Birth of Billy, 1981–1983
What will you do when the war is over, tender comrade
When we lay down our weary guns
When we return home to our wives and families
And look into the eyes of our sons
‘Tender Comrade’ Workers Playtime, 1988
TRULY DEMOB-HAPPY, EX-TROOPER Bragg marched on to Civvy Street in the summer of ’81, returning if not to wife, family and son, certainly to girlfriend, family and Wiggs. The British Army had, like it said in the posters, made a man of him. Broken, no; strengthened, yes.
‘I felt very positive, as if I’d done EST or something. I felt that in some way I was stronger than the British Army. It had been a real sabbatical. I was really determined to do what I wanted to do. But it’s not something I’d recommend to anyone else.’
He was as fit as he’d ever been in his life. The reduced Spurrell family (no Carol) treated him to a holiday in Southern Italy, Andrew Spurrell in the long-distance driving seat. From there they drove to Switzerland, to Venice, right down to the boot of Italy, and then into France, clocking up 960 miles in twelve hours and arriving just in time to catch a quaint village festival where they served French lager that was coloured red and green. Each evening, Billy and Andrew ran a mile and a half, not something they imagined they’d ever be doing together during Riff Raff, which already seemed a lifetime ago. (Andrew would go on to compete in three London marathons, while Billy contented himself with globe-trotting.)
Late in 1981, Andrew moved to the impressive new vet’s surgery that he now practises from and Billy went up and helped with the stock-taking.
‘Did we actually pay you?’ asks Andrew.
‘I probably owed you it,’ replies Billy.
Britain’s unemployment total tipped three million for the first time since the 1930s. Back in Barking, Billy had continued working for AV Movies over at Wiggy and Jackie’s, running messages and helping out, but, in Wiggy’s words, ‘the company was starting to fall apart a bit’ (money troubles). So Billy found a regular job, determined this time that nine-to-five work was going to be a stop-gap while he found his creative feet. He started work in a record shop, Low Price Records on East Ham High Road (a modest chain with two other branches in Stratford and Barking). It was close to a dream job. He wrote it off as research and development.
Low Price specialised in ‘cut outs’, that is, unsold, written off, deleted or overpressed stock: boxes of vinyl records with the corners of the covers snapped off, sold on at 5p a unit. To the 24-year-old Billy, these were chests of buried treasure, and fed his insatiable appetite for plastic, stretching as far as Indian classical music, film scores and jazz. Todd Rundgren, he recalls, was on heavy rotation, thanks to shop manager Steve Goldstein, a practitioner of Britfunk bass who lived with his mum in a block of flats on Commercial Road.
Against this background of vinyl intoxication, the re-energised Billy set about working out how he was going to do gigs. It was the buzz of the live experience that he craved after those three months of pointless manoeuvres and standing in line (‘I wanted the rawest, scariest possible adrenaline rush’). He felt even more like an individual, having survived the army’s dogged attempts to pat him into an identical shape on their conveyor belt. Perhaps this is why he never even considered joining or forming a band. He’d been a team player, now it was time to strike out on his own. No compromise.
Billy calls 1982 ‘the year I stopped fucking around’. It was a long year. He went through the later songs he’d written for Riff Raff and filtered out just the one: ‘Richard’, a wounded love song that he considered worthy of his new-found voice (‘Do you think I only love you because you sleep with other boys?’). This and ‘A New England’, which he also wrote in Oundle, but which the disintegrating Riff Raff never played, were the only pre-army songs that would later make it on to his first album, but he’d been very prolific since getting out, and a new set was taking shape.
Fortunately for Billy, always in need of something to fly in the face of, the new romantics hadn’t completely gone away and the march of electronic and digital technology had, for him, sucked most of the soul out of chart music. When he’d come out of the army, Spandau Ballet had greeted him doing ‘Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)’ on Top Of The Pops, and it was all the proof he needed that punk had died with its boots on.
The Top 40 was full of it. Adam & The Ants, a pantomime Glitter Band led by a former punk, were everywhere (‘Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and yours tru-lee’), and ridicule, for them, was nothing to be scared of. The surgical, all-synthetic Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf were enjoying a commercial renaissance – the pop equivalent of that early-80s Fiat Strada advert set to the operatic strains of Figaro in which not a single human worker is seen on the shop floor of a car factory (‘Handbuilt by robots’ it proudly proclaimed). Soft Cell, Duran Duran, Modern Romance, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – the Casio fops and the art students seemed to be taking over the asylum. Even Top Of The Pops had a new electro theme tune, ‘Yellow Pearl’. It was, as the Gary Numan hit of the day had it, ‘Music For Chameleons’.
‘It was those fucking Bowie fans,’ Billy says. ‘They never went away. It was Station To Station and Low that did it [Bowie’s gloomy late-70s albums that coincided with him moving to Germany and upsetting Russian/Polish border guards with the Nazi memorabilia in his suitcase] – good enough records, but they spawned Tubeway Army, Visage and Bauhaus, all those fucking bands, and they were the cutting edge!’
It wasn’t just music that had forgotten how to rock. The whole world seemed to Billy to be on target for a rendezvous with George Orwell’s soul-free futurevision. Day-to-day technology that we take for granted in the 90s seemed like Logan’s Run in 1982 – the Sinclair ZX computer, the Phillips 2000 VCR, fibre optic cables, watches you didn’t have to wind up, microchips with everything – and it brought out the Luddite in Billy Bragg, as he plotted his one-man revolt.
He bought himself a drum machine.
The summer of 1982 was the summer of Fame. The American TV series spun off from Alan Parker’s film about the New York School Of Performing Arts was attracting eight million viewers on BBC; the nation was transfixed by a bunch of starry-eyed stage school brats in legwarmers. Perhaps it was the self-motivated ambition of Leroy, Bruno and co that caught the on-your-bike Thatcherite mood – ‘Here’s where you start paying,’ ran teacher Debbie Allen’s introductory pep-talk, ‘with sweat.’
Although Billy was anything but a Lycra-clad chorus boy, the message of Fame was for him. That summer, Katy went away for six months to Australia and Thailand during her year out before starting University College London. This was, on the face of it, a bummer, but having her on the other side of the world gave Billy the space and time he needed to reinvent himself.
It also gave him the freedom to go up to Oundle and get Brenda to peroxide his hair without the boyfriend–girlfriend discussion. ‘I wanted to be another person,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to be Stephen Bragg anymore, I wanted to be Billy Bragg.’
In actual fact, he became Spy Vs Spy, his first stage name. It was taken from a long-running comic strip of the same name by Antonio Prohias in the American humour magazine Mad, a hotbed for anti-establishment, hippy satire in the 70s and a valuable cross-section of the US counterculture, but robbed of its bite in the 80s when the UK-licensed edition was hamfistedly ‘adapted’ for the British audience. Spy Vs Spy was a black-and-white, wordless cartoon that followed the incessant, violent feud between two bird-like secret agents, one in black, the other in white (although neither was obviously good or bad).
Billy admits that, on paper, the name Spy Vs Spy was ‘a bit new romantic-sounding’, but relished the notion that ‘people wouldn’t know what they were getting’. Plus, it sounded like a band’s name, and he knew that he wasn’t going to get gigs as a solo performer, as solo performer meant folk music – hardly an alluring concept in the post-punk circles Billy intended to move in.
The British folk circuit had quietly boomed ever since Dylan. As Patrick Humphries notes in his Richard Thompson biography, plenty of singer-songwriters ‘slipped under the door named “folk” simply because they played the acoustic guitar’ – but it would be some time before Billy Bragg ventured into that arcane world, despite the audible tinge of folkiness in his style. It took Bob Dylan three years to ‘go electric’ (he was booed by purists at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965); Billy intended to be plugged in from the start.
This conceit of bastardising the stand-up folkie tradition by swapping the acoustic guitar for an electric one was fairly radical at the time. During punk, John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett had defied their folk-club roots and brought electric minimalism to Top Of The Pops in 1977 with ‘Really Free’, but this was very much a one-off, and hardly a statement of intent. The so-called ‘punk poet’, Patrick Fitzgerald, used an acoustic, and Billy had seen him bottled off for this crime at a Rock Against Racism gig in 1978. (Billy ended up on the same bill as Fitzgerald in Switzerland some years later.)
So plugging folk into an amplifier was Billy’s inadvertent gimmick, if you like. Not much of one at a time when bands were as famous for what they wore as what they played – Dexy’s Midnight Runners (gypsy chic), ABC (gold lamé suits), Bow Wow Wow (pirate costumes, and, in singer Annabella Lwin’s case, nothing) – but it would certainly mark him out from the endless stream of keyboard-prodders and raincoat-rockers.
Billy’s songs were more punk than folk (he has often described his earliest incarnation as ‘a one-man Clash’), and the chugging ghost of Riff Raff still stalked songs like ‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’ and ‘To Have And To Have Not’, but there was more to Spy Vs Spy than choppy guitar and uncosmeticised cockney vowels. For one thing, there was humour in the words or, if not belly laughs, certainly an easy, lyrical dexterity in couplets such as ‘Just because I dress like this/Doesn’t mean I’m a Communist’ and ‘I am the milkman of human kindness/I will leave an extra pint’.
Although in 1982 Billy had yet to hone his performing style and between-song banter, the raw materials with which he was about to step out into the spotlight were impressive indeed. The capital’s spit’n’sawdust pub circuit had never heard the like – and that was precisely where Billy Bragg intended to go public. Billed as a band and dressed as himself, the sound of two musical traditions colliding.
Back in October, Billy had written to the Melody Maker, not a letter for publication but a heartfelt plea to writer Adam Sweeting, nowadays a respected journalist and TV critic at the Guardian, then very possibly an angel sent from heaven as far as Billy was concerned. He’d identified with a piece Sweeting had written called ‘The Clash And The Cocktail Culture’: ‘It is the story of my life,’ Billy wrote. ‘The music industry is wallpapering over the cracks in our society … For the first time in two years I’ve found someone writing what I am feeling 24 hours a day. You are the voice in my darkness.’
Having pinpointed a sympathetic soul, Billy asked Sweeting to come and see him play live, as his debut was approaching. Proving himself a bit of a maverick in rock journalist terms, Sweeting did just that, on the strength of one hand-written letter from a self-confessed ‘whining bastard’. After an aborted first shot at the City Of London Poly in November – and an agonising five-month gestation – Spy Vs Spy finally supported The Sensible Jerseys at a North London Poly sociology disco in Highbury Grove in March 1982, and Sweeting came along. (Jerseys bassist Steve Ives had played in the very last incarnation of Riff Raff, a sixth-former at Oundle’s Prince William Comprehensive.) With a real, live music hack in attendance, Billy’s nerves were in ribbons, and, unusually for him, he downed three pints before he went on.
He was using the drum machine for one song, ‘The Cloth’. It was operated by a foot pedal, but when the song was over he couldn’t get it to switch off, and was forced to turn the volume down to prevent it from tip-tap-tip-tapping throughout the rest of the set – an early omen that technology and Billy Bragg were not natural bedfellows. Mercifully, there was no review, but Billy had planted a seed.
He met Sweeting for a chat at the Hospital Tavern in the East End, just by London Hospital. On the way in, Billy noticed that the licensee’s name was Jack Ruby, which he took as a good omen – though he’s not sure exactly why. (Jack Ruby had not brought much luck to Lee Harvey Oswald, but he did run a nightclub, which was pretty showbiz, and he was famous. Who says an omen has to bear up to cross-examination?) Without fully realising it, Billy was laying important foundations for the near future.
Notwithstanding a further support with the Jerseys at legendary Soho jazz club Ronnie Scott’s (in the small upstairs room, mind) in May, what Billy describes as Spy Vs Spy’s very first ‘proper’ gig took place at the Rock Garden (where Riff Raff had played so many times) on 6 June 1982. With not a single dark root showing, and wearing a home-made T-shirt with Spy Vs Spy painted on the chest in fabric dye, Billy officially presented himself to the world: one man and his guitar. And his drum machine.
A fortnight earlier he’d won the first heat of a live talent contest at the Bridge House in Canning Town, a landmark boozer venue in the East London area that had initially defied the punk rock boom by booking heavy metal acts and Rory Gallagher. It’s just beside the flyover as the beloved A13 segues from East India Dock Road into Newham Way. Billy also came first in the second heat on 10 July and reached the final on 24 July, up against such hopefuls as Hiss The Villain, The Boobies, Raw Recruit and On His Own. With roots starting to appear in his banana-blond crop, this time Billy wore a T-shirt bearing the logo of 2000AD comic and its rozzer figurehead Judge Dredd (‘He brings law to the cursed Earth’). He wore it again at the final, and came second. The prize was £50.
Billy Bragg was suddenly in the game.
Steve Goldstein, who was the manager at Low Price Records and lived with his mum, owned a Portastudio. In non-professional rock terms, this is even better than knowing someone who owns a van.
The chance was too good to pass up. It was time for Billy Bragg to commit himself to tape. Over one weekend, Billy recorded six songs from his live set at Mrs Goldstein’s, with Steve at the controls. (The block of flats is called Gilmour House, and it’s still there, off Commercial Road, on the left as you travel east on the A13, should anyone ever set up the Billy Bragg Rock Tour Of London. It’s certainly a crucial marker flag on the journey from obscurity to ubiquity.)
Played ‘as live’ – not such a surprise bearing in mind the economical nature of Billy’s act – he satisfactorily entrusted the following numbers to tape: ‘A New England’ (written after seeing two satellites flying alongside each other in the clear Northants sky), ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’, ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’, ‘Strange Things Happen’, ‘The Cloth’ and ‘To Have And To Have Not’. Only one (‘The Cloth’) failed to make it into Billy Bragg’s professionally recorded canon. The others defined what he was all about. Some might say that ‘A New England’ still most succinctly demonstrates what makes Billy Bragg such a durable, widely loved performer. It’s essentially a love song, but one that packs a subtle political punch, and joins the dots between personal, ideological and lyrical.
I was 21 years when I wrote this song
I’m 22 now, but I won’t be for long
People ask me when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
Are already pushing prams
I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
The central conceit of the song lies in the claim that the singer doesn’t want to change the world, merely get a shag. It is not hard to hear the irony. Billy is desperate for some romantic inspiration, but the two shooting stars in his song turn out to be satellites. ‘Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?’ he asks. No, seems to be the adaptable answer. Here is a poet trapped in the modern world, so besotted with a girl he does not yet know, he is prepared to cast all broader ideals aside in favour of a domestic utopia. When Kirsty MacColl recorded ‘A New England’ in 1985 and took it into the Top Ten, the paradox of the chorus was rinsed out by a pop arrangement and a sweet voice, but the way Billy plays it, with the lone Duane Eddy guitar and that plaintive quality to the vocal, says it all.
Many of Billy’s early songs disclose a failure in love, a sense of having been left behind. In ‘Richard’, a song written in Riff Raff days, the rhapsody ‘There will be parties/There will be fun/There will be prizes for everyone’ implicitly counts Billy out. There is more of Morrissey in Billy Bragg than many critics give him credit for – the difference between the two men as lyricists (there are plenty of differences between them as men) lies in the desire to fit in. Morrissey revels in his outsider status; Billy’s banging on the door of acceptance.
Of the Gilmour House set, it is ‘To Have And To Have Not’ that ploughs the most purely political furrow. There is punk rhetoric in blunt graffiti-like observations such as ‘The factories are closing and the army is full’, but it is the repeated mantra ‘Just because you’re better than me, doesn’t mean I’m lazy’ that unlocks the song’s power. Here is a young man who has been failed by the education system, defeated on the day, but isn’t griping at the system, he’s pleading at society not to judge him on his one O Level. Punk was a howl of disapproval, but it sought no answers from the state. Billy Bragg is frustrated but not crushed. He shall overcome.
Although rough and ready, this first Spy Vs Spy demo had plenty going on behind the punk rock electric guitar and the Essex delivery. He became famous for his non-singsong voice, and yet ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ finds him delivering a disarmingly tender lament to an unfaithful partner, give or take ‘the fings you’ve done’. The tape was duly mailed to anyone in the record industry who might cock a sympathetic ear, from Rough Trade to EMI. All was quiet.
Until, that is, the Melody Maker dated 16 October 1982.
In line with the paper’s sympathies with musicians, they actually reviewed demo tapes. (They still do, in fact, a featurette that’s survived umpteen makeovers.) Billy remembers the column being called ‘Shit Demos’. It was, as he well knows, called Playback, and it provided the post-Riff Raff Billy with his very first words of endorsement. Having spent years worshipping the NME, and the equivalent time treating Melody Maker as a classified ad-sheet and Sounds as the last resort in an ill-stocked newsagent, it would prove educational for Billy that the ‘other two’ picked up on him first.
Playback was written by – who else? – Adam Sweeting. Referring to the man behind Spy Vs Spy as Bill Bragg, he raved thus: ‘His demo tape is a small goldmine of strong, simple tunes which he uses as scaffolding for some of the sharpest and funniest lyrics I’ve heard in years. Bragg, with his rough, hoarse voice, sings about working girls, the dole and how to cope with frustration. Meanwhile, he’s able to view love with a child’s sense of wonder.
‘Already, Bill Bragg possesses a view of the world which is simultaneously knowing and naked, appallingly vulnerable, but strong enough to look at the fact without flinching. Consequently his songs are both uncomfortably perceptive and reassuring, small rubber dinghies on a stormy sea. The wit and wisdom of Bragg’s songs puts to shame most of the people who go around calling themselves songwriters, and regardless of whether or not there is any justice in the world, you’ll hear more from him soon.’
Quite a review, and one that Bill Bragg would soon be able to recite from memory. The music papers, traditionally in the shops on Wednesday, are available a day early in Central London, which, in 1982, was where Billy’s girlfriend Katy worked. She picked up the papers, discovered the heaven-sent Playback column, and immediately rang Billy up at the record shop to read the ‘fucking brilliant review’ down the phone to him. ‘Are you sitting down?’ she asked. He was.
Fortunately, the shop was empty, as Billy was overcome with emotion, and would’ve been in no fit state to work out anybody’s change. ‘It was such a relief,’ he recalls. ‘Here was a possibility that I might be able to do this. Here was someone, a music writer in a music paper, saying the songs I’d written were really good. That filled me with real confidence.’
On the same page in the Maker was a review of a demo by some jokers calling themselves Nux Vomica, which, in contrast to Spy Vs Spy, Sweeting trashed: ‘facetious ditties with horrible singing and a truly repulsive guitar sound’. Nux Vomica was Billy Bragg and the brothers Wigg posing as Ian Moody, Graham Moody and Andy Anonymous, playing ‘naff pop songs’ that they’d taped a year earlier, and sent in as a control experiment – a very scientific coup indeed, and one that worked. Sweeting was no fool. He knew a good demo from a rotten demo. (Nux Vomica were named after a medicinal compound in a bell-jar Billy remembers seeing in Andrew Spurrell’s surgery – but few people were ever going to ask them where they got their crazy name.)
Billy never did tell Sweeting who Nux Vomica actually were.
Around this time began Billy’s solo apprenticeship. There are baptisms by fire, and there are baptisms by beer. The Tunnel club specialised in the latter, and provided Billy with his first residency, playing Tuesday nights, opening for anybody, £5 a night (he was later granted 60 per cent of the door takings). The Tunnel, later a venue that was synonymous with alternative comedians and the appalling treatment thereof, was housed at a pub called the Mitre on the Greenwich side of London’s notorious Blackwall Tunnel. Driven down there either by Wiggy’s brother Alan, Katy, or even his mum, Billy set about paying his dues. Up north, you do the working men’s clubs; this was worse, a talking men’s club. Despite the cavalcade of live entertainment on offer, they were only here for the beer.
Warming up may be too showbiz a term for it, but Billy attempted to distract the Tunnel’s pathologically ungrateful punters before the main act came on, be it a heavy metal band like Blood & Roses, former-Groundhog Tony McPhee, The Gymslips, Doll By Doll, Doctor & The Medics or crowd-pleasing striptease outfit True Life Confessions. If anyone broke a string at a Riff Raff gig, Billy would keep the audience amused by singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, and it was this blitz spirit that saw him through the Tunnel. He would play his songs, obviously – thrashing away at his customised ‘Route 66’, ‘A13 Trunk Road To The Sea’, for five minutes ‘until someone took a blind bit of notice’ – but he would also talk to the audience, and wind them up (‘this really sharpened up my patter’). The dreaded video juke box, fast becoming a pub fixture in this age of ‘fun’, was rarely turned off during Billy’s act, and spying opportunity under every hurdle, he turned it to his advantage.
Tears For Fears, then very much a raincoat band, were having their fist hit with ‘Mad World’ in October ’82, and if the video came on, Billy would make a facetious comment about their silly student dance. The audience would laugh, and, having snared their sympathy, he’d riff off it for a while. (This trick has remained in his arsenal: on his first trip to New York in 1984, in order to find some valuable common ground with the Americans, he sparred with them about what was on MTV.)
Also noteworthy in the Billy Bragg set at this time was a brave cover of Cliff Richard’s ‘A Voice In The Wilderness’ (a ballad from the 1959 beat movie Expresso Bongo), which, for attention-grabbing purposes, he reworked as ‘The Voice Of The Wildebeest’ (‘My wife and the wildebeest left hoof marks on me’). It’s fitting that the Tunnel later became semi-legendary for its high body count of dying comedians. It was here that Billy Bragg became a stand-up.
He’d turned out funny.
Meanwhile, over in Marble Arch, a man called Jeff Chegwin at the music publishers Chappell (yes, he is Keith Chegwin’s brother), was about to make Billy’s day. He’d phoned him in October after the Playback review had caught his eye in Melody Maker and requested a copy of the tape. ‘This was equally astounding,’ Billy recalls. ‘The first industry person who’d shown interest.’ It turned out to be more than interest.
Chegwin loved the tape, but didn’t have the available money or in-house support to sign him to a concrete publishing deal. But the enthusiasm was there, so he gave Billy a list of contacts to send the tape on to, and touted it around himself, in the hope that a record company might provide the cash for Billy and Chappell to do something.
‘I got absolutely no response,’ says Billy. ‘Every now and again I bump into one of the music business people who I sent it to and I remind them of the fact. I’ve got their names.’ (In a follow-up letter to Adam Sweeting, Billy mentioned ‘a flat refusal from CBS and a “not sure” from Polydor’.)
The Catch 22 goes, if you haven’t got a record out, you can’t get in the music press, and if you haven’t been in the music press, you don’t exist. As priceless as Adam Sweeting’s rave review was, it hadn’t opened any record company doors, so Billy set about opening them for himself. First, he reasoned, he needed a manager. As luck would have it, he’d been chatting to an artist he knew called Jim Davidson, who’d painted backdrops for The Clash back in 1980, and had been impressed by one of their co-managers, Peter Jenner. Billy had calculated that he specifically needed a manager who was a socialist and a father figure. A tall order, perhaps, but that was precisely what Peter Jenner turned out to be.
Jenner taught at the London School Of Economics in 1967, then moved into managing Pink Floyd when they were still an underground concern. He put on the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, and, with his partner in Blackhill management Andrew King, had handled T Rex, Roy Harper, Edgar Broughton and – most impressively to Billy – The Clash, between the time they sacked journalist Caroline Coon and reinstated original Svengali Bernie Rhodes (just over twelve months, during which time they toured the epic London Calling and recorded the triple-album folly Sandinista!). Blackhill also looked after Ian Dury & The Blockheads until 1980, when they were just over their commercial peak.
Billy spoke to Sumi Jenner, Peter’s wife, and was dismayed to find that he was no longer in management, and Blackhill had shut up shop. He was now Head of Marketing & A&R (Artists & Repertoire) at the Charisma label and had been for nine months.
‘I don’t know what I was,’ Jenner recalls. ‘Charisma was in a real mess.’ Charisma had been set up as a stable for innovative artists in the late 60s by Tony Stratton-Smith, or ‘Strat’ as he was known. Building on a nascent roster that included The Nice and Van Der Graaf Generator, Stratton-Smith had had the foresight to sign public school progressive rockers Genesis, then two albums away from commercial success (their Foxtrot album went Top Ten in 1972), but they were the sort of band upon whom a label’s reputation is forged. Stratton-Smith also managed them until 1973. When singer Peter Gabriel left the group in 1975, he stayed with Charisma, and recorded all four of his confusingly eponymous solo albums for the label, every one a Top Ten hit.
Charisma’s ornate Mad Hatter logo will be equally well known to Monty Python fans, as Stratton-Smith released seven Python albums between 1971 and 1980, giving them total artistic control and risking the wrath of many a nervous retailer. (Charisma triumphantly pushed the Pythons into the album Top Ten in 1980, with the Contractual Obligation Album, which was banned from TV or radio advertising for being ‘crude in the extreme’ and ran into legal trouble for its unauthorised and defamatory use of John Denver’s ‘Annie’s Song’ – subsequently removed.)
A rum label, to be sure, but not really Peter Jenner’s cup of tea – although he admits it’s unlikely he would’ve been happy as Head of Marketing & A&R at any label, and was quite a fan of Strat. In 1980, Charisma had placed a toe in the waters of movie-making, with the wilfully eccentric Sir Henry At Rawlinson’s End, produced by Stratton-Smith and showing disappointing financial returns. Jenner recalls ‘constant cashflow problems – we were haemorrhaging money’. He reasons that ‘Charisma’s golden era was pre-punk, they’d never really got hold of post-punk.’
By 1982, the last studio album Peter Gabriel would record for the label was in the charts, and a deal with Dutch giant PolyGram meant that Charisma’s pressings were paid for, but Jenner describes his job thus: ‘I was there to fire everybody’ – by which he means artists who were past their sell-by date. His task was to ‘thin out’ the roster; unfortunately he was not much cop at the high-powered corporate game: ‘I was a real fucking softy. I just let bands make another record. I was really unsuccessful at that job.’
As cash-flow slowed down to a trickle, the pressure from PolyGram mounted: they were saying, if you want more money, we’ll have to take over. Stratton-Smith’s response to the crisis was admirable, as Jenner relates: ‘He would come into work at twelve, go to lunch at one, come back at four, and then go out all night. Great geezer. Old school. Very sharp.’
These qualities were also true of Jenner, who’d been round the music biz block himself. ‘I realised that if I was going to sign anything, I was going to have to be very economical.’
Because Charisma was part-independent, part major label, as an A&R, Jenner simply couldn’t get involved in bidding wars for hot, unsigned artists: ‘The nightmare of being an A&R man is trying to work out whether somebody’s worth spending £100,000 on as a business investment. It’s a crap shoot, it’s madness.’
But this turned out to be a blessing.
Billy had by then left Low Price Records (‘the last proper job I ever had’), and had more time on his hands to go wandering in central London, hawking his wares around. On 2 November 1982, Channel 4 went on the air, as, in the same week, did the first ever edition of Tyne Tees’ live Friday evening music show The Tube. And here’s where divine intervention takes over.
Peter Gabriel was on that first Tube the same day that Billy Bragg turned up in reception at Charisma, hoping to get to see Peter Jenner and give him his tape (he liked what he’d heard about Jenner, and the Clash connection said ‘kindred spirit’). He sat, like Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (‘I’ll wait. I’m happy to wait’), when someone came out looking for the TV repairman. Because Gabriel was on The Tube, they were keen to video it, but didn’t know how to tune the VCR into the new channel. Now, Billy was more than au fait with video equipment, thanks to his time working for Wiggy, and saw his way in.
‘And I did look a bit like a TV repairman!’
Yes, he said, he was there to fix the video, and he was duly taken into the room where the telly was to perform his alchemy. Job done, he wandered down the corridor and found Peter Jenner’s office. Putting a tape or record into someone’s influential hand is a hundred times better than putting it in the post, or leaving it at reception, as any plugger will tell you, and Billy made the drop. Not only that, he made an impression.
‘He was a laugh,’ says Jenner. ‘Instantly likeable.’
That weekend, Jenner was off to see his parents at their place in the country, and he took the opportunity to listen to a clutch of demos. He liked Billy’s, picking up on ‘the enthusiasm and the vibe. I especially liked “The Busy Girl Buys Beauty”. Having been involved with Roy Harper and The Clash, I’d been aware of singer-songwriters, and I guess I had become a lyric man rather than a music man.’
Jenner vowed to himself he’d get back in touch with the bogus TV repairman.
Better, he ventured down to the Tunnel Club to catch Billy play. There’s no venue too obscure or too far away for a good A&R man, even if Jenner wasn’t a particularly good one – he committed the cardinal A&R sin and turned up just as the artist he was there to see had reached his last two numbers. However, the atmosphere inside the pub was tangibly electric, and Jenner’s radar sensed that something was in the air. He took in Billy’s last couple of songs, made a mental note of the buzz, and took care on his way out to ask somebody at the bar if Billy had been any good (evergreen A&R stand-by). The answer was an unequivocal yes, so Jenner left the Tunnel satisfied that his hunch was correct. The bloke on the tape had something.
More spooky coincidence: the reason the Tunnel’s audience were so wired was that someone had just knocked a pint glass off a table and, following the sound of breaking glass, everyone was waiting for the fight to start, including Billy. This air of tension did not dissipate for the remainder of his set. And the punter who Jenner consulted at the bar? Katy Spurrell. The space hardware was evidently lined up in Billy Bragg’s favour that night.
As he left, Jenner made his pledge to Billy: ‘We must do something, however trivial.’
By the end of 1982, Billy had moved out of his mum’s to a new base in Southfields, near Wimbledon (Katy was house-sitting there for some friends of hers who’d gone to Africa). On the map, it’s not much closer to the action than Barking, but it felt more central.
Even though it was a large house, Billy and Katy never had the heating on full, and as a result the warmest room was the bathroom, where the hot water tank was. There was a small vanity table in there, which meant that Billy could use the room as his study and write songs. He remembers Katy banging on the door wanting to use the bathroom while he was in the throes of writing ‘Between The Wars’. ‘She just doesn’t understand,’ moaned the tortured artist, forced to write the last verse out on Wimbledon Common (‘I’m surprised it didn’t turn out like the Wombles’).
Wiggy remembers taking food parcels round to the refugees in Southfields: ‘They were going through their starvation days.’
Because there was simply no Charisma money forthcoming, Billy was caught between a rock and hard place. ‘He wasn’t doing what was “happening”,’ Jenner explains. He knew that they would have to find a more wily way of getting a Billy Bragg record out than simply finding the funds and paying for it: ‘If you can get a tape done,’ he told Billy, ‘I’ll put it out.’ He was out on a limb with his belief in Billy, and needed a co-visionary. Jeff Chegwin turned out to be that soldier. Bearing in mind Charisma’s interest, Chappell stumped up a special one-off publishing deal, which basically meant three days in their demo studio at Park Street – and no money. To Billy it was like winning the pools, and it solved Peter Jenner’s financial niggles. Between Chappell and Charisma, he could make a record.
‘The principle that you had to spend an enormous amount of money was wrong,’ reasons Jenner. ‘So we came up with the mini-album for £2.99. If you can put out a twelve-inch for £2.99, why not put out an album with seven tracks on it? Same piece of vinyl.’ He made Billy an offer.
There would be no contract. PolyGram would pay for the pressing. Chappell would look after the recording costs. Jenner passed the artwork through as petty cash. He aimed to cover his arse with £500 he had left over from what has since passed into Bragg folklore as a Gregory Isaacs record, but may have been something else entirely.
Jenner drafted Billy a letter, dated 21 January 1983, on Charisma headed notepaper:
‘Dear Billy, this is to confirm our intention to release some tracks of yours which you will be doing at Chappell’s expense. We expect to release, unless it is indescribably ghastly, a record of some sort between four and twelve tracks long depending on what you come back with. We would own the record for the world and would pay a royalty of eight per cent, rising to nine per cent after 10,000 sales and ten per cent after 50,000 sales. Hope this reflects our discussion and I look forward to hearing the tapes.’
Booked to go into Chappell on 2 February for those three days, Billy performed his last gig at the Tunnel the night before. He was supporting a band called Shark Taboo. He played his songs to a total of eight people in the bar (‘not uncommon’). He finished up, collected his money, and he and Wiggy, who’d driven him down, were preparing to leave – at which point the entire audience got onstage. Shark Taboo were the audience. Too embarrassed to go, Billy and Wiggy sat down to offer their moral support to these fellow travellers round the U-bend of rock’n’roll. Mercifully, after just two songs, the barman told them to get off, as they were bothering the customers in the other bar.
Billy Bragg had, he felt, done his time.
On 2, 3 and 4 February, between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. at Park Street Studio, Billy recorded what would be his debut album. As with the Gilmour House dry run, he just played his proven live set over and over again, this time in a soundproof booth with in-house producer Oliver Hitch pressing record and stop. There was no mixing, they just ran it straight on to quarter-inch tape. Billy recalls doing thirteen versions of ‘A New England’.
He takes his hat off to Jeff Chegwin, who was ‘enthusiastic and encouraging’ throughout, if unable to express his appreciation at the end of the three days, having just had his wisdom teeth out.
‘Really good!’ he mumbled through a broken mouth.
‘Nobody else there gave a shit,’ Billy reckons. ‘They didn’t know what the fuck I was on about.’
Not a problem. He’d found two men at two separate companies who knew exactly what the fuck he was on about, and were willing to sidestep corporate consensus and chuck Billy Bragg a few scraps. Without Chegwin and Jenner, Billy would be wandering around Wimbledon Common telling passers-by that he’d had his tape reviewed in Melody Maker and coulda been a contender.
On the subject of which, uplifted by the stirrings in the record industry, Billy continued to push his nose up against the media’s window. Not about to let his first print admirer off the hook, Billy pestered Adam Sweeting for a follow-up review or an article to legitimise his quest.
This has been a recurring theme: all the way through the Flying Tigers and Riff Raff, Billy has striven for conventional legitimacy, be it the band’s ‘advertising debut’, or the first gig in Hornchurch, or the keenly-clutched copies of Cosmonaut. For a hardened music press reader, these are the given points of reference, and it would take Billy a few years before he realised that achievement on his own terms was more important to him than the orthodox requirements of the music biz.
Adam Sweeting arranged to meet Billy and interview him for possible publication at a later, unspecified date (after all, Billy had no product out to tie in with a feature, and that’s the way the supposedly alternative press works). On the bus there, Billy was bursting with excitement and nerves at the prospect of talking into a tape recorder, and wrote down all the things he wanted to say, so as not to waste this first crack at bending the world’s ear. The singer and the writer met at a pub near the British Museum. The interview went well. Billy even ran through his checklist in the toilet midway through, and was, of course, duly outraged that Melody Maker didn’t print it all when the piece ran in April.
Before that though, during the interminable limbo period between the recording of the album and the day it came out (five and a half months), Billy went back to Peterborough to play The Glasshouse at the Key Theatre. It was a modest lunchtime gig (‘A bar and food are available and accompanied children are welcome’), but the local press treated him as a returning local hero. ‘Well known locally,’ said the Classified Standard, ‘Riff Raff became a regular feature on the Peterborough music scene.’
Billy played on long after the bar had closed, and was invited back in June. ‘A selection of his songs have already been recorded for release in the near future,’ noted Cheryl Przybyl in her Pop Scene column in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. (In June, she was still talking about it in the future tense, saying the album was ‘due for release any time now’.)
Back in London, Billy played three nights at the Latchmere pub in Battersea, performing two sets a night. One night, between the two sets, an A&R from CBS records made himself known and said, ‘Very entertaining, Bill, but do I hear a hit single?’ He might as well have tweaked Billy’s nose. Jenner had never asked him about hit singles.
In Melody Maker dated 26 March, Mick Mercer reviewed a Spy Vs Spy gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead supporting two-piece Re-Set, in front of what Mercer calculated was ‘a motley two dozen’ people. It was a PA-stacked-on-beer-crates sort of place with posters advertising gigs by Blurt, Play Dead and The Impossible Dreamers. ‘Billy The Kid could enjoy himself playing to one person, let alone 30,’ ran the review. ‘What a cool nerve! What a voice! The night belonged to Old Bill. Dull he wasn’t.’ (Mercer, later willingly pigeon-holed as the country’s leading expert on goth music, had written the only ever national feature on Riff Raff in Zig Zag. Sympathetic souls continually hove in and out of view.)
A week later, Sweeting’s interview appeared, under the headline ‘The Climate Of Reason’, and accompanied by a three-column photograph by Tom Sheehan confirming that he was still Billy Bleach. Overenthusiastically announcing that the album was coming out in May, Sweeting expertly described Billy as ‘part stand-up comedian, part musical flying picket’. Among the quotes Billy did manage to get into print were a confession to buying Smash Hits religiously, some well-expressed fears for the welfare state and details of his Spandau Ballet epiphany (seeing them perform ‘Chant No. 1’ on Top Of The Pops and feeling that punk was truly dead).
It was the last time he’d use the name Spy Vs Spy.
He may have been in a music paper at last, but his album was trapped in the ether somewhere between Chappell in Marble Arch and Charisma in Wardour Street (above the old Marquee club); a pleasant little stroll apart down London’s busy Oxford Street, or three short stops on the tube. Billy found himself bouncing between the two a great deal during April, May and June. ‘It seemed to take for ever,’ he says, recalling a knot of dread every time he stepped out of Marble Arch tube, for fear that this was the time they’d tell him, Sorry, the record’s not actually coming out. ‘I was so close to getting my hands on that record and going and doing it,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t have any kudos at either company, they had much more important things to do.’
In April and May, Billy Bragg did his first gigs up North: at The Gallery in Manchester, and at a twenty-fifth birthday party for a bloke he knew called Dave C in Liverpool at the Warehouse. His initiation to Liverpool was beset with stereotypical trouble. Katy drove him up there and duly had her car broken into during the soundcheck. Billy remembers two coppers taking down all the details out in the street, with Katy in tears, when the party’s host came out and said ‘You’re on.’ There’s nothing like centring yourself before a show, and that was nothing like it. (Dave C’s now a sheep farmer.)
In June, having acquired a booking agent, ‘the fabulous’ Nigel Morton, Billy went out on his first support tour with Incantation – as he describes them, ‘musos pretending to be from the Andes’, they were still cashing in on their one hit from December ’82, ‘Cacharpaya’. Though they were ill matched, Billy’s piggyback with the ’Cantation took him to such civic meccas as the Towngate Centre in Basildon, the Hatfield Forum, and the Theatre Royal, Plymouth.
Being a solo performer was already proving useful. Letting the train take the strain, Billy Bragg was infinitely more mobile than any other support band in the country, requiring no parking space at the venue, just the one microphone, and no roadies. This would become more of a marketing angle in time, but for now, it was sheer economics. Guitar on his back, Roland Cube amplifier in one hand, train ticket in the other, he was the rock’n’roll equivalent of a certain Italian vermouth: anytime, anyplace, anywhere. ‘Woe betide if I broke a string.’
Peter Jenner describes Billy as ‘quite a solitary person’, which is what he believes made that first flurry of gigs so achievable. ‘He’s very happy to be on his own, sitting in a car, in a hotel room, reading the paper, going for a walk, going shopping – he doesn’t feel the need to have people all around him.’
He had, incidentally, parted company with the drum machine due to technical differences. There was no love lost between man and box, but Peter Jenner is happy to take credit for splitting them up: ‘That was the one thing I suggested. It was very Spandau Ballet – if you’re going to do a drum machine, do it properly. It was a Mickey Mouse drum machine.’
But where is it now? (Wiggy’s got it, actually.)
On 1 July 1983, the wait was over. Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy, the debut long-player by Billy Bragg, was released on Utility/Charisma, with ‘Pay no more than £2.99’ emblazoned on the sleeve. 1,500 copies had been pressed. Jeff Chegwin would handle the plugging (i.e. getting the record into the right hands in radioland), Charisma’s in-house PR Lee Ellen Newman would scare up some press, and Billy himself mucked in with a bit of both. Jenner gave him 25 copies of the album and sent him out to do his own promo.
The trade magazine Music And Video Week announced the formation of the Utility label, the first act of political union between Billy and the man called PJ. Utility was described as ‘a label for the new age of austerity’. In interview, Jenner made an unusually ideological case for what was just a record company label imprint: ‘It seems obvious that the record industry has to come to terms with the colossal scale of unemployment, especially for young people, and the consequent shortage of readies. The reaction, up to now, has been to brutalise and decimate sales and releases by non-chart artists. At Charisma, we want to fight this. Our philosophy at Utility is that it is the idea, the song, the personality, the talent that matters, not the technology, the hype or the styling.’ One can easily imagine ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ playing in the background to this rousing speech. He finished by saying that the Billy Bragg album, ‘in both price and quality, is a foretaste of lots more to come’.
It was, as Lou Reed later sang, the beginning of a great adventure.
Andy Kershaw at Radio Aire in Leeds was the first DJ to write to Charisma and express his interest. The Rochdale-born headmaster’s son was formerly Leeds University’s upstart ents sec (he booked Iron Maiden, Duran Duran, The Clash and UB40 – and failed his degree) and was now hosting a late-night alternative show in John Peel mould called Uneasy Listening, spinning a very similar musical mix to the one he’s now famous for on Radio 1 and the BBC World Service. He also put together his own blues show. ‘I suppose for that station it was pretty radical,’ he says.
Kershaw actually rescued Life’s A Riot from the station’s reject bin. He was paid so little he couldn’t even afford to go to the pub at lunchtimes, so instead he would sit in the record library and sift through a huge box (the kind washing machines come in). ‘If it wasn’t Elton John or Lionel Ritchie they threw it in there and gave it to charities,’ he recalls. ‘I used to do half my programme from that box.’ The sleeve of Life’s A Riot caught Kershaw’s eye: ‘When I dug around, there were about four copies of this bugger in there. So I picked up the lot and took them home. That night I put the needle on the record and “A New England” came on, and I know it’s a cliché, but I can genuinely say that it changed my life. I would not be sitting here doing what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t even be living in London, if I’d not pulled that record out of the box that afternoon. I just loved the simplicity and directness of it, the attack and the percussive quality of the guitar.’
Kershaw had run into Pete Jenner when he booked The Clash and Ian Dury at Leeds University, and found him ‘a gentleman in a business of rogues and ill-mannered loudmouths’. He wrote to Charisma not realising that Jenner was involved and declared Life’s A Riot ‘the best record I’ve heard in years’, signing off, ‘more power to your plectrum’. Kershaw and Billy met in London at a café called Sandwich Scene, along with Kershaw’s mate Dave Woodhead who would later play brass on Billy’s records. They clicked. Soon, Kershaw had Billy playing live on his show, and secured him some gigs through promoter John Keenan in Leeds, always offering him floorspace for the night. The bond was immediate.
Getting airplay on the Peel show was the Holy Grail. And it happened through a delicious mixture of chance and ingenuity. Jeff Chegwin played in the Chappell football team, once a week after work in Hyde Park, and Billy occasionally lent them his good right foot. One Wednesday evening, they were all standing around post-match having cans of beer and listening to Radio 1 on somebody’s car radio with the doors open when John Peel dropped in during David ‘Kid’ Jensen’s show, saying he’d do anything for a mushroom biryani. Chegwin spotted a gold-plated plugging moment. He and Billy drove over to where Radio 1 broadcast from – Egton House in the shadow of Broadcasting House – and took a mushroom biryani they’d just bought on Oxford Street into reception. Peel was an old hand, well aware of plugger’s bullshit, and accustomed to a steady stream of nutters in the lobby, but to his credit, he came down in person and gratefully accepted the vegetable biryani. Billy and Chegwin asked him to listen to their record in return. It’s what’s known as currying favour.
All concerned tuned in later that night, and were rewarded for their quick-thinking: Peel thanked Billy for the biryani, said he would’ve played the record anyway, and proceeded to spin ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’ at the wrong speed (it was cut at 45 rpm for better sound quality, and sounds a bit like a scary monster at 33). It was clearly time for some bright spark to invent CD.
This was Billy Bragg’s first ever play on national radio. The biryani scam was even reported in the gossip column of pop magazine No. 1.
The first reviews came in dribs and drabs. On 21 July, City Limits, the lefty London listings magazine, paired Life’s A Riot with the new album by rockin’ anarcho-syndicalists Crass, Yes Sir, I Will, also underpriced at £2.75 (hence the connection – for a comparison, Paul Young’s No Parlez album came out in the same week and cost £3.99, while Big Country’s The Crossing was £4.79). The review by Dave Hill said that Billy’s album contained ‘simple, poignant, even delightful paeans to various unobtainables’, and that it ought to ‘touch anyone whose blood is warm’.
Robin Denselow, in the Guardian on the same day, was more cautious: ‘Nothing extraordinary, but this could be an interesting label to watch.’
A week later, and Sounds became the first of the three music inkies to get a review out, written by Garry Bushell – now a self-styled hate-me tabloid TV critic and homophobe, then a music hack with a stiffy for so-called ‘Oi!’ bands (Cockney skinheads of sometimes questionable politics). He gave the album three and a half stars out of five: ‘Bill’s no maudlin seer; he’s closer to a busking Paul Weller. He ain’t gonna make Top Of The Pops but at three notes for seven songs, his album’s well worth your attention.’ (Bushell would interview Billy for Sounds in October, in which he compared him to an aforementioned punk poet: ‘Patwick Fitzgewaldkins he ain’t, mate.’)
Billy was invited to record his first session for John Peel – an important stepping stone for new faces, up there with first NME feature and, if things really took off, first Top Of The Pops. The news came as Billy returned from a gig up North: Katy met him at the train station and told him that Peel personally had been on the phone. ‘This was the Crown Jewels!’ Billy says. He went into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios on 27 July, and taped seven songs. It was such a special occasion, Billy went wild and took a taxi up there. Like any wet-behind-the-ears musician, he was disappointed that John Peel wasn’t actually at the recording session (Maida Vale is miles away from Egton House, miles away from anywhere) and flabbergasted that he also got paid – £150, thank you very much. He wrote Peel a thank-you note, and the session was broadcast on 3 August. He was still signing on at this stage, but not for much longer.
On 6 August, better late than never, Melody Maker joined the Billy Bragg cuttings file, with a review by Adam Sweeting (now a long-standing fan, he lamented the omission of both ‘The Cloth’ and the drum machine). Record Mirror followed (four stars out of five), then the Sunday Times (‘Paul Weller meets Jilted John!’), and that was it. For now.
Peter Jenner went on holiday in August. When he returned to work, he ‘got the pink slip’. Charisma were letting him go.
This was a blessing in disguise – the disguise being a beard and some oversized teeth, for the man behind his career change was the neo-hippy entrepreneur Richard Branson. These days, Branson runs trains, planes and Personal Equity Plans; in the early 80s, it was just his little corner of the record business: mail order, shops, label. The first Virgin record store was opened in 1970, and the label was launched in 1973 off the back of then-nineteen-year-old Mike Oldfield’s magnum opus Tubular Bells (which went on to sell over ten million). Despite the label’s bell-bottomed beginnings it astutely managed to keep its cool during and after punk, signing the Sex Pistols from ‘God Save The Queen’ until the bitter end, then The Skids, The Members and XTC. It is difficult to imagine now, but when Branson paid £15,000 for the Pistols, his was a truly independent label, with no shareholders and no US money. As Jon Savage says in England’s Dreaming, ‘[Malcolm] McLaren now had to deal with a company head younger than him and equally ruthless. Branson’s appearance belied his character. Despite the long hair and the air of woolliness, Branson had never really lived the hippie lifestyle.’
In 1983, in a puff of cheap incense, Virgin swallowed Charisma, thereby inheriting the bankable Peter Gabriel, the bankable Genesis and the not-yet-bankable Billy Bragg (they’d shifted only a modest one thousand copies of Life’s A Riot). The Charisma name was dissolved and the Mad Hatter logo laid off. Peter Jenner wasn’t chuffed with the takeover – he was no fan of Branson. ‘I’d never liked him. Flash bugger, he didn’t understand music – but you don’t need to understand music, you need to understand marketing, which he does. He’s good at that. He has an instinct for what the people want, which I don’t have.’
Jenner was seen as a hangover from the label’s PolyGram-linked past (‘I was a PolyGram person, I was the enemy’), and the inevitable ‘restructuring’ saw him out of a job. Billy remembers going in and helping him clear out his office, at which point Jenner made him a logical offer: ‘I can’t be your record company any more, I’d better be your manager.’
Management was what PJ knew best. He was a fixer, not a desk jockey. So, in September 1983, with his wife Sumi and Ian Richards, he founded Sincere, a management umbrella that would handle Billy Bragg, Hank Wangford the country and western gynaecologist, and The Opposition, a rare band Jenner had signed to Charisma; they were, to borrow a rock biz cliché, big in France (‘They could have been up there with the U2s and Simply Reds, filling up the stadiums,’ Jenner reckons. ‘But their lead guitarist had a problem playing live’).
Sensing that Utility wasn’t going to last long under the Virgin regime, Jenner started scouting round for another record company to put out Billy’s records. Not a sniff. But his belief in Billy’s music – and in the sound logic of Utility – was rock steady: ‘This was still the early days of Thatcherism. I felt it was becoming clear that there was going to be a fucking huge recession, and while everyone else was doing glamour and glitz, the new romantic bit, I thought that someone going round being a bit Dylanish, doing social-realism would go down well. Cheap, go-anywhere, do-anything. He did it. But I suppose my claim to fame is that I knew there’d be a market for it. I’ve often had these thoughts and I’m usually wrong. On this one I happened to be right.’
While Jenner hunted around for some new sponsors, Billy continued to put himself about. On 30 August, he trekked down to Penzance to join a frankly bizarre all-star bill containing Meat Loaf, Chuck Berry, Aswad and a kind of almost-10cc (they were minus founders Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, and in fact two months away from splitting completely). The day was called Penwith ’83, ‘Cornwall’s largest ever open-air concert’, and Billy was playing for train fare only – which was £90, as he’d travelled all the way from Edinburgh, where he was scatter-gunning the Fringe Festival. (Scotland–Cornwall–Scotland was a typically impractical itinerary for the furiously available Billy Bragg, and peanuts compared to some of the zigzags he would later pull off in Europe.)
Sadly, Cornwall’s largest ever open-air gig hadn’t pulled Cornwall’s largest ever crowd: it failed to break even at the gates. After playing his set (and securing Chuck Berry’s autograph), Billy discovered that nobody was getting paid. He begged the deflated organisers to reimburse at least his £90, which they eventually did, cash in hand. He hopped back on the train to Edinburgh and put it all behind him; at least now secure in the knowledge that he and Wiggy could play Chuck Berry better than Chuck Berry.
Billy’s relationship with Katy ‘had gone pear-shaped’ at this time, and as a result of the ensuing romantic and domestic uproot, it felt as if he never really came back from the Edinburgh Festival. He stayed in ‘a lovely big house’ with a friend called Rose, and from this agreeable base he played virtually anywhere with a bar and a play on, sometimes twice a day, sometimes twice a night (‘I made sure I was in everybody’s face’). On a typical evening, you could see The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist at the Little Lyceum, then catch a Canadian folk outfit called Stringband and Billy Bragg at the Theatre Workshop (bar open till 2 a.m.). There really is no place like it for three weeks.
Edinburgh ’83 was good to Billy. The Peel Session was coincidentally repeated while he was up there and improved his profile on the spot (‘the power of Peel cannot be overestimated’), he made an awful lot of useful contacts and broke an awful lot of guitar strings. As far as Billy is concerned, from there on, he was a professional musician.
Billy Bragg was go.