racism led me to undertake my first political activism in 1978, marching through the streets of London in opposition to the neo-fascist National Front. Yet I’ve always felt that their failure to connect with mainstream politics had limited their ability to be a catalyst for change.
However, my belief in parliamentary democracy was severely tested during the Red Wedge campaign. Far from being committed to radical change, elements of the Labour Party were just time-serving hacks who had little interest in engaging with a new generation of potential Labour voters. While they might make a great show of displaying their differences with the Tories in the Commons, underneath the rhetoric, they were much the same.
This tune sprang out of the Burns Steer guitar and I wrote the lyrics on a cross-Channel ferry. Andy Kershaw, who was then my road manager, called his autobiography No Off Switch, and he wasn’t kidding. In the hope of getting a little peace and quiet, I told him I was writing a song and couldn’t chat anymore. I’d had the title running around in my head for a while so I duly wrote it on a piece of paper and, in the middle of the English Channel, these lyrics began to emerge.
Levi Stubbs was the lead singer of the Four Tops, who had numerous hits on the Motown label from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s. Most of those songs were provided by the songwriting and production team of Eddie Holland, Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier. Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong were another team of Motown songwriters, working most successfully with the Temptations.
After I’d spent a couple of weeks opening for the Smiths in the US, Morrissey commented that my act was ‘positively vaudevillian’. I don’t know if he meant it as a compliment, but I certainly took it as one. The fact that he’d noticed there was a touch of the music hall in what I did pleased me no end, as I’ve always felt I had as much in common with Max Miller as I do with Mick Jagger.
My grandmother used to play an upright piano at family gatherings and we’d all gather round to sing the old music-hall songs that she loved. It’s Kenny Craddock playing here, not my nan, but he does a decent job of capturing the spirit of her enthusiastic style.
During the miners’ strike, I shared the bill at many benefits with folk singers who performed songs written by Joe Hill. Born in Sweden in 1879, Hill emigrated to the US around the turn of the century and became active in the Industrial Workers of the World, the ‘one big union’. He was their primary songwriter, penning new lyrics to old tunes. One of his songs is called ‘There Is Power in a Union’.
While travelling around the country during the year of the strike, I got the notion to write a song in Hill’s style, so, borrowing the tune from an American Civil War ballad variously known as ‘Rally Round the Flag’ or ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’, I appropriated Hill’s title and wrote some new lyrics. I’m proud to say that my version ended up next to Joe’s in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.
This song takes its title from a leaflet produced by the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana in 1965 that proclaimed ‘Help Save the Youth of America – Don’t Buy Negro Records’. Offensive though this shocking piece of segregationist propaganda was, it got me thinking that there were other things that the youth of America needed saving from – not least their leader’s seeming determination to initiate a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union.
One of the painful paradoxes of being an itinerant worker is that you develop a longing to be home with those you love. Making my living as a musician was what I’d always wanted to do and I really enjoyed touring the world. But such was the nature of my success in the mid-’80s that I’d only be home for a week or two before I was headed off on tour again. Inevitably, that kind of schedule plays havoc with your relationships.
Jack Ruby was the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald was the man who shot John F. Kennedy.
The Lenin Shipyards in Gdan´sk, Poland, was the birthplace of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc.
Pregnancy, if not planned, can knock the wheels off a love affair, putting all the pressure on the woman, leaving the man bewildered, unschooled. Like so much in relationships, consent is the key to a happy ending.
If you’d have walked in and caught the two of us, there on the floor, discussing naked men, you’d have known right away what was happening.
I put a lot of work into this song, trying to distil the frustrations of being trapped in your parents’ world while you’re desperate to escape into your own. On the very last day of mixing, I recall lying on the floor of Livingstone Studios trying to finish the lyrics so that I could record the vocal and complete the album. It was long past midnight when we finally added the sample of ‘Jerusalem’ to the fade out. The next morning I left for back-to-back tours of Japan and East Germany. Happy days.
A friend lived next door to a professional witch, who placed a card in the window of the local newsagents offering to cast spells that could make someone fall in love with you. One night we were round his house and heard the faint sound of chanting coming through the walls. ‘Sounds like she’s got a new spell,’ said our host, and I began wondering what it would be like to be the subject of one of her enchantments.
When Johnny Marr came to visit during the Taxman sessions, I invited him to play on ‘Greetings to the New Brunette’. While the engineer was setting up mics around him, Johnny began to play a beautiful instrumental version of ‘Walk Away Renée’ on my Martin D18 acoustic. We liked it so much that we recorded a take and I wrote the monologue as I travelled home that night on the Tube from Wood Green to Chiswick Park.
Fittingly, this became the B-side of ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’, the Four Tops having scored a hit with ‘Walk Away Renée’ in 1968.
Workers Playtime is my break-up album, mostly written during the collapse of a truly titanic love affair. For once, my songs weren’t enough to hold her attention, so maybe painting a picture might help.
I live by the sea now, so this kind of thing never happens.
You only have to see old soldiers get together to know that the bonds forged in the heat of battle go much deeper than those found in civilian life.
The Mint Juleps were a female a capella sextet from East London who supported me on a couple of tours. When they asked me to write them a song, I thought I’d try to come up with something in the style of the great Sam Cooke. For whatever reason, they never got around to recording it, so I cut it instead.
Producer Joe Boyd came up trumps when he invited Danny Thompson, ex-bass player of Pentangle, to join the Workers Playtime sessions. Danny, who had backed John Martyn and Tim Buckley, plays with great sensitivity and has a wicked sense of humour. Joe’s choice of drummer was not so successful. When he bailed after the first day, Wiggy, who was working with me on the album, suggested we put out a call to Mickey Waller, who had played on the classic Rod Stewart albums that we had worshipped as teenagers.
He duly appeared, and while setting up his drum kit for this number, he and Danny, trying to think where they had met before, came to the conclusion that the last time they’d played together was at the recording of ‘Maggie May’ – Rod Stewart’s biggest hit. Me and Wiggy looked at each other and were teenagers again. We couldn’t stop grinning for the rest of the evening.
You know how it is, things come to a head and you go down to the pub to try to sort it all out amicably and suddenly the whole thing blows up in your face.
I once got buttonholed about this song by a trio of feminists who didn’t think I should be writing songs from a female perspective. ‘You’ll never know what it really feels like to be the victim of male violence’, they told me, and I had to agree. However, I didn’t write this song for women – there are plenty of powerful songs by women that address this issue. I wrote it for men, that they should hear from another man that violence towards women is never acceptable, under any circumstances.
When I went to Moscow in 1987, they put me up in the Hotel Ukraina, a grandiose slice of high Soviet architecture. My room contained a freestanding bath and every morning I would submerge myself there while listening to Astral Weeks and sipping Red Zinger tea made with boiling water from a sturdy bedside samovar. It was my way of easing myself into the strangeness of the Soviet Union.
The one annoying thing about my stay there was that I had trouble getting the soap to lather. I never worked out whether this was down to the hardness of the Moscow water, the cheapness of the hotel soap or because communism was inherently inferior to capitalism.
To maintain the bath-related theme, this song is the sound of a relationship going down the plughole.
Between Marx and marzipan was where I spent much of the 1980s, never feeling totally comfortable at either of these extremes: one was too bitter, the other too sweet a position from which to observe the world. I was always happiest writing songs from a place where a wry sense of humour could be used to shed light on relationships and ideals that never quite delivered on their initial promise.
Susannah York was an English actress who rose to fame in the 1960s.
And Mary, the tall girl, the barefoot girl, the little black cloud in a dress, the only one, the price I paid, the little time bomb – she was, to everybody else’s dismay, the object of my doomed affections.
Workers Playtime wasn’t only a break-up album, it was also my post-political album. The 1984 miners’ strike had given artists the chance to be polemical and I grabbed that opportunity with both hands, doing my best to push the pop and politics agenda, culminating in the Red Wedge initiative supporting the Labour Party at the 1987 general election.
But the miners had lost and Mrs Thatcher had been re-elected on a landslide. The barricades had been overrun and several trips behind the Iron Curtain had tempered my enthusiasm for seeing politics in black and white terms. Most of all, I’d become starkly aware of the limits of trying to change the world by singing songs.
Despite all that, I still believed that music had a role to play in offering a different perspective on things, from the minutiae of relationships to the great geo-political arguments of the day. This song was my way of owning up to the ambiguities of being a political pop star while stating clearly that I still believed in Sam Cooke’s promise that a change was gonna come.
Jack Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States, and Jacqueline was his wife. Together they were said to have created a ‘Camelot’ at the White House between 1960 and 1963.
Robert Oppenheimer is known as the ‘Father of the Atom Bomb’ for his role in the design and construction of the first of such weapons.
The Cheese Pavilion is a venue near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, where I did a gig in the 1980s. Part of a large agricultural showground, its main purpose is to house regular contests to find the finest cheeses in England.
‘It’s a mighty long way down rock ’n’ roll’ is a line from the chorus of ‘All the Way from Memphis’ by Mott the Hoople, a song about the disconcerting paradoxes of pop stardom.
I was really pleased when the Berlin Wall came down and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe began to melt away. However, I wasn’t so happy when Western triumphalism sought to use this as an excuse to tip all aspects of left-wing culture into the trash. The people of Eastern Europe had been liberated from totalitarianism but they had not been freed from exploitation. Songs of solidarity would still be needed by those struggling for a fairer society. Encouraged by Pete Seeger, I undertook the task of updating this most traditional of leftist songs.
Phil Ochs was perhaps the most polemical of all the singer-songwriters who emerged from the protest song movement of the mid-’60s. As Bob Dylan moved away from the Woody Guthrie tradition, Ochs’s material became more topical, focusing on support for the civil-rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.
His embrace of these causes was severely tested by the events of 1968; the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, followed by the brutal suppression of anti-war protesters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that year, had a profound effect on Ochs. Having identified so powerfully with the idea that music could change the world, when that turned out to be a false hope he took it personally. He failed to release any more albums after 1970 and took his own life six years later.
This song is based on ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’, written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson in 1936.
There are some people whose politics are based on the assumption that the glass is always half-empty, that the world is out to get them, that everybody is motivated by the same selfish impulses that they themselves are prey to. If you hope to make a better world for everyone, you have to have a degree of trust in humanity.
The Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) was the German name for the former Eastern Bloc state of East Germany.
Gennadi Gerasimov was foreign affairs spokesman for Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev during the years of perestroika and glasnost. Witty and urbane, he was markedly different from the standard stodgy Soviet apparatchik, and gave us the first tangible sign that change was coming to Russia.
Cindy Sherman is an American conceptual artist whose work mainly consists of photographs of herself in different roles and costumes. Her early black and white photos purported to be stills from imaginary movies, but in the late ’80s she turned to colour, and the images became disturbing, hinting at a macabre underbelly to the American dream.
In April 1991, I was in Washington DC when a friend invited me to look at some drawings by Woody Guthrie that were held at the Smithsonian/Folkways Archive. I had no idea that Woody was an artist, and his sketches really impressed me, particularly one depicting a dancing woman. It was only a few lines of faded watercolour, but it had such life, such joyous motion. Woody had written below the figure ‘You Woke Up My Neighborhood’.
A week later I was in Athens, Georgia, to record some songs with REM. When Peter Buck asked me if I had any ideas for a tune that he’d been working up, Woody’s title made a pretty good chorus.
The sudden appearance of HIV/AIDS in the ’80s meant that everyone had to consider the possibility of life-changing consequences every time they had sex with a new partner.
Peter Knowles played for Wolverhampton Wanderers in the late ’60s and was a striker in the George Best style. At the height of his career, he announced that he was giving up football to become a Jehovah’s Witness.
On a long journey between gigs in Spain, the lyrics of this song began to form in my head. Apart from the driver and myself, everyone else was asleep and my guitar was buried under the luggage at the back of the van. As the images continued to come, I desperately needed a tune to set them to if the moment of inspiration was not to escape me. So in the dark of the van, I began to compose this song to the melody of Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’.
When I got to my hotel all I needed to do was to come up with a new tune that had the same metre as Dylan’s song.
This lyric concerns the scourge of violent hooliganism and belligerent nationalism displayed by supporters of the England football team at international tournaments in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
The title of the song is a reference to the excuse offered by the football authorities whenever trouble broke out – that it is a minority of fans who behave like this. ‘The Few’ is also the name that Churchill gave to the RAF pilots who defended England during the Battle of Britain in 1940: ‘Never, in the field of human conflict, has so much been owed by so many to so few.’
In recognition of the role that ‘Desolation Row’ played in the creation of this work, the first four lines are a parody of the opening lines of the eighth verse of Dylan’s song. The Baby Brotherhood and the Inter-City Crew were gangs of football hooligans.
The line ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ is adapted from ‘The English Flag’, a poem by Rudyard Kipling published in 1891.
The Empire Stadium was the original name of Wembley Stadium, built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924.
John Bull is a fictional figure said to be the national personification of Great Britain, in the way that Uncle Sam personifies the USA.
None of my uncles ever played for Red Star Belgrade, I don’t look anything like Robert De Niro and a Mitsubishi Zero is an aircraft, not a car, and I’ve never driven one.
Poetic licence is a wonderful thing, but should be used sparingly.
The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 was the largest terror attack in British history. I was already an apprehensive flier, and the reports of children’s toys and other everyday objects being found in the fields around the village weeks after the event had a deep effect on me. In an attempt to reconcile my feelings, I sat down one night to write a song about the tragedy, utilising a descending tune that I’d worked out on guitar some months before.
Frustratingly, the lyrics weren’t really saying anything profound until I came up with the couplet ‘I closed my eyes and when I looked / Your name was in the memorial book’. These words took me completely by surprise. Trying to find my way into the mood of the bereaved relatives of the Lockerbie victims, I had unwittingly opened a door to my own bereavement.
My father, Denis Bragg, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in July 1975. The doctor in charge of his case suggested that the best way to deal with this devastating news was not to speak about it to my father. As much in shock as anything else, my mother and I followed this advice, to our eternal regret.
When he died fifteen months later, aged fifty-two, we just carried on not speaking about it, not to each other, not to anyone. It became my way of dealing with the grief. Everyone who knew me was aware that I’d lost my father, but no one knew how I felt about it.
When his ashes were interred, Dad’s name was written in a large book at the cemetery, open every year on the day that he died. My mother, my brother and I would always visit on the anniversary and go together to view the memorial book. This imagery had somehow bubbled up from my subconscious.
Those two lines caught me unawares and I looked at them on the paper for some while. I thought about turning away from the gravel path that led to the crematorium, back to the safer ground of writing about something that happened to someone else. But my eighteen-year-old self was calling, and I walked beside him again, through the funeral service and the flood of feelings that beset me that day.
And I’m glad I did. The song was written in a cathartic thirty minutes or so and when it was all there on the paper, the spell that had bound me for so many years was broken. I knew that when I played this song live, I would have to talk about what happened to our family when my father died.
So when people tell me that this song helped them to come to terms with the loss of a loved one, I always smile, because it had exactly the same effect on me.
Any hopes that the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact would herald a period of peace were dashed by the invasion of Iraq in 1990. It’s almost as if, having lost an enemy, the West immediately went searching for some new adversary to justify continued arms spending in a post-Cold War environment. This song was written in the lead-up to that conflict.
The involvement of members of the Smiths and REM in the making of Don’t Try This at Home got my record company very excited. Kicking off with the big, radio-friendly sound of ‘Sexuality’, they felt this album gave them the opportunity to turn me into a proper pop star who scored regular hit singles. After all, they’d recently got the Housemartins to the top of the charts, why shouldn’t they do the same for me?
Early on in the recording process, Johnny Marr and I had written ‘Sexuality’ together, which he then took back to Manchester and turned into a fabulous monster of a pop song. That set the bar pretty high for the rest of the record and I did my best to create tracks that lived up to Johnny’s vision.
On this, the last cut of the album, I felt that we’d made a great record and had every right to finish things off by going completely over the top. Big stomping tune, double-tracked vocals and yes, that’s me playing the deranged guitar solo during the fade out. And those lyrics? To be frank, they’re nonsense, as was the idea that I could ever become a genuine pop star.
My early records were predominantly sold on vinyl and every single released needed a B-side, which would help sell the record if it wasn’t a track that was available elsewhere. With this in mind, I usually cut two or three extra tracks when recording an album. Sometimes, however, you’d go into a studio to make a single and have to come up with a B-side on the spot.
This is one of those songs, written from scratch at Fort Apache Studios in Boston, where I was recording a new version of ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’ with my band, the Red Stars. We were enjoying the freedom to throw ideas about on the session, and I think that comes across in the performance.
I wrote this song for a movie called Mad Love, about a young woman with suicidal tendencies. It’s based on some words I wrote on hearing of the death of Kurt Cobain. Kirsty MacColl recorded a beautiful version of this song for the movie soundtrack.
This song was the opening track on my first album for five years and, in that period, many things had changed. Prime Minister Thatcher had been deposed, the Cold War was over and, most importantly, I had become someone’s dad.
The collapse of the Iron Curtain brought to an end a bloody cycle of European history that had begun in August 1914. The fall of Margaret Thatcher was also a cause for celebration. However, the failure of the Labour party to defeat her successor, John Major, in 1992 broke the hearts of many who had fought so hard against the Tories in the ’80s. For others, it signalled that no one cared about collectivism anymore. With communism defeated, they viewed solidarity as an out-of-date idea to be scorned. History had ended, someone declared, and we had won! Break out the champagne – we don’t have to pretend to care anymore.
From now on, having a social conscience was for losers. Soon the news stands were full of magazines that celebrated a culture of excess couched in an infantile laddism. Friends who had paid lip service to the cause were to be found eating prawn cocktail sandwiches in private corporate boxes at the football. These people weren’t necessarily swapping sides in the debate – they just didn’t think that politics really mattered anymore. Style was reasserting its dominance over content and politics was becoming less about principles, more about presentation.
What was clear from the early ’90s was that if the left hoped to hold onto its ideals in the face of such momentous change, we were going to need to find a new way of articulating what we believed in. The language of Marxism, which had framed our discourse for much of the twentieth century, no longer spoke to people about their everyday lives. However, the problems that Marx identified had not been resolved. The term ‘socialism’ had become tainted by totalitarianism and if we hoped to make a case for a fairer society, we needed to go back to basic principles and create a new language. I’ve long held that, in order to be effective, socialism has to be a form of organised compassion, like a national health service, free to all at point of use. Socialism without a heart is just hollow dogma.
The imagery of the song is based on an episode in the life of English visionary artist William Blake, who claimed to have seen a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye as a child.
The Great Wen is a disparaging nickname for London, coined in the 1820s by William Cobbett. A wen is a form of cyst.
I was never a believer in Cyril Connolly’s dictum that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, but after our son Jack was born in late 1993, I did wonder if it would have an effect on my songwriting. Connolly may have had a sour view of parenthood, but there is something in what he says, because if the experience of becoming a parent doesn’t change your life completely, then you’re probably not doing it properly.
I was fortunate in that parenthood changed my life for the better. After ten years on the road, I was ready for a break, so I stopped gigging and became a happy house-daddy. I barely picked up the guitar for a year and when I did I often found that the tunes that I spontaneously strummed bore a strong resemblance to those heard in Jack’s favourite, must-watch-it-ten-times-a-day singalong video, Spider in the Bath. Eventually, my songwriting instincts reasserted themselves and I wrote ‘Brickbat’, elated to find that parenthood could be as much of an inspiration as my turbulent singleton years.
The Last Night of the Proms is a concert of patriotic classical music held every year at the Royal Albert Hall in London, accompanied by much jingoistic flag waving.
When I was born in late 1957, the Soviet Union had just fired the first shot of the space race and their duel with the United States illuminated my childhood. Each new mission was marked in my school books with numerous drawings of astronauts and cosmonauts circling the earth.
When our son was born, the first word he learned to say after ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ was ‘moon’. Before he could walk, he could point to the bright sphere in the night sky and identify it by name. It reminded me of my own childhood infatuation with our nearest astral neighbour and inspired me to write this song.
I wrote this on Valentine’s Day 1995. I was in the studio that day, recording William Bloke, and on the way there I came up with some lyrics that fitted nicely to a tune that I’d composed while playing guitar to amuse Jack. That morning my partner, Juliet, gave me a book of love poems in which she had marked a particular work: ‘I Wish I Could Remember That First Day’ by Christina Rossetti. It was a fitting choice as neither of us had much recollection of the first time that we met, some eight years before we got together as a couple.
Florence Ballard, one of the founding members of the Supremes, struggled with alcoholism and depression, dying in poverty in 1976 aged thirty-two.
Football references were all the rage when laddism took hold in the early ’90s, and metaphors about the beautiful game had often peppered my love songs. When Johnny Marr offered me this tune, I decided to collect up all the ones I had knocking about in my notebooks and string them together in this lyric.
In medieval Europe, there were no weekends – workers toiled every day of the week except Sunday, the Sabbath. Along with the Christian festivals of Easter, Whitsun and Christmas, workers could also expect to have a day off on the feast day of a saint with a local or occupational connection. These days seldom ran consecutively, so there were very few weekend-style breaks in the work cycle.
In order to enjoy a two-day break, factory workers in nineteenth-century Britain began staying at home on the first day of the week, claiming they were celebrating the feast of St Monday. This initiative marked the beginning of the struggle for the five-day week.
Colin MacInnes’s sharp observations of the changes wrought in ’50s England by the influx of West Indian immigrants and American pop culture reveal him to be nothing less than the hip George Orwell. Unlike most commentators of the time, MacInnes welcomed these new arrivals and celebrated them in novels such as Absolute Beginners and Mr Love & Justice.
In December 1957, he wrote an article about the first English pop star, Tommy Steele, entitled ‘Young England, Half English’, in which he recognised that Steele’s audience, wearing foreign-style clothes, drinking foreign pop and listening to a foreign music were not nearly as English as their parents were, at least in terms of culture. The idea that each generation modifies national identity by adding new cultural dimensions, often borrowed from overseas, ran contrary to the traditionalist notion that Englishness was a static, narrowly defined construct.
The band that was backing me at the time, referred to collectively as the Blokes, had a long pedigree of playing world music. They provided me with the ideal setting for a song that explored this issue. During a soundcheck, they were jamming an Algerian folk song, the chorus of which translated as ‘Oh my country, oh my country, what a beautiful country you are’ – the band sing the original Arabic between verses (‘Le-li Umma le-li-ya, bledi g’desh akh!’). I borrowed that tune and wrote this song.
Essex Man is a term used to describe a stereotypical working class rightwinger, of the sort who voted for Margaret Thatcher. I was born in Essex.
Marmite is the brand name of a savoury spread made from yeast left over from the process of brewing beer. Its popularity is largely confined to the British Isles and, even here, people tend to love it or hate it. Soldiers are thin strips of toast that can be dipped into the top of a soft-boiled egg.
Bubble ’n’ squeak is a Cockney speciality, consisting of left-over vegetables from yesterday’s dinner, traditionally potatoes and cabbage, mixed together and pan-fried.
Morris dancing is a form of traditional English dance for men involving bells, hankies and flower-decked hats.
The three lions on the badge of the England football team come originally from the arms of William of Normandy, who conquered England in 1066.
Over the past thirty years, globalisation has made it possible for companies to place themselves beyond the reach of tax regimes while moving production to countries where workers have few rights. As a result, governments and unions have increasingly found it difficult to hold corporations to account. At the same time, supranational financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have sought to speed this process up by insisting on the privatisation of public services.
In recent years, those who believe that people should be more important than profits have come together to protest against economic decisions being made behind closed doors.
Modern Britain is a highly centralised state. Power and the ability to wield it are jealously guarded by the Westminster Parliament. While some powers have been devolved to the Scots and the Welsh, no arrangements have been made for giving power to the English.
Part of the problem is the ambiguous nature of the English identity. Without a border between themselves and Westminster, the English have difficulty working out where Britishness ends and Englishness begins. Devolution has inspired the people of Scotland to reimagine themselves as a confident, outward-looking nation. Meanwhile, England continues to dream about the British Empire and the Second World War, while spending money to keep up the pretence of being a world power.
The British state came into being just over 300 years ago and, in each century, the nations that make up its constituent parts have changed. It looks likely that this century will also ring changes. Scottish independence just might be the wake-up call that the English sorely need.
Gilbert and George are conceptual artists who live in London. Their recent works feature Union Jacks and naked pictures of themselves.
During the recording of England, Half English I went to a Sunday boot sale with Ben Mandelson, my guitar player. We found a stall with loads of seven-inch singles and, to our delight, they were mostly records that were big during our schooldays. We kept pulling out the classic ones and saying to one another ‘Remember this?’
Gradually, it dawned on me that these weren’t just a random bunch of old records for sale; this was clearly someone’s personal collection, once the centre of their teenage universe. We were rummaging through the adolescence of Minky MacMuffin, her name written in biro on every sleeve.*
I looked up at the vendor; she was a pale, winnowy woman about the same age as me. ‘Are you Minky MacMuffin?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘Yes’ she said, turning her head away from my gaze and biting her lip. Ben and I pretended to carry on looking at the records in the box, but both of us knew we’d be buying no vinyl here.
The Yarra is the river the runs through Melbourne. When I first toured Australia in 1987, my agent hailed from the city, as did my support band, the wonderful Weddings, Parties, Anything. As a result, something of the place rubbed off on me. It’s a temperate city in a very hot land and, as is mentioned in the song, the fact that they provide a brolly – an umbrella – in your hotel room somehow makes me feel at home.
Flinders Street runs parallel with the Yarra through the centre of the city.
‘That funny game they play’ is a reference to Australian Rules Football, first played in Melbourne in 1859. To say it’s a full contact sport doesn’t really capture the enthusiasm with which its players come into contact with each other.
The Saints is the nickname of St Kilda, one of nine professional Aussie Rules teams from the Melbourne area. The Magpies are their deadly rivals, Collingwood.
‘Barracking’ is Australian slang for supporting.
Sunday Too Far Away is an Australian movie about a group of itinerant sheep shearers in the Outback who go on strike.
The Hammers is the nickname of West Ham United, the football team from East London that I support. ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ is their anthem.
Although our bondage trousers no longer fit us, those of us who were touched by the fire of punk still find ways to hang onto that DIY attitude.
As far as I’m concerned, the best kind of Billy Bragg songs are both personal and political. ‘I Keep Faith’ is a good example. Depending on how I introduce this song, it can be either a song of personal commitment or a collective call to arms.
While most love songs concern themselves with the euphoria of newly found love, one of the great challenges in life is how to maintain a long-term relationship with those we love the most.
Sometimes you just have to say it plain.
In the first month of 2012, I headed to Los Angeles to make a new album under the encouraging eye of my friend Joe Henry. For many reasons, it felt as if I was making a new start, having lived through a time of great changes, both personally and professionally. This song, written and recorded on the final day of the sessions, seemed to sum up my sense that, after a period of things coming to an end, I was now moving into a world of new beginnings and exciting possibilities.
There is an old saying that states, ‘To a man with a hammer in his hand, everything looks like a nail.’ For some us, that nail will never go in straight, no matter how many times we hit it.
In 2011, I was invited to contribute a song to a project marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Sixty-six artists were each asked to write a performance piece based on one of the books of the Bible. ‘Send me one from the New Testament,’ I told the director when he asked me to choose a book ‘You know, one of the books where Jesus is being a socialist.’
He sent me the Book of Luke, which contains the verse, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ Or as the King James Version has it: ‘And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.’ That didn’t scan quite so well, so I went with the New International Version.
In March 2007, comedian Phill Jupitus invited me to be a guest on his final radio show for BBC 6 Music, where he’d been the breakfast DJ since its inception. As a special treat, the show was to be broadcast from the kitchen of his home in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. As it was an early start, I spent the night before in his spare bedroom, which was fine until, at 7 a.m.,
I was blasted out of bed by him kicking off the show. I stumbled downstairs to be greeted with a kitchen full of his family and friends, and the news that I wasn’t due on air for two hours. I’m not much of a morning person, so I grabbed a mug of coffee and a slice of toast, and went to ease myself into the day in the empty living room. Propped up in the corner was Phill’s brand new Taylor acoustic guitar.
It’s a widely held belief among singer-songwriters that new guitars always have songs in them and, picking it up, I found my hands playing these lovely descending chords. In no time at all, I’d written this song of parting. When I performed it live on air, an hour or so later, it was the very first time that anyone other than myself had heard the song.
The changes that have occurred in the record industry since I started writing songs forty years ago are immense. In the late ’70s, the Sex Pistols and the Clash were playing regular gigs in the city where I lived, but I had to rely on the weekly music press to find out about them and, unless John Peel played them on his late night radio show, I had no way of hearing their music. And if I wanted to express my views, as a nineteen-year-old with no qualifications, I had little choice but to learn to play guitar, write some songs and negotiate a path via the NME and the BBC.
The Internet has changed all that, and for the better. Instead of having to read about music that doesn’t interest you in the weekly press, you can now set your own preferences to receive news about your favourite artists or explore musical genres beyond the confines of the mainstream.
The most empowering aspect of this new age of information is that everyone can make a contribution to the debate, democratising the formation of opinion. If you’re trying to offer an original perspective of the world by joining the dots in a different way to everybody else, you have more dots than ever to play with and multiple angles on them.
But this democratisation is a double-edged sword: information technology empowers the pessimists as well as the optimists, and there will always be those who feel empowered by drawing a penis on every pretty picture they find.
Confronted by the darker side of humanity that has been revealed by the truthful mirror of social media, I’ve come to the conclusion that the real enemy of those of us who want to create a better world is not capitalism or conservatism, but cynicism: the dogged belief that nothing will ever change for the better, that everybody is only in it for themselves and that no one cares about this stuff anyway. I’m out to prove that idea wrong with every line I write.
When I was approached to write a song to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in 2012, I was immediately struck by the problem of how to bring a fresh angle to a story with which everyone was familiar. Half-joking, I suggested to the producer that I might write a song from the perspective of the iceberg that sank the ship. He thought it was a great idea, and so I started to consider the journey that the iceberg was on, a continual cycle of transformation and movement that lasted millennia. The principle behind the song is one that serves as perhaps the best justification for creating any kind of art – the urge to articulate something from a different perspective, one that you don’t see reflected anywhere else.
* Names have been changed to protect those involved.