Great leaps forward, 1987–1989
At any foreign airport you will meet your sophisticated compatriot who will tell you that everything you are about to see is a cliché and that the real life is behind the scenes. But he himself is the cliché. You will learn more from the local man with the bad shave who sells you dark glasses
Clive James, Flying Visits
The stars look very different today
David Bowie, ‘Space Oddity’
UNWASHED AND SOMEWHAT slightly dazed, Britain woke up on 12 June 1987, with a hangover. Eight years of partying with yourself takes its toll. Paul Weller decided to play Stalin and airbrush himself out of the Red Wedge photos: ‘I had reservations about joining in to begin with and I wish I’d just stuck with my instincts from the start. On the Red Wedge tour we were made to feel guilty for talking about each other’s shoes. It was like, “How dare you? Clothes are a bourgeois trapping.” I love clothes. I’m just not interested in anything political any more.’
Writer Pete Davies had painted a nightmare local futurevision in his cheerless 1986 novel The Last Election. With the fictional, senile Nanny at Number 10, employment a thing of the past, the masses numbed by drugs and snooker, and political broadcasts by the Money Party promoting ‘the splendour of our guns or the worldwide sales of nancy boy pop groups’. It was a facile bit of 1980s satire but typical at a time when, if the voice of dissent was to be heard anywhere, it was in the arts, in alternative comedy, in Spitting Image, on Channel 4, even in sitcoms about unemployment like BBC’s Bread and ITV’s We’ll Think Of Something. It was in The The’s deceptively soulful tune ‘Heartland’:
This is the land where nothing changes
The land of red buses and bloody babies
This is the place where pensioners are raped
And their hearts are being cut from the welfare state
Britain had turned into a client state, a missile base for America, and a privatised bloody mess. And the Labour Party had lost Paul Weller. The Blow Monkeys asked how long can a bad thing last? Well, at least another five years.
In July 1987, prosperity reached Go! Discs, who moved out of Wendell Road into a smart office in King Street, Hammersmith (Son Of Go! Mansions). Porky and Tiny were offered real salaries and job titles (Porky had been on £100 a week, now he was on £15,000 a year). Further staff were hired, and Andy Macdonald set up his office a floor above the rest of them. The stars looked very different from up there, and Go! Discs had gone legit. The family atmosphere was still there, as were the fey, whimsical press releases, but they had to be worked on. (‘Whenever Billy’s stuff was on the schedule everything went a bit more Wendell Road,’ Porky recalls.)
After what seemed like the Last Election, Billy had a two-month tour coming up, starting in Canada and ending in Rhode Island – if ending is the right word, as it led directly into a week at the Mean Fiddler, Italy, Hungary, Austria, the UK again, and Scandinavia and the USSR before Christmas. Do not pass Go!
He and Mary talked themselves out of getting married, having got as far as looking at the hall in Ilford where they were going to hold the reception. Billy broke it to Jenner on the way to the airport: ‘I don’t know who was more relieved, me or him. I have absolutely no regrets about the fact that it didn’t come to anything. It would definitely not have worked. It would’ve ended in divorce, suicide, boredom, and probably some of the worst-decorated houses you can imagine.’ (Mary married the boyfriend-before-Billy a year later.)
After Canada, Billy made concrete his support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (and indeed, his increasing interest in Central American music and poetry) by playing at the International Book Fair in Managua. He’d been invited by the poet, Catholic priest and Minister of Culture, Ernesto Cardenal. It was his first visit to the third world, and to a country with a fine tradition of dissent. He stayed at the Hotel Las Mercedes, built by the Sandinista government to compete with the American-owned, CIA-favoured International (where Howard Hughes once lived). The 1972 earthquake had killed 20,000 people, and as good as knocked Managua down, a situation not helped by the fact that former dictator Anastasio Somoza Jnr had been siphoning off foreign aid and increasing his own personal fortune to £1,600 million. Here was a country at war, and yet, as Billy told Nicaragua Today magazine, ‘it’s more free than Britain is.’ For a socialist regime, it was energetic and fresh, unlike the ‘staid and dour ambience’ of the Eastern Bloc.
There were gigs at the Sandinista Cultural Workers Union and a four-hour meet-the-people session where 300 of the festival’s delegates questioned government ministers, the Foreign Minister, the Vice President and the President, Daniel Ortega. ‘This impressed upon me how far this experiment in social democracy was progressing,’ Billy wrote in the NME. ‘Can you imagine a Labour government laying themselves open like that?’
Billy had a moment of clarity on the flight home as he cruised over the Northern Honduras, ‘where the Man From Delmonte reigns supreme over the seemingly infinite pineapple and banana plantations. I realised the score. The US government wants to snuff out the Nicaraguan Revolution because if the people of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala follow the Sandinistas’ lead, the interests of the American United Fruit Company and their successors will be toppled.
‘I learnt a lot, not least that the Nicaraguans don’t seem to like my music very much.’
Nonetheless, as with so many relationships Billy forged, he and Nicaragua would meet again.
In August, Billy deputised for Andy Kershaw in his 10 p.m. slot on Radio 1, his first real taste of broadcasting. In the minutes of the following week’s departmental meeting, it was noted that ‘he needed very little guidance’ from producer John Walters, and was commended.
Billy’s week-long Mean Fiddler residency ran from 23 to 27 August. For one night only, Riff Raff reformed with Porky on bass, marking ten years since they arrived at Bearshanks. Another notable aspect of that week was keyboard wizardess Cara Tivey’s Billy Bragg debut. He’d seen her playing with Everything But The Girl in America, and the two of them would make some sweet music together (not that kind).
If Talking With The Taxman had been ‘difficult’, the fourth album would surely be ‘really difficult’. In October Billy started recording Workers Playtime at Pavilion Studios with Joe Boyd – a proper record producer whose work included Fairport Convention, R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs (hence Billy’s interest). Jenner had known him since the 60s, and effectively pulled him out of retirement with the threat, ‘Either you produce it or I will’ (PJ had produced ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ for Ian Dury and a few Roy Harper albums).
Wiggy earned a co-production credit by, as he tells it, ‘putting my oar in’. Expanding on Taxman’s dalliances with instrumentation and knob-twiddling, Cara came on board, as did Mickey Waller on drums, Wiggy on guitar and old hand Danny Thompson on double bass. (To illustrate Thompson’s heritage, when, in 1991, Billy recorded Fred Neil’s ‘Dolphins’ with him, he explained how he wanted it to sound – like Tim Buckley’s version live at the Festival Hall. Thompson nodded, listened patiently, and said, ‘Yeah, I played bass on that.’)
A curio came out at that time, a single called ‘Ballad Of A Spycatcher’ by Leon Rosselson, which featured Billy and The Oyster Band. It caused a minor stir because its specially written lyrics repeated an allegation from Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher, then banned from sale in Britain due to an apparent national security threat. You could buy the book in America, naturally. These things tickle a man who has been to Nicaragua.
In divine retribution for voting Mrs Thatcher back in, the beautiful South of England was devastated by a freak hurricane in October. Winds of 110 mph left the area between Cornwall and East Anglia with a bill of £300 million, and seventeen people were killed. Three days later, just in case those Tory voters thought it a coincidence, the stock market crashed, and fifty billion pounds was wiped off share prices in London in one day. They called it ‘financial meltdown’, and all those City boys who’d taken Harry Enfield’s character Loadsamoney at face value and waved their wads in Docklands wine bars, kissed goodbye to their Christmas bonus. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Billy’s return trip to the Soviet Union in November, via Sweden and Finland, took in Estonia, Moscow and Leningrad (very much the rock capital of Russia). This trip was superbly documented by Chris Salewicz and photographer Adrian Boot in the book Midnights In Moscow: snow, trains, an assortment of funny hats, cross-cultural community singing in an Olympic weight-lifting hall, exquisite buildings, unexquisite buildings, black marketeers who looked like Alexei Sayle in Gorky Park, vodka, chocolate and the Kingston Gas Board (KGB).
Six months later, and in marked contrast to that trip’s open-armed, inquiring, fact-finding perspective, Billy returned to the USSR, to play the Vilnius Rock Festival in Lithuania alongside West Midlands cartoon rap-rock group Pop Will Eat Itself. With Art Troitsky as mediator (what an admirable cultural go-between he was) and with the NME’s James Brown in tow, the Poppies’ story was the polar opposite to Midnights In Moscow. All they seemed to talk about was the lack of beer and decent food (they led audiences in a chant of ‘Beer, beer, we want more beer’ and made a mockery of the press conference with the same parched theme). ‘Really sad,’ Billy concludes. ‘English people abroad. If you’ve got any interest in learning anything from these places, you’ve got to put your own feelers out. Otherwise you’ll just meet the boring people from the Ministry. It’s like being shown round the Glastonbury Festival by John Selwyn Gummer.’
On the way home from Leningrad, Billy had a Russian soldier’s hat confiscated from his luggage by customs officers.
Memo to Generation X: pull your pants up, turn your hat around and get a job
P. J. O’Rourke, Fashionable Worries
The Housemartins split in January 1988 with the self-penned statement, ‘In a world of Rick Astley, Shakin’ Stevens and the Pet Shop Boys, quite simply they weren’t good enough.’ They told the NME before they told Andy Macdonald. In February 1988, Billy Bragg played no gigs for the entire calendar month, the first time this had happened in six years (they were sculpting away at Workers Playtime).
A track from Taxman took on new life in April 1988. Called ‘Help Save The Youth Of America’ (‘A nation with their freezers full/Are dancing in their seats/While outside another nation is sleeping in the streets’), it was a warning against complacency in the Land Of The Free aimed specifically at the sons and daughters of the Baby Boomers, whose idealism was in danger of fading away. May ’88 saw the primary elections for the next president, a chance perhaps to replace Ronald Reagan, the man who coined the phase ‘evil empire’ with a younger man (Reagan was 77) and even a Democrat, Michael Dukakis. It wasn’t much of a race, and despite the news images of flag-waving, partisan fervour at US election time, only about 40 per cent of voting-age citizens even bothered to turn out at the polls, but Billy was keen to do his bit for consciousness-raising. (His American fans, largely college types, tend to be at the soft-left, T-shirt-slogan end of the spectrum, but there is always work to be done in a country that produced the bumper sticker ‘Guns, God and Guts made America great’.)
A US-only live EP was issued on Elektra, named Help Save The Youth Of America, and also containing the politically charged tracks ‘Think Again’, ‘Chile Your Waters Run Red Through Soweto’, ‘Days Like These’, ‘To Have And To Have Not’, and ‘There Is Power In A Union’. The personal message on the back implored buyers ‘to take part in the democratic process … you are electing a President for all of us. Please be more careful this time.’
On the fourteen-state, 22-date tour that went with it, Billy hooked up with the Democratic Socialists of America and various Central American support groups, and made it a campaign trail. At New York’s Roseland Ballroom, as reported in Rolling Stone magazine, he apologised for his hoarse voice: ‘It’s nearly gone from me leaning out of taxi windows and shouting “Asshole”, at cars with Bush bumper stickers.’ Jane Garcia, reviewing the Los Angeles University show for the NME, noted, ‘Billy said everything about American politics you wished Bruce [Springsteen] would say because it would have more effect.’ In the event, the Republicans walked it, and Bush became president.
While Billy was out there, he had a Number One hit single over here. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was Billy’s contribution to an all-star remake of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, Sgt Pepper Knew My Father, coordinated by the NME’s Roy Carr and in aid of the charity Childline. He recorded it during the Workers Playtime sessions in late ’87, thinking it no big deal: Cara Tivey played the tune, Billy did three vocal takes and it was down in a couple of hours. In May, it became half of a double-A-sided single with Wet Wet Wet’s ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Thanks to support from BBC’s That’s Life (host Esther Rantzen had founded Childline), it topped the charts for four weeks and raised £700,000. Billy might call it his ‘honorary Number One’ – in that the Wets’ track received most airplay – and try and offload the credit to Cara, but no amount of humility can disguise the fact that it’s a magnificent achievement, cover or no cover, charity or no charity.
‘WHO THE HELL ARE WET WET WET?’ asked Billy’s T-shirt on the cover of the self-congratulatory NME.
Top Of The Pops showed the Wet Wet Wet video three times, but on the fourth week, Macdonald begged the producer, ‘Let Braggy on!’ They relented, and Billy repaid their generosity by making a pig’s ear of his appearance. To be fair, he’d just flown in from a five-week US tour, and he’d only ever sung the song three times, but making up the words during the camera rehearsal didn’t please the people upstairs in the control room (needless to say, he was adamant about playing live), so he taped the lyrics on the floor beside him. Wiggy and Dave Woodhead played recorder.
During the actual recording, the BBC dry ice started, obscuring the lyrics, and half-way through, Billy watched a Norman Wisdom figure with a fifteen-foot ladder distractedly lean it up against nothing – it fell over with a crash that caused the audience to look round. Assuming this would spoil the take, Billy meandered to the end, at which the director said, ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’
He was at his mum’s on the Thursday of transmission, mortified that an event she was clearly so proud of was, in reality, going to be so naff. ‘It was awful,’ he says. ‘If you know where the ladder gets dropped, you can hear it.’
A packed June and July later, Billy grabbed some ‘little bits of holiday’ with a string of ladyfriends in August: messing about on the canal with Texan folkstress Michelle Shocked (a barge from Tottenham Hale to Richmond that broke down near Putney Bridge); a romantic trip to the Lakes with ‘a woman from Stockholm’; a bunk-up with ‘someone else’ in Salisbury – quite a tally, but Billy was on the rebound after Year Mary.
In August, things went ‘a bit Wendell Road’ at Son Of Go! Mansions and ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards’ came out as a single. Billy was pretty much trapped in the singles loop by now, but it never reaped great dividends. Since ‘Between The Wars” pioneering work in the Top Fifteen (and discounting May’s ‘honorary’ Childline squirt), Billy Bragg singles hadn’t troubled the business end of the chart – ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’, released after the album whence it came in November ’86, had reached 58.
Some valuable Billy Bragg compositions and fine covers have appeared as B-sides down the years (Brunette’s twelve-inch contained Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportees’ and The Smiths’ ‘Jeane’), but it seems that Bragg fans are albums-buyers and gig-goers by nature. ‘Great Leap Forwards’ threw up an unfortunate incident: Billy caught Andy Macdonald with a car bootfull of seven-inch promo singles marked ‘DJ Edit’. On closer inspection, he discovered that the first verse had been edited off. Billy explains his ire: ‘I was angry from an artistic point of view – that nobody had asked me about this – and at the naïvety of Andy and Pete, thinking that chopping off the first verse would get it played on Radio 1. It was so ridiculous. The only way we would’ve got it played was to get Trevor Horn in to produce it at incredible cost, and cut the politics! But the first verse? Really fucking dumb.’
With a sad inevitability, it got to Number 52.
Workers Playtime, the album, was released on 19 September and went Top Twenty. In full, ‘Great Leap Forwards’ provided it with a fitting, sing-song finale, one of the few songs on the album not about Mary or inspired by the Mary experience.
‘The Short Answer’, which actually names her (‘Between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary there was Mary/Between the Deep Blue Sea and the Devil that was me’) is actually about a number of Billy’s obsessive relationships, and, in true Bragg style, uses actual events as a starting point and takes off down fictional tangents. For instance, there is talk of being duffed up by ‘her’ two brothers; Mary did have two brothers, but they never took him outside, as it were. Billy will readily admit to using real names in song – as far back as ‘Richard’ from Riff Raff days, whose protagonists are people he knew (‘Richard belongs to Jayne/And Jayne belongs to yesterday’) – but it is wise not to take every word he writes at face value.
That said, ‘Must I Paint You A Picture’, ‘The Only One’, ‘The Price I Pay’, ‘Life With The Lions’ and ‘Little Time Bomb’ are all fundamentally Mary songs (‘Sometimes I think that fate has been against us from the start’). Equally, they can be taken as polaroids of Billy’s attitude towards women, towards himself and towards relationships as he viewed them in 1988. Opening jangler ‘She’s Got A New Spell’ – the title of which comes from a phrase Alan Wigg used after a female neighbour was banging and wailing next door – is more general, hinting at the witchcraft of female sexuality first explored in ‘Strange Things Happen’. ‘I’m not saying they’re all witches,’ he explains. This perceived hormonal alchemy has come a long way since the boyish frustration of ‘A New England’ and ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ and the disappointed sigh of ‘A Lover Sings’ and ‘The Myth Of Trust’. Billy has become more analytical of love, but no happier, frankly.
David Fricke in Rolling Stone called it ‘broken-heart surgery’.
Porky remembers with some distaste a meeting between Andy Macdonald and Pete Jenner after Mary and Billy had split where, albeit jokingly, they rubbed their hands together at the thought of the album they would surely get out of it. They were, however, on the money (apt, really) – Workers Playtime was a fine cycle of injured love songs. With a bit of politics.
‘Valentine’s Day Is Over’ examines violence towards women from a female perspective. ‘This is a song by a bloke about how it is unacceptable to beat up women,’ Billy explains. ‘I’m not writing it for women, I’m writing it for other blokes to hear.’
‘Great Leap Forwards’, featuring some of Billy’s most memorable lines, pulls off the difficult trick of boiling down the whole pop-and-politics-don’t-mix argument. Billy elucidates: ‘What I’m trying to say is, the role of the artist is not to come up with answers but to ask the right bloody questions. It’s the audience’s job to change the world. The artist can talk about the world, and evoke the world, and paint a picture of the world, but the answers aren’t given to singer-songwriters. For fuck’s sake, my first famous song said “I don’t want to change the world”, however … and the important thing is the “however” – while I’m here, there are one or two things I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind, other than just my guitar and the length of my hair. Some people take that and run with it and get a lot out of that, other people are opposed to it, but I recognise that it’s a contradiction. I am not kidding myself.
‘I was trying to communicate to people that I was aware. It was my post-Taxman declaration of who I was. My caveat to Red Wedge: I’m really interested in politics, however, I don’t know what’s going to happen if Labour win the election.’
It’s a mighty long way down rock’n’roll
From Top Of The Pops to drawing the dole
If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution, cut out the middle man
In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune
But this is reality so give me some room
So join in the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just a T-shirt away
It is Billy Bragg’s ‘Song For However’. It builds and builds until, apparently, everybody Billy knows is singing backing vocals (Porky, Cara, Wiggy, Michelle Shocked, a junior Jenner and Jayne Creamer – the very Jayne mentioned in the song ‘Richard’, then working at Go! Discs). What a way to go. He always did know how to end an album.
Having rehumanised himself through the songwriting process on Workers Playtime, Billy put himself back on the rack for what he refers to as The Tour That Went On For Ever, but was no more punishing than any other. The American leg started on 7 September in Halifax, Nova Scotia and ended 1 November in Montreal. (From there it was Scandinavia, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Christmas.) The Volvo had been outgrown since Billy stopped playing with himself, replaced by a rented van, containing him, Cara, Jenner, Wiggy and Grant Showbiz aka Grant Cunliffe, sound engineer and producer who’d experienced the early days of The Smiths (‘the punk Hollies’, as he’d described them) and also worked with The Fall.
Halfway through the American trek, between LA and Dallas, the Bragg party detoured via the Grand Canyon and almost ended the tour there and then. With Jenner driving, and Billy sitting in the front, they came round the mountains at one in the morning at European speed and two huge National Park elks darted across the road in front of them. The van missed the stag but hit the doe, which was killed outright. Mercifully, there was no other traffic, and Jenner managed to keep control of the vehicle and stay on the road, but it was nearly a nasty accident – Cara, six months’ pregnant with her first son George, was asleep across the back seat. It shook everybody up, and cost them deer.
A week later, Cara gave them a return shock in New Orleans, but a rather more pleasant one. 9 October is Columbus Day, so there was no gig to be had, and it was designated for laundry. But Cara’s boyfriend Mick had joined them, and at 11 a.m., without warning, the party were summoned to the courthouse to witness their wedding. Fortunately, they’d all bought cowboy gear in Austin and were able to dress up. Everyone cried, except Cara and Mick, and despite the public holiday, a visiting Tiny managed to rustle up something old, blue and borrowed. It was a happy occasion, but it meant that they never did get their undies spun for the entire tour.
(Cara’s baby was born in December. She worked right up to her ninth month, and was back out on tour when George was three months.)
On 31 December, Billy played the first of what became his annual Hackney Empire New Year’s Eve specials. He traditionally spent New Year’s Eve at Brenda and Joe’s in Oundle (their parties were legendary), but 1987 had seen him and Wiggy wandering the streets of London after a Wangfords gig, eventually washing up on Andy and Juliet Macdonald’s doorstep – so Pete Jenner stepped in. He’d find something for them to do. Work.
Marginally fewer gigs had been notched up in 1987 and 1988, but many more miles travelled. Billy was hopping an average of twelve countries a year, many of them covered twice, usually a couple visited for the first time – in ’86 it was East Germany, Russia and Japan; in ’87, it was Australia, New Zealand and Nicaragua. In 1989, although he didn’t know it yet, it would be Mexico, Bolivia and China.
‘He was working me hard,’ says Billy of Jenner. ‘But the things he kept coming up with were too fucking interesting to turn down! It wasn’t just, Let’s go and tour Germany again, it was, Let’s go to China, let’s go to Mexico, or Nicaragua. The only thing that used to bug me about it was that there was no time in between, no time for me to assimilate the fact that I’d been in China, and think to myself, God, that was really incredible, and let it sink in. I’d get home, and bang, I was in Mexico! Then back in New York again.
‘I’d say to people, It’s nothing to do with me, I just go where he tells me!’
Jenner defends his merciless slave-driving tactic: ‘You’ve got to ride the tide, you’ve got to do it all. If you can do everything, you should do everything. If you don’t open up those markets, you’re gonna bore them in England: There you are again, another album, another tour. If you’ve got a career in all these other countries, you don’t have to overwork the UK. When you’re happening, get to Prague, get to Germany, get to America, get to Canada. You’re offered the chance to go to Russia, you go to Russia.
‘I wanted to get Billy happening all over the world, which was hard for him, I know, because he never liked flying. He had to screw up his courage and go on dodgy airlines on cheap tickets. I could never afford to book with whoever flies direct from Minneapolis to Denver, so we’d have to go via Memphis. That sort of shit.’
‘Pete’s so intrepid,’ says Tiny. ‘He always wants to go somewhere else.’
She remembers him in a German airport brandishing a 1970s-looking brochure saying ‘Come To Kazakhstan!’ containing a photograph of the local delicacy, boiled sheep’s head in its own juices (this was intended as enticement). Tiny assumed he was joking, but you can never tell with Peter Jenner.
It was a mighty long way round rock’n’roll, especially the way Billy Bragg was doing it, but aside from the lack of feet-ground interface, it was still the life for him: ‘I didn’t feel it was pointless. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway.’
If nothing else, Brenda and Joe’s postcard collection was looking healthy. Ever since Billy left Oundle in 1980, he’d sent regular letters, Christmas cards and tapes to his old mates. It became a custom once he started travelling the world, and the couple were in regular receipt of esoteric missives from far-away armpits or beauty spots. Their anthology today is impressive: postcards depicting the three-storey Uniroyal Tyre in Detroit, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, a rainforest in Queensland, moose calves in Alaska, the Pope in Rome and the people’s underground station in Moscow (actually, he bought that one in Camden). These bulletins, often brief and written on knees in transit, are exhausting enough simply to look through, so heaven knows what it must have been like on the other end of the biro.
Here, there and everywhere, but forever writing home: that’s Billy Bragg all over.
In February, 1989, he was in the GDR again, by which time perestroika was in full swing – not as groovy as it sounds, since the conservative East German State were clamping down in response to Gorbachev’s revolution in the head. The place was like a pressure cooker, and the ten-day trip was a depressing one. The optimism they’d experienced in ’86 had gone. Billy remembers that nobody in their party spoke a word on the flight back from East Berlin to Amsterdam.
Billy asked about the elusive glasnost after gigs, but no one was particularly open about openness. At the House of Russian–German Friendship in East Berlin, he inadvertently started some big trouble by saying that perestroika and glasnost wouldn’t work unless the Berlin Wall came down. The next day, he was called in by the state-run promoters to be taught a lesson: they took him to the museum at the Brandenburg Gate. As their coach drew into no-man’s land between East and West, Jorg Wolter’s antennae began twitching. There were TV cameras waiting for them, which meant that Billy’s little visit would be on that evening’s news. ‘Whatever you actually say,’ Wolter told Billy, ‘you’ll be saying that the Berlin Wall is a good idea on TV.’
Billy refused to get off the bus. Wolter lost his temper, got off and walked back to East Berlin, straight through the guards without a care. The whole farrago was ‘piss-poor PR for the East Germans’, as Billy puts it. While they were between the walls, in an area about 200 yards wide, Billy noticed that it was full of rabbits, which struck him as sweet.
Suddenly he was Mr Refusenik: he declined to play the lightbulb factory again, so they offered him an army barracks where the border guards were based. Here, Billy had a fascinating friendship meeting with the border guard officers – an old timer fixed him with his beady eye and revealed that he actually took part in the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, explaining that it’s there to keep the fascists of West Germany out of East Germany (the ‘anti-fascist dam’ they call it). Billy’s response was direct: ‘There aren’t any. We are not trying to invade your country – I know it and Gorbachev knows it.’
The lesson from all this was that things change. Politics change. That’s why Billy admits he can’t keep up with the Labour Party today. Things had changed all around this old guard officer and he hadn’t even noticed. Billy did the barracks gig and sure enough, a happy, smiling photo with the guards appeared in the newspaper. He said his Berlin Wall piece again, and got in trouble again.
The closing gig at the Sports Hall was televised live. Never mind Radio Free Europe, this was Channel Free Bragg: through his interpreter, Billy suggested that the Wall was built to house a rabbit sanctuary. ‘The time will come when the rabbits of East Berlin will be free to roam in West Berlin,’ he said.
A smattering of applause. The cameras moved away. Once Billy was offstage, he was told in no uncertain terms, ‘You will never play in East Berlin again.’ And that was that.
‘Although they didn’t know it at the time, they were right,’ Billy says. ‘Because the next time I came back, there wasn’t an East Berlin to play.
‘But at the time, I felt that I’d failed all those people I’d had contact with. I was yet another thing they weren’t allowed to do.’
Australia and New Zealand saw Cara Tivey back in the saddle: ‘If I can do that, I can do anything,’ she reasoned. George flew to Sydney aged three months. It was good for everybody to have him there, and anyway, as Billy says, ‘Having a baby on the road’s not that different from having a rhythm section.’
After a couple of dates in Japan, Billy, PJ and Sumi went to Shanghai and on to Beijing in China – but as sightseers not a rock’n’roll touring party. ‘It was really groovy,’ Billy enthuses. ‘Shanghai was like a big Dixons, but without the variety.’ History was brewing up the very weekend they were in Beijing: on 15 April, the liberal reformer and former Communist Party head Hu Yaobang died. A week later, on 22 April, his funeral was marked by a 100,000-strong demonstration by students, who unfurled a huge banner saying ‘China’s soul! Forever remember Comrade Hu Yaobang!’ The next two months saw hunger strikes, martial law and the eventual massacre of 2,600 students by the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square.
All Billy, PJ and Sumi knew of it was the difficulty they experienced as they drove to the airport. PJ’s brother, a Sinologist living in Canberra, had sorted out some Chinese contacts for them through the Australian cultural attaché. After Tiananmen Square, every single contact they’d made disappeared.
Billy and PJ had found a stall in Beijing selling cool Chairman Mao badges and bought the lot for $110. It was Mao who had initiated the original Great Leap Forward in 1958, and look where it had got them. It’s not enough to buy badges in days like these.