Childhood, 1957–1973
Got ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ by The New Seekers – good riddance to ‘Ernie’! I have been banned from receiving any pocket money until I get a haircut!
Diary of Stephen Bragg, aged fourteen
STEPHEN BRAGG WAS born in Upney Hospital (nowadays Barking Hospital). In the same year, Bill Haley and his Comets came to Britain; ‘Supermac’ became Prime Minister; Humphrey Bogart died of throat cancer and the Russians sent a dog into space.
Five years later, Stephen’s brother David was born. They grew up in a very matriarchal family with ‘an infinitesimal number of aunties’ and, as a result, cousins galore. Though Dennis Bragg, from Protestant stock, was an only child, marrying Marie gained him five sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law. Dennis worked as a chargehand in a warehouse; Marie was a cookery technician at night classes at the polytechnic. She later delivered leaflets and samples around the East End for ‘a bit of extra money’, and then worked at the Nat West sorting house in Aldgate.
In the spirit of clarity, I will refer to Billy as Billy from day one, even though he was Stephen or Steve throughout his school years, and adopted Billy only for the purposes of punk. Bizarrely, he was known by some as ‘Doog’, short for Dougal, after he changed schools in 1969, a nickname he cleverly gave himself to prevent the old epithet of ‘Big Nose’ plaguing him there. His name was Stephen, and he shall be called Billy.
Despite the East End Catholic background on his mother’s side, there was little religion in Billy’s early life outside Cub Scout church parade (which was a strictly Methodist affair, i.e. very few laughs). Marie never went to mass, due to the stigma of having married a Protestant (‘a bit like becoming a Satanist’); although when Dennis died of cancer in October 1976, she drew a lot of strength from her faith and it helped her through a supremely difficult patch.
Marie’s sister Pat and her husband Don had a farm in Warwickshire, and this is where the Braggs would regularly spend their holidays. Dennis helped with the harvest, driving the tractor, while the kids pitched in by trailing the combine harvester, stacking hay bales. A ride on top of the bales aboard the cart was their reward, before hopping off and unstacking them again. As a real treat, they were given a can of petrol and allowed to ‘burn off’ the stubble. Brilliant! ‘All my best holiday memories as a kid are from up there.’
Back home, in the stained glass above the front door of the Bragg house, it said ‘Stanley’. (It still does, actually.) Next door it said ‘Livingstone’, and further down ‘Park’ – the houses were all named after great explorers. Mungo Park followed the River Niger and wrote Travels In The Interior Of Africa in 1799. Sir Henry Morton Stanley traced the Congo to the sea almost a century later, and was famously sent by the New York Herald to find missionary David Livingstone up the Nile in 1871. Exotic gentlemen indeed, but they all started somewhere like Park Avenue.
Billy had a happy, family-oriented childhood, with noisy, overpopulated Christmases (as well as his four ‘farm cousins’, there were a further eight on Marie’s side), sing-songs, and many a tale from Dad about his time in India at the end of the Second World War. Billy’s first point of purchase as a young explorer was Barking Park, a 76-acre, tree-filled wonderland conveniently situated ‘over the back’. The crowbar-shaped Park Avenue can be seen on local maps made as far back as 1807, when the park didn’t even exist in name, just as a recreation ground with a lake. It opened its park gates officially in April 1898, and was a typically well-groomed municipal showcase throughout the early 1900s.
A river runs through it – or at least, a tributary of the Roding does, called Loxford Water – in which Billy and pals would fish with nets for tiddlers, and over which they would throw stones at the Ilford kids during border skirmishes. The boating lake was another pivotal landmark in the happy wanderers’ world, four feet deep, and drained for two months every winter. It was, and presumably still is, traditional for every child to fall in – although the water these days is full of horrible green gunk. Billy managed to fall in twice as a boy: the first time, he was simply running and didn’t stop in time; the second, he was ‘doing something nefarious with bangers’ (fireworks, not prostitutes or sausages) in the boathouse with his mate John Murphy, and fell off the fence into the lake. Painfully enough, it was drained at the time, and he split his head open, which required three stitches courtesy of King George’s Hospital (and a couple in his elbow for luck). He paid the waters a sentimental third visit aged 21, when, out walking the family Labrador Lucky during a freeze, he stepped on to the ice and went straight through. You can take the boating lake out of the boy, but …
More adventurous childhood manoeuvres took Billy as far as the marshland around Barking Creek, the link between the Thames and the Roding, where it’s said King Alfred once sailed in longboats. This tributary of the Thames was vital to early Saxon settlement in Barking when it became a busy fishing port, but today it is conspicuously free of traffic, aside from the odd car wreck dumped in the adjoining swamp. It was all marshland round here when Billy was a lad. (In fact, the area’s still marshy enough to give the residents of new housing in Beckton a problem with subsidence and malaria.) This was as far as young Billy ever ventured: he remembers chancing upon ‘a suitcase full of nudey books, all warped from the rain. You had to be careful round here, though, it wasn’t your neck of the woods.’
At the mouth of Barking Creek stands Barking’s own flood barrier, a blue guillotine that is designed to come down after the Thames Barrier at Woolwich has successfully diverted rising flood waters and sent an almighty splashback up towards Essex. In the 70s, flood-warning practice around here was common, as it’s below sea level. The dread sound of the siren meant buses to Ilford, which is higher up, in more ways than one. Billy’s nan reckoned that’s why the good folk of Ilford always voted Tory. ‘All kippers and curtains,’ she would say.
Other less savoury aspects of the Barking wetlands in history include a nearby guano factory, which basically made explosives out of bird shit, and teething trouble with the Victorian-built Northern Outfall Sewer, whose macabre effluent was repeatedly delivered up Barking Creek by the tide. In the late 1800s, a pleasure boat sank in these waters and its occupants died not from drowning but from ingesting raw sewage.
Billy would wait for the Woolwich ferry here on a Sunday afternoon with his dad. Looking out over the Thames towards Shooters Hill in Kent, Dad used to tell him, ‘That’s where Julius Caesar stood and looked across, and didn’t like what he saw. He saw us.’
Marshlands included, Billy’s childhood stomping ground hasn’t altered a great deal since the 1960s. Certainly, Park Avenue is frozen in time, and Barking Park is as it ever was. A local artist has written ‘FUCK’ on the side of the boathouse; the Ilford Lane end of Billy’s street has been blocked off to form a cul-de-sac; and what used to be the newsagents from where he did his paper round is now a mosque.
To supplement his weekly paper money, the enterprising Billy fetched shopping for an old geezer called Will Vernon at 152, Park Avenue. A former scoutmaster, he was badly gassed at the Somme and couldn’t get out of the house like he used to. (Number 152 is locally famous for copping a direct hit in the Second World War, when the poor lodger who lived in the attic was catapulted right across the street.) Helping out old Mr Vernon was worth a shilling a week. Subsequent local errands bumped it up to half a crown.
In 1971, aged thirteen, Billy enjoyed an early whiff of fame, plucked from the universal routine of conkers and V-necks and offered a brief glimpse of what it feels like to be special. He wrote a poem for school called ‘This Child’, about Jesus saving the world. Written by candlelight during a power cut, when he handed it in his teacher asked him where he’d copied it from. Nowhere, he assured them. The school got in touch with Mr and Mrs Bragg, who confirmed their son’s authorship, and the next thing anybody knew young Stephen Bragg was reading it out on Radio Essex.
‘That was the first thing that stood me out from everybody else in the class,’ he says. ‘I’d done something that was different. I can’t tell you how impressive that was, in the sense that it suggested I might be able to do this job that I do now.’ The freckly thirteen-year-old had been granted a glance at the future.
Back on terra firma, newspapers delivered, the young poet would get on with less Bohemian pleasures: ritualistically dribbling a football up and down Park Avenue while he waited for his dad to come home from work, using his left foot up and right foot back, systematically tapping it off the front wall of every house in the street (‘I was useless’). A West Ham supporter since the crib, he was chuffed when the Seventh Barking Sea Scouts merged with the Eleventh Barking and the combined scarf came out claret and blue (West Ham’s colours, if you’re not au fait with such detail, and for many years accompanied by the name of sponsors – who else? – Dagenham Motors).
The borough is steeped in football heritage. Arguably the most famous English footballer, Bobby Moore, was born and raised in Barking. He joined West Ham in 1958, and made the England team in 1962. He captained them 90 times, heroically holding aloft the World Cup in 1966. England’s legendary manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, was a Dagenham boy, as were Jimmy Greaves, Terry Venables and Trevor Brooking. ‘When I was a kid the only thing to do in Dagenham was play football,’ says Greaves in his autobiography.
Billy has a clear early memory of watching the 1966 World Cup on TV (along with 30 million other Britons), and the image of his mum doing the ironing and expressing an ill-placed sympathy for ‘those poor Germans’ when the crowd thought it was all over. His dad took him out into the street, to Ilford Lane, and told him to savour the fact that there wasn’t a single soul in sight. ‘You’ll never see this again, short of there being a world war,’ he said. ‘It was very spooky,’ Billy remembers.
Billy’s lifelong love affair with West Ham FC is borne of a loyalty passed down through the Bragg generations. Somewhere along Barking Road lies the exact spot where his family traditionally stands whenever West Ham bring back the cup (not an especially worn bit of pavement then, we may assume). He cannot divulge the exact location to anyone outside the family (‘It’s one of those kind of things’). Billy’s own participation in West Ham’s fortunes reached its dizziest heights in his early teens. A glance at his schoolboy’s diary from 1971 reveals a typical, soccercentric entry: ‘Most people in school were looking sad, after West Ham’s sad but very good performance at Old Trafford last night. Today, West Ham lost 2–1 to Stoke City.’
He often went to see ‘East Ham’ (as his mum calls them) at their Upton Park ground, but would strategically choose European matches, because there would be less chance of trouble from away fans. Billy admits that he had ‘started getting in with a crew’ around this time, but any potential slide towards hooliganism was fortunately curtailed by his first Saturday job in 1972, ‘and that put the mockers on it. Saved my life really. I could’ve got killed’.
In 1975, after West Ham had won the FA Cup (2–0 against Fulham), Billy proved that he hadn’t grown out of his obsession by managing to collect some hallowed Wembley turf – not at the match itself, but from under the tarpaulin at a subsequent Elton John gig in the Stadium that summer. The dehydrated remnants still exist in a little plastic pot in a trunk in the attic (‘Sad, sad, sad,’ he says smiling, shaking his head). The adult Billy hasn’t been to a Hammers game for five seasons, but he can still bluff his way through a football conversation.
John Murphy’s family (he was the boy with the bangers in the boathouse) also lived down Park Avenue, as did the O’Briens and the Browns and the Handleys (clan of Robert, later the drummer in Riff Raff) – but the most important residents of all, certainly to the Billy Bragg story, were the Wiggs. They lived next door, in ‘Livingstone’. (Curiously enough, the Braggs and the Wiggs had actually swapped houses in the 1930s, when the two dads had been kids. Talk about in and out of each other’s front doors.)
Philip Wigg, better known as Wiggy, was born in 1960, two school years behind Billy, but, naturally enough, the two knee-high neighbours quickly became running mates, united by the park and bike culture. Wiggy had a three-wheeler with a boot at the back, seasonally full of conkers, while Billy rode an RSW (Raleigh Small Wheel). Wiggy has vivid memories of his knees hitting the trike’s handlebars. He and Billy, he recollects, were initially brought together by the back fence and ‘a bit of Cowboys and Indians’. Both boys had younger brothers, as if to complete the symmetry. Wiggy’s was Alan, or ‘Little Wiggy’.
‘It’s standard issue in Barking,’ says Wiggy, ‘to have two brothers, two or three years apart.’ He was a tallish lad, so being two years junior to the rest of the Park Avenue mob was never an issue. ‘I was always this height even when I was ten, so I could hang with them a bit.’
Although working class from one end to the other, Park Avenue conceals a subtle, two-tier hierarchy between skilled and unskilled workers. The dads who were builders, plasterers, engineers and decorators formed a working-class aristocracy, and it was they who first had colour televisions. Billy takes the divide further: ‘Their kids had Johnny Sevens [enviable plastic rifles subtitled the One Man Army, which came apart to make seven subsidiary guns], and later Gibson SGs, while the rest of us were playing Japanese cheesecutters [now he’s talking about guitars].’ When the Braggs belatedly acquired their first colour telly in 1972, Billy’s Great-aunt Hannah, the only surviving relative on his dad’s side, would walk round specifically to watch The Black And White Minstrel Show on it.
Beyond the symbolic ownership of mod cons, young Billy’s idea of ‘posh’ was anyone who went to Manor Junior School or lived on the nearby Leftley estate. (The Leftleys were an old dairy-farming family in Barking whose name was later ubiquitous on the sides of assorted-goods lorries in the area.) Billy and Wiggy went to Northbury Junior School, then on to the 1920s-built Park Modern Secondary, as their fathers had. In September 1970, after Billy had been at Park Modern a year, it went comprehensive, merging with Barking Abbey Grammar School. It was here that he received his one dose of corporal punishment: six of the best for the heinous crime of playing football in the playground with a tennis ball. (It’s the only language they understand.)
At Northbury Juniors, Billy had been a reasonable scholar, regularly ranking in the top five of his class. In his penultimate year, he managed to come second, behind Ricky Ogland, the swot who was also good at football, ‘so it was hard not to like him’. Billy’s last chance to be top of the form, in 1969, was snatched when his mum went into hospital for an operation that April. While she was convalescing at home and unable to clear up after her two boys, Billy and brother David were packed off to Auntie Pat and Uncle Don’s farm. They spent the summer term at a tiny Warwickshire school (where, Billy recalls, they brought jam biscuits round at playtime), thus depriving him of finishing Northbury as number one.
This near-miss would haunt Billy throughout life, significantly in the army, and even in pop. ‘I felt it deep in my heart,’ he reveals. ‘When I was second Most Wonderful Human Being in the NME polls of 1987 behind Morrissey it brought it all back.’ (Although it’s of little consolation to Billy, they later knocked Ricky Ogland’s house down to build the North Circular to Beckton.)
Those months at the farm were ‘like already being on holiday’, since it was where the Braggs customarily spent the summer break. (Otherwise, it was out to the seaside at Shoeburyness or a modest chalet belonging to one of Marie’s friends, at St Osyth near Clacton.) Billy remembers watching the moon landing while he was a farm evacuee in July, and Dennis writing him a letter on that historic day. There was also a memorable dead cat by the side of a country lane which the boys would monitor on a diversion from the walk home from school while it gradually decomposed – better than any science lesson.
Back in Barking for a new term and a new school at the end of that lazy, hazy summer, Billy’s learning curve seemed to take a nose dive. After he failed his eleven-plus, and effectively preordained the direction in which his education would take him – not to grammar school, not to university, very probably to Ford’s production line – his Barking Abbey school reports tell a sorry tale with an all too predictable ending. When he was in form 4G1 (or ‘Fourgone’, as he so enjoyed putting it on the fronts of his books), the recurring adjective in his end-of-term assessments was ‘lazy’. Some lowlights from his 1971 reports: ‘His lazy attitude is affecting his work … Far too lazy. More effort needed … Could do so much better.’ Things picked up a little in 1972, despite what his physics teacher deemed ‘an unfortunate result’, but there is one particular appraisal from Christmas of that year that manages to define both Stephen Bragg of the time, and Billy Bragg in general: ‘Uses his obvious intelligence more as a disruptive influence.’
It was almost career advice. His headmaster was moved to add: ‘Take heed of these remarks!’ (His exclamation mark.)
Away from school, young Billy’s lifestyle can be glimpsed in another entry in the 1971 diary: ‘Beat the rest of the family in a game of “Campaign”: I was Russia and, after crushing Austria (Dave), and Spain (Dad), I grappled with Mum to gain control of Europe.
‘Didn’t feel well today after a long lie in. Got a new parka, and I went out to give it an airing. My parka was given a wink of acceptance from the lads. Oatmeal and soap flakes.’ (Even the author doesn’t know what he meant by the last line, but there is something deeply evocative about it.)
Diplomatic board games notwithstanding, politics did not loom large in the Bragg house. Dad didn’t tell Mum how he voted, so as not to influence her vote, but Billy suspects he may have been voting Communist. Although not a Red in a card-carrying or even an ideological sense, one of Dennis’s old friends from school, George Wake, stood for the Communist Party in their Barking constituency – ‘I have a sneaking suspicion my dad voted for him out of loyalty and respect to a schoolfriend.’ The mantra over the tea table was, ‘It doesn’t matter how you vote in Barking, Labour always get in.’ (When Billy first voted in 1983, he voted Labour and Labour got in.) The nearest thing to a political discussion in the house where Billy grew up was when Marie complained to Dennis that, logically, if he didn’t tell her which way he was voting, she might end up voting for the opposite lot, and thereby cancel out his vote.
Immigration was an emotive issue in London – and across Britain – and Billy today is grateful for the tolerant attitude of his parents towards race. Tolerance was by no means guaranteed in the 1960s. The size of the immigrant population in Britain quadrupled between 1951 and 1961 (from 100,000 to 400,000, as the expanding labour market ‘sucked in’ workers and their families from the New Commonwealth). In 1962, the government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act, opposed by Labour, put restrictions on the incoming flow, but roughly 50,000 a year still passed through the gates, and, particularly in the cities, white Britons were forced to deal with a much more colourful view (indeed, the term ‘coloured’ quickly became the net-curtain euphemism for Blacks and Asians).
Billy’s parents were fortunate enough to be able to associate the New Commonwealth intake with positive experiences: an Afro-Caribbean doctor had delivered both of Marie’s babies in 1957 and 1963, and there was an Indian family over the road, the dad of which would pop over to fix the television if you asked. They thus avoided the convenient xenophobic view that the immigrant community miraculously combine being lazy with a burning ambition to take all our jobs. It is hard to stomach, but historian Peter Clarke in his fine book Hope And Glory, cites an electoral slogan used unofficially by Tories in Smethwick in 1964 and Haringey in 1968: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’
Billy says that race politics were the first he learnt, gleaning much of his multi-culturalist conviction from listening to music. Further parental enlightenment arose from Dennis’s wartime posting to India, which, Billy believes, ‘opened his eyes to a different culture’. (Like so many of his peers, Dennis hadn’t been out of the South of England before he joined the army.) Billy was lucky to grow up in such a fair-minded, white working-class household. In 1990, he would crystallise his own beliefs in a rewrite of the socialist anthem ‘The Internationale’: ‘We’ll live together or we’ll die alone.’
Away from such weighty matters, the Bragg–Wigg friendship flourished; albeit in a pragmatic, football-card-swapping way (‘We got on,’ recalls Wiggy. ‘Not incredibly close, but always there’), but 1971 was a crucial year for them. When the eleven-year-old Wiggy joined a thirteen-year-old Billy up at ‘big school’ and bought Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’, the two boys entered a new phase of shared passion. They became bonded – for ever – by pop music. Wiggy had a record player and no records; Billy had the software but no hardware, and thus a symbiotic union etched in extruded polyvinyl was inevitable. They were Jack Spratt and his wife: made for each other. ‘It was a definite mutual interest,’ Wiggy confirms. ‘After bikes and falling in the lake.’
Some years before Wiggy’s affinity for gadgets would influence actual career options (guitarist, guitar tech, audio-visuals, production), he became the master of the reel-to-reel tape machine. He’d first felt his way around one aged four. Said machine was a cumbersome Mission: Impossible-style beast upon which the ramshackle Wigg & Bragg Radio Shows were recorded in either’s bedroom. Ah, the reel-to-reel! Anyone with domestic experience of this type of voluptuous, boxy contraption will recall with fondness its ton weight, its circulation-stopping carrying handle, the inevitably battered, flat cardboard boxes the tapes came in, and the heave-ho one-button controller that required shoving into stop/start/record/wind position like a Morris Minor’s gearshift.
The two armchair DJs recorded singles on to tape by propping the microphone next to the record player’s speakers and keeping quiet. Woe betide any kid brother who might noisily wander in while Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Scarborough Fair’ was being ‘broadcast’. (Good fortune on this front came in David Bragg’s natural talent for swimming, which took him off to frequent tournaments, with Mum and Dad in tow, leaving the house empty.)
Musically, the 1960s had kind of passed the two friends by. (Wiggy claims that he wasn’t automatically allowed to watch Top Of The Pops on a Thursday, if, say, his mum wanted to watch a film on the other side, and Billy doesn’t recall ever being able to watch it – ‘It must’ve clashed with something, or else it was just too soppy in our house. We didn’t watch a lot of BBC. We were Magpie kids, not Blue Peter kids.’) But they ‘got’ the 1970s from the word go, and found every ebb and trickle of the Top 30 utterly enthralling, excitedly nipping home from school every Tuesday lunchtime to tape the new rundown, and then memorise it.
This was the time of ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by Middle Of The Road, ‘My Sweet Lord’ by George Harrison and ‘Knock Three Times’ by Dawn. It was Mungo Jerry, T-Rex, the England World Cup Squad and R. Dean Taylor. In those formative years of 1970 and 1971, the Number One spot was graced by a motley parade: Dave & Ansell Collins, Edison Lighthouse, Lee Marvin, Clive Dunn, Free, Tony Christie and Benny Hill’s Ernie (‘The Fastest Milkman In The West’), which occupied the top slot for five weeks until a rock cake caught him underneath the heart. Billy and Wiggy got into the Faces, Slade, Elton John and Bob Dylan. They started compiling personal weekly Top Twenties in exercise books, based on their own limited stocks of vinyl and tapes: never mind Ernie’s reign; ‘Scarborough Fair’ was top of Billy’s charts for two years, from February 1971 to January 1973. At one stage, fourteen out of the twenty songs in his list were by Simon & Garfunkel.
Billy had taken his first Saturday job, aged fourteen, in a hardware store called Guy Norris on Station Parade in Barking, sorting shelves and humping massive wallpaper books. ‘It was the size of a small supermarket, like a Spar,’ he recalls. There was a second branch at Gants Hill. The owner had inherited the business, and introduced a wider range of goods that reflected his own interests, namely records and model trains. (‘I don’t think he was into hardware very much.’)
The trains were at the back, the records downstairs, where Billy would while away his lunch hour in the listening booths with a bun from Barton’s the bakers. This was where he first heard Bob Dylan (a fairly natural progression from the more saintly Simon & Garfunkel), and where he bought his very first chart single with his first ever wages, Rod Stewart’s ‘You Wear It Well’. He also remembers buying Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and playing it incessantly, like you do – ‘The one where he’s carrying a book on the front. It did my head in.’
Although a little suspicious of David Bowie – he was, after all, to use the favoured vernacular of the time, ‘bent’ – the friends shared vinyl copies of Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and were never above a garish, TV-advertised treasure-trove like K-Tel’s 20 Golden Greats (‘Original artists! Original hits!’). ‘I was more of a singles man,’ Billy recalls, ‘I thought 45s were called 45s because they were 45p.’ Wiggy could be relied upon to shell out for Faces albums: A Nod Is As Good As A Wink … To A Blind Horse in 1971, Ooh La La in 1973. These were heady, voracious days.
Girls? Who had time for girls? The knotty appeal of the inscrutable opposite sex was but a distraction to our dedicated pop cadets. Granted, going comprehensive had led Barking Abbey to introduce a rowing club into its extra-curriculum, and, as Billy freely admits, ‘Some of the tastiest women were in the rowing club. So we all joined.’ They were similarly motivated to sign up for the Methodists Association Youth Club (‘tasty girls from the Leftley estate’), even though they had to be confirmed to get in. And in many ways, they got over Bowie’s bentness because the girls at school loved him, and would go home at lunchtimes to listen to his LPs. But these lads weren’t going to allow unrequited kiss chase to rain on their hit parade.
‘I wanted to make noises like these records that I loved,’ recalls Wiggy. ‘But with the Faces it was really difficult because you didn’t know if you wanted to be the singer or the guitar player or the drummer or the keyboard player, every bit of it was so individual and so good.’ He plumped for the guitar – although had his Woolworths organ more closely resembled a Hammond & Leslie in ambience, it might’ve come a close runner-up. In 1972, Wiggy bought a Rudy Classic acoustic guitar, with nylon strings, and the attendant tune-a-day book. He couldn’t tune it, however, and had little interest in learning ‘Go And Tell Aunt Nancy’. ‘I was frustrated but turned on by the music.’
In 1973, Billy got his hands on a harmonica, and they joined forces (with reel-to-reel forever rolling), Wiggy smashing out G, E minor, C and D, and Billy starting to sing his own words. Soon, they discovered the Rod Stewart songbook (‘It used a lot of really nice-sounding chords like F Sharp Minor seventh,’ Wiggy enthuses) and the Dylan songbook, both of which they devoured. In 1974, Billy’s dad bought him his first guitar, for sixteen pounds, a Spanish-style acoustic from Nathaniel Berry, a piano shop in Ripple Road. After much tuition from Wiggy, Billy could manage C, F and G on it, and so they ‘wrote some C, F and G stuff’ – approximately twenty original songs of their own in a two-year period.
Enthused by their first big brush with popular music, Billy and Wiggy bought the company. Having eagerly soaked up the words to hit songs in Disco 45 magazine since 1971, they graduated to reading the New Musical Express, or the NME. More than just a 50-year-old weekly newspaper, this durable cultural touchstone tends to hit way-of-life status for whey-faced suburban and provincial boys (and it is mostly boys) who are too young to go out to the colourful-sounding gigs reviewed at the back and too broke to do much more than pore over the endless, magical singles and albums reviewed in the front. For young teens, it acts as a passport. For older teens, it’s a football team. For students, it’s a tool for meeting people in the bar. And even for some thirtysomethings who should know better it remains rock’s parish magazine.
It is difficult to overstate the cyclical importance of the NME down the generations; and, to a lesser extent, Melody Maker and Sounds (although the former’s turned into a bouncy pop rag before being closed down in 2000 and the latter went in 1990). The weekly music press flourished in the 1970s, just when Generation Bragg needed it. Run by graduates of the hippie publishing underground, and staffed by a fair share of old jazzers sucking briar pipes, the ‘inkies’, as they became known during the glossy style-magazine boom of the 80s, acted as a lifeline to pop’s non-casual consumer. Around 1973, Billy and Wiggy joined the musical masons.
In a book that is essentially about a musician, it is easy to see the world through pop-tinted, guitar-shaped spectacles. But for sheer unification at a difficult age, music has far-reaching social properties. Put into perspective, it is easy to see why Billy Bragg’s spiritual subscription to the music papers galvanised his ambitions to be a rock star.
Music carries immeasurable commercial clout and export potential, but for a more objective overview it’s clearer to treat it, as publishing houses do, as a special interest or hobby, no different from trout fishing, canary breeding or period homes. As such, the NME and its subsequent glossy spin-offs, Smash Hits, Q, Mojo, Word et al., are specialist publications, there not to serve record buyers, but record enthusiasts.
The fact that pop music provides a culture that permeates every corner of our lives and lifestyles, defines generations and soundtracks revolutions, should not distract from the fact that reading about rock is a big step on from listening to it. You can like pop music; you can love pop music; and you can join the vast, paying consensus who send singles and albums up and down the charts every weekend, without once being moved to pick up and read a weekly music paper. Those who do, and do so like addicts after a regular fix, are the anal retentives, the list-makers, the trainspotters, the chart-memorisers, the vinyl junkies, the fanclub-joiners, the catalogue completists, the record collectors, the indie saddoes … a publisher’s dream. And there are an awful lot of them about. Some of them form bands and become famous. Some get jobs in record companies or at the publications themselves. Others grow out of it. But there is an elementary distinction that separates the Billys and Wiggys from the rest of the population: you either listen to music, or else you read the sleeve while you’re listening to it.
Once bitten, and forever smitten, Billy and Wiggy soon knew their NME – and, in the process, their enemy. Having never connected with the overblown likes of Led Zeppelin, Yes, Emerson, Lake or Palmer, they drew a line in the sand between themselves and the other kids at school. On their side was the blues-, soul-, and folk-influenced; on the other, ‘sixth-form music’ (a phrase which Billy stills spits out) – Deep Purple, Queen and Pink Floyd, whose 1973 opus The Dark Side Of The Moon was ‘huge’ at Barking Abbey Comp.
This keen distinction, 80 per cent musical, 20 per cent class war (classroom war, at any rate), was not one that would leave Billy when he left school, grew up and broadened his mind. He retains an instinctive ‘thing’ about those in voluntary higher education, who clearly represent the dreaded middle classes somewhere deep and murky within Billy’s unreconstructed psyche. ‘That’s partly why I’ve never been big on drugs,’ he admits. ‘Because that was something sixth-formers did.’ He and his compatriots were ‘generally against people who went on to further education’. (When Billy was fourteen, the school leaving age went up from fifteen to sixteen, thereby adding another year to his penance, and scarring his better judgement for life.)
Very loosely, the musical battle lines partitioned authenticity from artifice. As far as Billy was concerned, Dylan meant it, man, while, say, Alice Cooper was just a clown. A glance at the cover of one of his school exercise books of the period reveals some germane doodles: a representation in biro of Alice Cooper looking unwell, ‘after an attack by Dylan’ according to the caption, and a copy of School’s Out smashed into pieces. These primitive drawings are the propaganda of an emblematic war between Billy and Mark Whittaker, the Alice Cooper fan who sat next to him. Here is the news: ‘Alice is bent; Dylan is great.’
Ah, you knew where you were in them days.
As the song by The The goes, ‘It ain’t easy to be born in an unknown city.’ For anybody brought up in a satellite town, the feeling of dislocation is intense; it crawls beneath your skin and grits your teeth; it’s like there’s a party going on every night and you’re not invited. Teenagers feel disenfranchised enough – by their parents, the education system, society – without being geographically disabled on top. Rich local history is no use to a teenager teetering on the brink of self-discovery: he’d readily swap all the mediaeval remains on the map for a decent gig venue. Billy Bragg was luckier than most suburban outcasts: once past the age of locomotive consent, he could get into the city and – if he timed it right and left before the encore – back home again.
At sixteen, like so many natives of the suburbs, Billy began to get restless. He left school with one O Level to his name (a grade A in English, which he’d taken a year early), having spent his final six months at Barking Abbey Comp anywhere but. This spell of truancy was not to fulfil the prophecies of his school reports, but a direct reaction to bullying. ‘There were some kids in our year who were very violent, and it was only a matter of time before they got around to you.’ This unsavoury wannabe firm had a technique: they’d pick on a likely-looking victim and, while four or five of them lay in wait inside an empty classroom, the hardest one would throw the meat into them – ‘Then they’d knock the shit out of you.’ When Billy’s number came up, and one of the tinpot racketeers punched him square in the face followed by the dreaded order ‘Get in there’, he legged it – ‘and I didn’t come back’.
With both his parents working, it was a pushover to stay away from school and bum around the house or the park. Billy admits he was feeling ‘cocky’ about his impending O Levels because he had English Language already under his belt. And then, in the week of his exams, he fell in love with a girl from another school and couldn’t eat or speak, let alone remember in what year the Corn Laws were repealed.
The girl’s name was Kim. This cursed experience of one-way romance later found its way into a song, ‘The Saturday Boy’ (on 1984’s Brewing Up album), but at this confused stage, all Billy could do was spew out his love in an entire exercise book full of poems, which, naturally, he presented to Kim – with no discernible comeback whatsoever. (They’d met on a week-long drama course in North Wales, working with the Theatre Clwyd – ‘I thought I’d made some sort of mystical connection.’) As it says in the song, ‘In the end it took me a dictionary/To find out the meaning of the word unrequited/While she was giving herself for free/At a party to which I was never invited.’
As a postscript, on 10 April 1985, when Billy was playing a Save The GLC gig at Barking Assembly Hall, Kim turned up with her mum clutching ‘the damn book’, and presented herself to the would-be suitor of yesteryear backstage. Acute embarrassment was the order of the day. ‘No doubt the book will turn up at Sotheby’s one day. And I’ll buy it!’
So. O Levels. Thanks to ‘a girl not old enough to shave her legs’, he failed the lot. The warnings had been there in his school reports (‘still not getting down to the sort of work needed for O Level … shows no interest in this subject whatsoever’), and in the results of his mocks (two and a half per cent for French, which wasn’t actually the lowest – Jackie Ewing got one and a quarter per cent and she became a policewoman). Billy’s teachers had him branded as ‘amiable but lazy’ and, even today, Billy doesn’t argue with their evaluation. ‘I was bored, but they don’t like to write that do they? Homework wasn’t a strong point. I still have dreams where I wake up thinking I’ve not done my homework, and I’m relieved when I realise that I’m actually 40.’ A self-professed unnatural in the exam situation, Billy would later take four goes before he passed his driving test.
Wiggy passed ‘about seventeen’ O Levels (Billy’s exaggeration), Robert Handley ‘had them coming out of his ears’, but nobody ever asked to see them, which was a comfort to Billy No Levels, and years later formed the inspiration for another song, ‘To Have And To Have Not’, which would appear on his first album in 1983: ‘Just because you’re better than me, doesn’t mean I’m lazy.’
‘When I left school, you didn’t really have to have O Levels, just a nice suit. It was literally, go out, buy a suit, go to the interview and start a week later.’ Thus, unencumbered by pieces of paper, Billy put on the qualification suit and started work at Overseas Containers Ltd at the other end of the A13, who’d just opened a big container depot at Tilbury and a sub depot at Barking (‘everybody was working for them round our way’).
‘To Have And To Have Not’ sums up Billy’s job-seeking experience: ‘If you look the part you’ll get the job/In last year’s trousers and your old school shoes/The truth is, son, it’s a buyers market/They can afford to pick and choose.’
At OCL, Billy was stamping bits of paper, processing claims by firms whose goods had been damaged in the containers in transit. His immediate boss, though no tyrant, sat right opposite him (‘it was worse than being at school’), and after just six months, the would-be white-collar wonder jacked it in – ‘much to the chagrin of my parents’. He left the lights of London behind him and bummed around France for the summer.
On his return, he got work as a bank messenger at the British wing of an American bank, Manufacturers Hanover Limited, literally in the shadow of the Bank of England on Princes Street. It was a vast improvement on rubberstamping detail at OCL for the itchy-footed seventeen-year-old. Some days the job entailed ‘doing in-trays and tea making’, but a large chunk of it meant wandering around the City and the West End on foot in a suit, ‘busy going nowhere’. It gave the non-deskbound young Billy ‘a bit of latitude’ – plus the chance to pay regular visits to Revolver Records on Cheapside in his lunch hour and soak up the sounds of the mid-70s. During his eighteen-month stretch at MHL, he also became a Rank Xerox Key Operator, which would serve him well during the cut-and-paste DIY design boom of punk.
Without actually knowing it, he was a punk rocker waiting to happen.
But in this story, you don’t get to punk without passing the Rolling Stones.