The army, 1980–1981
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I must master my life. Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle I am useless.
Marine Corps prayer, Full Metal Jacket (1987)
ELVIS WAS CALLED up to join the army on the day that Billy Bragg was born. Many say the king of rock’n’roll was never the same again.
In 1980, a change was precisely what the retiring Riff Raffer needed. First though, he had a rest, playing the prodigal son back at his mum’s house in Park Avenue, where he hungrily caught up on telly, warmth, toast, Marmite and all those other pleasures denied him at the University of Life. ‘He actually got quite tubby for a while,’ recalls Joe. But despite the checklist of comforts exclusive to home, Billy was a broken reed:
‘I felt that it had all come to naught, everything I’d achieved, all my status. I meant something in Oundle.’
There was no irony in this. He and the band had made a mark in Oundle as the first gang in town, but it’s like changing schools or leaving college to start work – you lose your Big Fish credentials when you change ponds. It is, as Pulp would later sing, funny how it all falls away. Big in East Northamptonshire, nobody in Barking.
‘And I was 22. All the dynamic and energy had disappeared from punk, all the political energy had dissipated, changing the world didn’t mean anything. Really depressing.’
Riff Raff soldiered on into 1980 from their new base in Barking, and briefly recruited another drummer to replace Robert. His name was Eddie, and he was straight out of the back of the Melody Maker:
‘Drummer, handsome, modest, seeks rock band with gigs, future. Own drums, feet, hands etc. No dabblers, druggies or skankers please. Into new music, Ultravox, Tubes, Hot Rods.’
As evinced by Eddie’s musical likes, around this time the synthesiser had really started to rear its ugly head (‘We were playing the wrong kind of music in the wrong kind of places,’ Billy reckons). 1980 was the year of the new romantics, a movement sometimes provincially known as futurism – pop’s reflex reaction to the spit and sawdust of punk’s wild years. Though on the face of it, this preening, synthetic trend seemed violently different from punk, it took a similar cue from King’s Road fashion and was correspondingly London based, but eschewed ripped cotton and stencilled slogans for tartan wraps and pirate frills. It was a chance for those who dressed down for the Jubilee to dress up for the new decade.
Gigs turned back into ‘events’. (Who can honestly say they weren’t at Spandau Ballet, HMS Belfast, 26 July?) Guitars turned into Roland synths. Drummers turned into machines. And boys turned into girls. (Even in Essex! Basildon natives Depeche Mode were making their name around Southend and Rayleigh in 1980, looking not as other men.)
‘I felt completely becalmed,’ says Billy. ‘I’d lost my edge. I started getting obsessed with my youth, sitting around mournfully listening to my old Jackson Browne records. I needed a kick up the arse.’
There was always the so-called black economy. Those run-ins with the law in Oundle had marked Billy’s card, but the step from pinching pies to a life of crime is very like the leap from marijuana to Class A drugs – natural enough but inherently avoidable.
‘I didn’t really want to go down that route,’ he claims. ‘There’s a grey area between duckin’ and divin’ and being a real villain, and I was never a real villain.’
Billy’s mum made him sign on, chiefly to generate some housekeeping money, but also to prevent the returning hero from developing sofa sores. There was pressure on him to do something, especially with younger brother David now building a dependable trade in bricklaying. ‘David had his own life, and his own mates,’ says Billy, who didn’t even claim a functioning social life in Barking.
He started working the late shift in an all-night garage, first in Earls Court, then in Ilford. For Billy, it was the proverbial Worst Job I Ever Had, due to the unsociable hours and the fact that he seemed to spend all of his waking hours either working or travelling to and from work (‘I was working so I could work – going nowhere fast’). Second division West Ham won the FA Cup that year, which offered some respite (1–0 against Arsenal). Billy started signing on again.
Since the retreat, Wiggy and Jackie had set up AVM, Audio Visual Movies, combining his affinity for gadgets (‘He’d always have the back off and have a twiddle about,’ says Billy) with hers for the photographic arts. Between them they started producing slide and video presentations, eventually for firms such as British Rail, Barratt Homes and the Financial Times.
Wiggy, ever the humble servant to understatement, says they ‘made a bit of a living for a couple of years. It gave me the chance to muck about with lots of toys’; but it was AVM who endowed Riff Raff with what was to be their last stand.
‘There are people out there with video cameras and, good grief, they’re using them to make films,’ gasped Music & Video magazine in September 1980. It’s hard to credit the fuss now, but at the time, video was a relatively new tool in the music business.
America’s 24-hour-a-day music video channel, MTV, wasn’t even launched until August 1981 (at which point the pop promo turned marketing crowbar, and record company accountants never looked back) and although films were often purpose-shot to accompany singles, they were far from the money-shredding phenomena they became in the ensuing decade. Egghead synth-duo Buggles seemed to be predicting the end of the world in their 1979 hit ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ (men with great faces for radio, ironically enough). So when Riff Raff announced that they were releasing four singles and a long-form video simultaneously, the media almost sat up and took notice – after a cry of ‘Are they still going?’
Jackie Mackay was the mastermind behind the venture – or, as Billy calls it, ‘the last piece of madness’. Eight Riff Raff songs were recorded at Pathway Studios in North London (where Elvis Costello had recorded his first ever demos), featuring Billy on guitar and vocals, Wiggy on guitar and bass, a chap called Mark Earwood on ‘electrical piano’, and twelve-year-old Oscar O’Lochlainn on drums. Robert Handley came down from Stoke Doyle to guest on backing vocals and get his hirsute features in the sleeve photo session – taken by Jackie – in which the lads hold up cut-out pictures of famous women (Virginia Wade, Margaret Thatcher, Hayley Mills, Sue Barker and Dame Barbara Cartland).
The A-sides were ‘Every Girl’, ‘Kitten’, ‘New Home Town’ and ‘Little Girls Know’, backed, respectively, by ‘You Shaped House’, ‘Fantocide’, ‘Richard’ and ‘She Don’t Matter’ (all Bragg compositions except Handley’s ‘You Shaped House’ and Wigg/Handley’s ‘Fantocide’). These were pressed – in Paris for cheapness – as four seven-inch singles, 1,000 of each. They were released on the newly minted Geezer Records label, which, in the spirit of Stiff, at least had some catchy mottoes (‘Sending confusion to the world … Where eggs is eggs … Taking the Mickey or what? … At last the sound of the MCMLXXX’s). The unified sleeve artwork, courtesy of an old Oundle acquaintance calling himself Jarvis Pamphlet (John Parfitt), was notable for its stylised line drawings of nude ladies. To Riff Raff’s credit, the singles form an attractive if slightly saucy-looking set, and the eight songs are a fitting legacy (‘Welcome to the legend of Riff Raff,’ wrote Billy on one of the sleeves).
The same songs comprise the 30-minute video entitled Every Girl An English Rose, visualised with stills and slides and the odd bit of moving footage taken on a leased Sony video camera. It went on sale ‘in selected shops’ for £15 a throw, or by mail order from Wiggy and Jackie’s Bayham Road house in Acton for £18. ‘We were too stupid to think of an album,’ says Billy – but that, in a radical format, is what it was.
Music & Video magazine gave the release a reasonable punt, saying that Jackie had ‘put together a programme which almost certainly will win no awards, but which, in terms of interest and creative energy, certainly challenges the currently accepted form of music videos’. They described Riff Raff as ‘a rough and ready outfit with a nifty line in hard-headed pop; three years ago, they’d have been called punk, two years ago New Wave. Now they’re just another band who’ll sink or swim on the strength of their material and their determination to succeed.’
Disappointingly, the singles slipped through the net, review-wise. Zig Zag gave ‘Little Girls Know’ a generous appraisal as late as January 1981 (‘Exuberant finish. Good one’) and the video was plugged in Melody Maker and Musicians Only – but all in all, it was clear that Riff Raff had breathed their last. They came, they saw, they conked out. ‘A bunch of chancers with no future’ they may have been ultimately, but what a catalyst they turned out to be.
Though not just yet.
Wiggy sorted Billy out with a cash-in-hand job at the beginning of 1981: artexing a ceiling (he was doing up a room in his house as a flat for one of his mates). It was not punk rock, and Billy came home with spots of plaster all over his face, but this odd-job for Wiggy led directly to an even odder job for Queen and country.
The trek to Wiggy’s place took him past the Army Careers Information Office in Acton High Road every day. Eventually, and quite against the wishes of his hero Elvis Costello – whose 1979 Armed Forces album actually advised punters not to join the army – Billy strode in there and signed up. ‘There was nothing else I could think of,’ he says. ‘My whole identity had been based on being in a band.’ He’d artexed himself into a corner.
Although Billy says he wasn’t aware of it at the time, by joining the army, and more specifically the Royal Armoured Corps, he was following in his father’s footsteps: ‘I was actually trying to escape sitting round at my mum’s all the time, but subconsciously, because my old man wasn’t around, I was looking for something he’d done to measure myself against. You’re quite welcome to assume that me joining the Royal Armoured Corps had something to do with that.’
Dennis Bragg was called up in 1942 and joined the 43rd Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. His squadron spent most of the Second World War stationed in Suffolk, testing tanks, amphibious landing craft and other hardware like flame throwers, and then training other tank crews how to use it (‘He sat out the European war while everybody they trained went off to Normandy and Anzio’). Dennis never saw combat.
Then, on 15 May 1945, just two days after VE Day, he learnt that his battalion was going to be posted to India to back up the British 14th Army in Burma, where they were pushing out the Japanese after three years’ occupation. Billy bitterly regrets never having had the chance to talk to his dad about this cruel twist of fate – victory in Europe, London’s safe, 115,000 servicemen a month are getting demobbed, and you’re off to fight the Japs, notoriously committed warriors who take no prisoners. How must he have felt?
On 6 August, when Dennis was halfway there on a slow boat to India, American President Truman did him a favour. He dropped the big one. Hiroshima was destroyed by the world’s first atomic bomb, dropped by a US Navy Super-Fortress aircraft nicknamed ‘Enola Gay’ (after the pilot’s mum). Three days later, the same fate befell Nagasaki, and five days after that Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies after what Truman had promised would be ‘a rain of ruin from the air’. There would be no more fighting in Rangoon.
‘In some ways, the atomic bomb saved my dad’s life,’ Billy says, all too aware of the irony. (If only he could’ve had a conversation with his father about that at the height of CND.)
Dennis stayed in India until 1947 and moved about between Hyderabad and Calcutta during the run-up to partition. Unrest was rife, as demonstrators demanded freedom from British rule, and the cities erupted with Hindu–Moslem rioting. After the war, Lord Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy of India and charged with presiding over the handover. He kept the troops back with all their equipment to keep the peace between the Hindus and the Moslems. ‘The tanks weren’t any good for battles any more,’ Billy recounts. ‘But if one comes down your street it certainly gives you pause for thought.’
The job of Dennis’s regiment was principally to turn up. One bit of kit patented for the war came in particularly useful: the Canal Defence Light, which was a powerful searchlight mounted on a tank that was designed for crossing the Rhine into Germany and never used. It was great for crowd control.
Billy knew that his dad had never killed anyone, and was always quite envious that he’d driven a tank, so a benign military role model was indirectly already in place. He also knew that, broadly, he didn’t agree with the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland and that nuclear weapons had made conventional warfare obsolete. You might say that Billy Bragg, peacenik, was not the textbook soldier, but he had read The Third World War by General Sir John Hackett, which made it pretty plain that we were more than just living in the shadow of the neutron bomb. So he was more than ready to don the khaki.
At that delicate time, Billy felt that ‘it’ was about to happen: ‘We’d had Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1980, Tito had died, Solidarity went off, Brezhnev was on his last legs, and the Tories were winding up the Cold War. It all seemed very, very likely – and part of my decision to join the army was based on the fact that I’d rather be on the German Plain in a tank when it goes off, and know what’s going to happen, than be sitting at home watching Match Of The Day or panicking. I’d rather be there.
‘It wasn’t the army or the empire or the country I was looking to believe in; I was looking for something to prove my own worth.’
He had a couple of stipulations for the Army Careers Information Service when he dropped in to join: ‘I wanted to drive a tank, and I didn’t want to go to Northern Ireland.’
Well, the tank was a possibility in one of the mechanised cavalry regiments and as for the other seemingly unmanageable proviso he was also in luck. West London, due to the high Irish population, is a favoured recruiting ground for the Irish Hussars, who were almost 100 per cent Protestant. Somebody at the MOD had sussed out that it wasn’t too clever an idea to take Johnny Protestant off the streets of Belfast, take him to England for six months, train him how to kill, give him a gun and put him back on his own street. As a result, the Irish regiments didn’t ‘do’ Northern Ireland. So, you were unlikely to be posted there in a mechanised cavalry regiment, and double-unlikely to go if you were in an Irish regiment. ‘So that hurdle I’d hopefully put in the way of my progress didn’t really work out.’
He was in. Joe and Brenda bought him a single as a present: ‘The Call-Up’ by The Clash.
May 1981 was precisely the right time for Billy to join the army, and precisely the wrong time. Six weeks before he took the train to Catterick for basic training, his brother David was involved in a nasty traffic accident: he hit a tree and, worryingly, was unconscious for a whole month (‘It was dreadful,’ recalls Billy. ‘If he’d died it would’ve destroyed my mum’). Thankfully, David came round and was discharged from hospital by the time Billy went away, but he wasn’t well and was largely immobile – ‘in a dream’, as Billy puts it. Part of him felt he ought to stay in Barking with his family, and it clawed at him inside when he did go.
First, he failed his medical: ‘It was no surprise to me to find that I wasn’t very fit.’ Never a muscular lad, nor a subscriber to chin-ups, sit-ups or press-ups, he wasn’t dreadfully overweight, but nor was he a lean, mean fighting machine. ‘At the time,’ he remembers, ‘they’d take you into the British Army if you couldn’t read or write, and they’d teach you. And they’d still take you if you weren’t quite fit.’
He was dispatched to Solihull in the West Midlands on a special army fitness programme that lasted a month and concentrated on running and what Billy calls ‘knees-up Mother Brown’. Frankly, it was fun. There were no uniforms, just a form of PE kit, and it was all reassuringly not like being in the army at all, more like ‘having a games lesson for four weeks non-stop. There was very little proper army shit.’
Billy was 23, which gave him the advantage (many boys join the army straight from school at sixteen). Plus, he was surrounded by ‘some of the most pathetic human specimens I’ve ever seen in my life’. The holiday camp atmosphere was shattered on 11 May, when Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami, aged 36.
It wasn’t just the premature death of a musical hero that took the wind out of Billy’s shorts, it was the sudden, suffocating feeling that he was in the wrong place: no one else there gave a hoot about Marley. ‘It was the first time I realised how totally, utterly different I was from these people, completely and utterly out of place and alone in what I was doing. I had a different value system.’ He found a single kindred spirit in the shape of a lad from the Midlands, and he remembers volunteering for extra bog-cleaning duty in order to earn the privilege of sitting in a little room with a TV in it, and the two of them, still stunned, watching Granada’s Marley tribute presented by Tony Wilson.
Billy felt marooned.
Four weeks of physical jerk-ups, and he was off to join the basic training programme at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire. This was where, before anyone would set foot inside the Royal Armoured Corps itself, they’d be licked into shape by a cavalry regiment based in Leeds (‘Nutty Yorkshiremen’). On the fitness course the environment was chummy, with very little pressure; here, the army’s gloves were off, and Billy was tossed into the machine (‘This was the proper army, a real shock to the system. I really did feel very much alone’). The very night he got to Catterick, he remembers phoning home and making himself feel even worse: ‘Another really low moment. I thought to myself, I’ve fucked up here.’
The image of raw recruits being put through their gruelling, dehumanising paces is one that’s proved an evergreen at the cinema – and cinematic images are the closest most people will ever get to basic training now that National Service is no more. There’s comedy (Carry On Sergeant, Stripes) and brutal drama (An Officer And A Gentleman, GI Jane), but no film has drawn quite so much power from army training as Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam tale, Full Metal Jacket, which devotes almost half of its screen time to US Marine instruction at Parris Island in South Carolina.
This becomes a weirdly emblematic film in the Billy Bragg story when you know that its Vietnam sequences were shot at Beckton, south of Barking, around the old disused gasworks where great grandfather Bragg worked. These days, the area’s known as Kubricktown, and there’s very little evidence left of the time the maverick director came to town and literally dynamited the buildings to recreate Hué City. It was surprisingly effective; the scenes where Matthew Modine’s platoon are ambushed by a lone sniper lack only a South-East Asian sky for total authenticity. (The area was more recently utilised by Oasis in the video for their anthemic 1997 single ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’)
It’s tempting to see 24600765 Trooper S. W. Bragg and the 35 other recruits that made up Intake 81/09 transplanted into the first act of Full Metal Jacket, being told to ‘Sound off like you got a pair!’ by some sadistic drill instructor. Tempting, and not far from the truth.
The army, be it the British Army or the US Marines, operates a brutal, effective and time-honoured form of psychology. Unlike the music press, it doesn’t build ’em up and knock ’em down, but the exact opposite. If you’re looking for ‘a kick up the arse’ you’ve come to the right place.
Billy hit his lowest ebb in that first week at Catterick, which is all part of the army’s plan. ‘I lost all confidence, I was scrambling to get up to running speed, to get a grip on it, make a go of it.’ At the end of the first week, some of his number buckled and went home (you could go at any time, but the peer pressure and dumb male pride are chest high). At this juncture, the surviving recruits were gathered together by their boss, Sergeant Lee, a tanned, fit, intelligent Yorkshire tank commander who Billy describes with total respect as ‘a working-class Superman’ (he was the highest-ranking NCO or non-commissioned officer; there were also three lance corporals). ‘What you’ve seen this first week is not the British Army,’ he assured them, meaning: it’s about to get really nasty. He urged them to stick it out for the remaining nine weeks, to complete the full basic training. He gave them his word that if, after the full nine weeks, any of them still wanted out, they could come to him on the last week and he’d sign their paper ‘without question’.
‘Fair enough,’ thought Billy. He took the Sarge at his word, and trusted him. ‘I would go so far as to say I hero-worshipped him, but that’s what we were encouraged to do. He was God.’
In return for the intake’s nine-week commitment (‘a fucking long nine weeks’, says Billy), Sarge gave them encouragement. This is how the mind-science works – nice Sergeant, nasty 2nd Lieutenant. Both men would shout in your face, but, unlike the 2nd Lieutenant, Sarge would shout in your face and then tell you how to do it. They were woken in the mornings by the hymn ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’ to get them out of bed, accompanied by the insistent percussion of boots marching down the parquet flooring. An officer says ‘Jump!’, you ask ‘How high?’
The psychology continues: for the first six weeks out of the nine, you don’t get your uniform, you don’t have access to a radio, your privileges are precisely nil, and you’re not permitted to go home. They’ve got you. The army is your world, and, in the words of Full Metal Jacket’s Sergeant Hartman, it is ‘a world of shit’. ‘Everything you do is shit,’ says Billy. ‘You never get a let-up. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit … Then they let you go home for a weekend!’
This pivotal weekend’s leave marks the beginning of the second phase of headfuck. On your return, you are given a uniform and a hat. You’re in. Suddenly, you are allowed to listen to the radio and visit the NAAFI (Navy, Army & Air Force Institutes, the organisation that provides canteen and shop facilities for the services). Better than all that, you start getting recognition.
‘It’s blunt psychology,’ says Billy. ‘But it don’t half work. You are so desperate for them to like you! You can’t understand why they hate you so much!’
Lance Corporal Wood, known as ‘Stumpy’, who’d come to pick Billy up from Darlington station when he’d first arrived from Solihull, was a short, yes, stumpy fellow, and he told him that he was going to be the best recruit – ‘And I near as dammit was. I was very good at it.’
After that shaky first week, and having worked the knot of homesickness out of his guts, Trooper Bragg proved himself quite a natural at this soldiering caper. Being older than the others was a start, but he was also frankly a little cleverer and funnier, too. ‘There was not a high literacy rate,’ he says. ‘And not a high communication level. Plus, there wasn’t much wit.’ It goes without saying that nobody believed he’d made a record, and he had to get Wiggy to send one up for proof.
His unit seemed to come from all over the country, but it soon became clear that they were lacking a decent minority to make sport with. The barracks were arranged not as Full Metal Jacket (one dorm, two rows of beds), but in four-person rooms. The four soldiers were known as a crew. In with Billy was a Polish guy called Marshalek, the spelling of which had the lance corporals bursting in on day one, shouting, ‘Where is he? Where’s the Paki?’ (It was no surprise to Billy to discover, after he’d left, that one of his lance corporals was in the British Movement.) In the event, of the 36 grunts, there were no Pakistanis and no Afro-Caribbeans. Most disappointing for the racists. Any Catholics? No. What’s next? Southerners! There were two Southerners, and Billy was one of them. This was the first time he’d been a minority.
‘The inherent racism is pretty heavy,’ he says. ‘And the anti-Catholic songs we used to sing on the way to the firing range … It’s the worst aspects of rugby clubs all together, the British Army. Too many blokes, all swearing allegiance to the flag.’ As if to prove the rugby allusion, Billy remembers one private boasting that, if everyone gave him a pound, he’d drink a pint of his own piss. He managed it – although he was dry heaving for the whole of that night – and next morning, the corporal made them own up to it, with the line, ‘For £25 I’d eat a shit sandwich!’
So, there may not have been much wit within the recruits, but the corporals made up for it with their Wildean repartee. On parade, they would talk about shagging their wives to taunt the recruits. ‘I got my hole last night,’ they would brag. ‘My finger went through the toilet paper.’ Boom, boom.
There were no women around except the ones working in the NAAFI canteen. (‘They were great cooks,’ recalls Billy. ‘But they weren’t chosen for their looks.’) In the circumstances, the cover of a Nolans album took on an unnaturally erotic significance in those early weeks of basic – ‘it became a real object of desire.’ As the course went on, Sunday became the day on which the NCOs sold the recruits copies of Mayfair and Penthouse, encouraging them to ‘clear the custard’. This necessary release meant fewer fights and better concentration.
After all the other kind, a spot of self-abuse was essential.
Billy learnt a great deal in the army. He learnt about military tactics, about the army’s role in the British constitution, about why we’re in Northern Ireland. He also discovered macabre things about nuclear, chemical and germ warfare. Don’t look at a nuclear explosion, and, in the event, dig a small, shallow trench, lie in it and put fifteen inches of earth over the top of yourself (ready for the Pioneer Corps to come round and stick a gravestone in). Billy learnt about nerve gas: the Russians have a particularly effective one that makes the walls of your lungs weep so you literally drown in your own juices – and it smells like new-mown hay. Every time Billy smells new-mown hay …
Half-way up the stairs of the blockhouse was a huge map of the Soviet Union, so Billy quickly learnt what they were all doing there (‘There was never any doubt’). He learnt that it is just fifteen miles from the Soviet Union to the United States of America (a short hop from Chukotsky Khrebet to Alaska across the Bering Strait). He understood what a red alert felt like, as the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands died on 5 May, and the barracks was put on one for three days. He learnt what real boredom felt like on guard duty, an eight-hour shift with a pick-axe handle. (He’d heard that even the real guards who had guns didn’t have bullets in them. It’s called a deterrent.)
Billy also trained with a Sterling sub-machine gun and knows how to dismantle one. Like all recruits, he was forced to take his gas mask off in a roomful of CS gas, recite his name, rank and number thereby forcing him to swallow, and then run out choking and crying. It’s a man’s life. Billy believes he is one of the only people who’s ever appeared on Top Of The Pops who’s both experienced the effects of CS gas and knows why it’s called that. (It was invented by Ben Carson and Roger Staughton.)
But more importantly than all of this practical knowledge, the British Army taught Billy Bragg about class.
This was the first time he’d tangibly seen class. There had been plenty of race politics in Barking, but not class politics. You never really met any middle-class people in Barking. The Leftley estate had a bit more money – carpenters, sparks, more working-class aristocracy – but those people weren’t genuinely middle class. Only middle-class people who’d fallen on hard times lived in Barking. They were social not geographical immigrants, with the pretensions to prove it, like violin lessons, but the very act of living there meant ‘they were prey to the same vices as all of us and worked in the same set of values.’ And the public schoolkids of Oundle operated in a surreal, countrified bubble.
In the army, meanwhile, class is an important, clearly defined issue. You can see it in operation, in living colour, within the ranks. Sergeants are the last working-class people in the officer hierarchy; after that it’s 2nd Lieutenants, the COs (commissioned officers), who leapfrog the system from Sandringham, polo-playing, horsey types who are pissed off that they’re not in the Household Cavalry. Billy had a nightmare 2nd Lieutenant, named Page, whose father was a general – ‘a stuck-up twat with no idea of our value system, or why certain things were important to us, and no man-management skills whatsoever’. He recalls being out on exercise, digging trenches on the Yorkshire Moors, and the NAAFI van turned up. The recruits ran at it to get tea and biscuits, while 2nd Lieutenant Page stood and laughed at them. Billy remembers thinking, ‘You bastard. You really don’t understand. You’ve driven up here in your fucking sports car, you’re going home tonight, you’re not going to sleep in a trench like the rest of us, and you think it’s funny that we’re desperate for a cup of tea! Such a prat.’
Another time, after his unit had run up a notorious hill called The Snake, Page turned up at the top – in his sports car, with not a shred of respect for the proles – and ran back down with them, an act that symbolised the class barrier for Billy, who was moved to make a snidey remark. As a consequence, as if to reinforce the injustice, he was thrown in the guardhouse for two hours, his bootlaces and belt taken off him, as is the standard procedure. This happened to Billy twice during his army days – both times for being lippy. His only consolation was knowing that this privileged CO hated being in the army more than he did.
When Billy decided to leave after basic training was over, 2nd Lieutenant Page said, ‘Well done, Bragg, you’re the only one in this entire unit with any sense.’ This incensed him further: ‘For a long time after, I felt that if I ever saw him in Civvy Street, I’d chin him. Whether or not I still feel that way I don’t know.’
There was a climactic, weekend-long exercise at the end of basic training, a glorified game of Cowboys and Indians (Blue Army versus Red Army) out in the pine woods at which, again, Billy proved adept. His crew was the only one to negotiate successfully their way back to base on the exercise. When faced with the task of map-reading in the pitch black, Billy’s brainwave was to trace their way around the perimeters of fields until they found a gate. The rest of the recruits got lost, and had to be picked up afterwards. Billy and co won the Best Crew shield. ‘I can’t tell you what the joy is like taking your helmet off after three days!’ he says.
He managed to write a letter to Brenda and Joe in Peterborough while on exercise, and his slightly embroidered words sum up the loaded, rarefied nature of military life:
‘There is something mystic about lying in semi-darkness at the edge of a pine forest waiting for a barrage to start, dressed in full combats with an SMG (sub-machine gun) lying under your chin, safety catch on. There are about 30 other blokes in this forest but you can’t hear them or see them. It’s twilight and no light penetrates. We come out into the open and move towards where we think the enemy will be. Rolling and crawling in the half-darkness we discover four Royal Signallers. Sure enough they’re wearing Red Army armlets, but they’re brewing a cup of tea! “What the fuck are you doing?” they ask. “Creeping up on you,” we say. “Would you like some tea?” they ask.’
The battle report continues, and he concludes that this exercise ‘has been the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since joining the army. The rest has been polishing floors, ironing kit, making beds and being humiliated by various NCOs. The only spare time I get is spent thinking and shitting simultaneously, so I shit often and think about anything but ARMY.’
The only other opportunity for privacy a soldier gets is having a bath (‘your own little world’). Billy was in the bath when his corporal came in and told him that it was he or Trooper Harding who would be named Best Recruit at the end of training: ‘My immediate thought was – they’re not going to let the Best Recruit leave are they?’ So he dried off and went to see the sergeant immediately, cap in hand, informing him that he wanted out. ‘He was very pissed off, but he stayed true to his word.’
That was it. After three months of army life at what Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker called ‘a college for the phony-tough and the crazy-brave’, 24600765 Trooper Bragg had decided to become Billy Bragg again. He bought himself out for £175.
That wasn’t quite it. So many had left or fallen back a squad during basic training, there were only sixteen of the original 36 left. If Billy left, they’d have an odd number – you can’t have a pass-out parade with 15 men, because you can’t make a square. So they asked him to stay for the parade, and, as a favour to Queen and country, he did.
Soon-to-be-ex-Trooper Bragg ceremonially passed out, which was, as he says, ‘a nice ending’. (He’d promised Brenda and Joe in a letter that he was ‘not coming out till Adam & The Ants drop from Number One’, in reference to the four-week reign of ‘Stand And Deliver’. He’d kept his promise.) Katy came up to Catterick to collect him and take him home – he’d been the only one in his unit who had a girlfriend who wrote – and she sat between proud parents to watch him make up the square in the march-past. Unlike the other fifteen, he carried on marching, straight out of the gates, saluting as he went.
‘I felt so lucky to be back on the street again. And not there.’
One piece of advice given to Billy by Sergeant Lee when he quit has always stayed with him: ‘Whatever you do out in Civvy Street, don’t ever become anti-squaddie. Remember these guys, they’re ordinary guys.’
This hit home. He’d liked the blokes in his intake, particularly his three room-mates, and it had given him a more informed view of the world as it continued to teeter on the brink of mutually-assured destruction (or so we thought). Soldiers, Billy had discovered, were just plasterers and car mechanics in another line of work, working-class pegs trying to squeeze themselves into a hole (in this case, a foxhole). It is possible, he realised, to be pro-disarmament without being anti-squaddie – and to spare a thought for the little boy soldiers who give the warmongers a chance. The sergeant’s sound advice still stops Billy from being completely damning of those who find themselves fighting other people’s battles. It was, he admits, weird during CND, but the songs he went on to write about the Falklands and other conflicts were richer for his own experiences on the North Yorkshire front.
It may be good for absolutely nothing, but war is what the army’s there for. Without his rifle, the Marine is nothing; without war, the soldier is redundant. Having been on the inside, Billy understands precisely why British soldiers were gung-ho for the Falklands when it went off in 1982: ‘Wars are like the World Cup, there’s only so many of them.’
As such, when HMS Sheffield was sunk on 4 May by Argentine aircraft (the first British warship to be lost in 37 years), Billy found it all too easy to imagine what those young sailors who lost their lives were like – they were just like him and the rest of Intake 81/09. An Exocet missile hit the ship’s galley, and Billy couldn’t shake off the image of trainee chefs who’d joined the Navy to get away, ‘and there they are in the water’. A soldier is not a number, even if he is far from being a free man.
Billy’s three-month sabbatical had changed him, broadened his mind, flattened his stomach, and galvanised him for what he wanted to do next: play some gigs again. Perhaps you truly have to wear a tin hat to know how good it feels not to wear one.