A range of distractions, 2002–2006
Gilbert and George are taking the [censored]
‘Take Down The Union Jack’ – the official version,
Top Of The Pops, 31 May 2002
SUZI QUATRO, LESLEY Garrett, DJ Spoonie, Shola Ama, Carol Decker from T’Pau … and Billy Bragg. No, not a bad dream after overdoing it at the cheese pavilion. This was 1 May 2002, and the broadcast of a special ‘music industry’ edition of BBC’s The Weakest Link quiz, which Billy had only agreed to do because it’s his mum’s favourite programme.
The afternoon they’d recorded it, out at a studio in Slough, Billy was under heavy manners to get ‘voted off’ by 4 p.m., the hour his agitated plugger had calculated they had to leave in order to make Broadcasting House in time for a live radio interview with Johnnie Walker on Radio 2. ‘No worries,’ Billy assured him. ‘I’m not taking this seriously. As long as I’m not the first person off.’
Oh, but he wasn’t. A solid grasp of general knowledge, a cool head and a propensity not to rub the others up the wrong way meant Billy kept getting through, round after round. ‘All of a sudden, I realised there was only three of us left! Me, Suzi Quatro and Lesley Garrett. To be perfectly honest, I suddenly thought, fucking hell, I could win this!’
Watching the programme go out, Juliet took great delight in recognising Billy’s expression change at this point, confirming for her that the dedicated socialist did have a competitive streak after all (a trait hinted at by the enthusiastic way he approaches family mini-golf tournaments). He went head to head with Suzi Quatro and won. He was the Strongest Link – goodbye! (They just made it to Johnnie’s show, where, sworn to pre-recorded quiz-show secrecy, Billy couldn’t even reveal where he’d been, let alone that he’d won. He’d won! Still, Mum was happy and he’d banked £11,000 for the Medical Foundation For The Care Of Victims Of Torture.)
It’s amusing to hear that Billy has been invited to participate in all the shows with ‘Celebrity’ in the title – Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here – and reassuring to know that he turned them all down. (‘Can’t be contemplated.’)
Though clearly a major TV highlight of 2002, we mustn’t let Weakest Link eclipse Billy’s fourth appearance on Top Of The Pops, essaying ‘Take Down The Union Jack’, the number one that might’ve been. It being – flags out! – Golden Jubilee year, they’d cooked up a wheeze: release the single in a multitude of formats (as per venal industry norm) and promote the backside out of it, thus hiking it to the top of the charts in time for Jubilee week. ‘It was a moment of madness,’ he concedes.
Released on 20 May, Billy took to the tarmac with Grant Showbiz and road manager Jason Bell, and did three in-stores a day for a week. Monday: breakfast in Dundee, lunchtime in Edinburgh, afternoon in Glasgow, that sort of whistle-stop itinerary. Tuesday, Leeds, Sheffield, Preston; Wednesday, Manchester and Lough-borough (stuck in traffic on the M62 trying to get over the Pennines, naturally); Thursday, Leicester, Birmingham, Northampton; Friday, Cheltenham, Cardiff, Bristol. The single entered the chart at an impressive Number 22 – Billy’s biggest hit since ‘Between The Wars’ – on the Sunday. The next day it was Eastbourne, Exeter; Tuesday, Camberley, Tunbridge Wells; Wednesday, Berwick St in London, and Thursday … Top Of The Pops!
The triumphant appearance aired the next day, in the show’s heretical new Friday slot. Seventeen years after his square-peg debut, he was back, once more confusing the young punters with his dangerous Republican rhetoric. Even better, the BBC took it upon themselves to bleep him. Twice. Neither ‘bum’ nor ‘piss’ were allowed to corrupt the nation’s youth. The single went down the following week.
‘Surprisingly, I can’t quite understand it, but the Jubilee went ahead anyway.’
With barely enough time to read the lavish spread about Barton Olivers in Homes & Gardens (a generous plug for Juliet’s Design Dorset operation), Billy was deep into the festival circuit – Leftfield at Glastonbury, Guildford, Brampton, Tolpuddle, Cambridge – with a short hop with the Blokes to Japan for Fuji Rocks (including a naked dip at some public baths – good bonding for any band). Then Europe, Canada, the USA and back to the UK, some dates with the full squad, others with just Mac, all the while thinking about the book.
The book, which would eventually become The Progressive Patriot, was borne out of Billy’s obsession with English identity, which threatened to eat everything in its path. ‘Having put out an album that made a point of talking about Englishness, I got invited to all sorts of discussions and TV programmes and seminars about the issues and politics of identity, and it made me realise there was a lot more to be said and done about this.’
Being invited to play at an Anti-Nazi League gig in September was another big marker – ‘the first one of those I’d done for 20 years’. (Having wound down in 1981, the ANL had resumed life in 1992, eventually merging with the National Assembly Against Racism, with the support of the TUC and various unions, to form Unite Against Fascism.) Also, having put in another insanely busy year, Billy was keen to find ‘something else to do’. A challenge.
‘I’m good at making Billy Bragg records, I’m probably the best Billy Bragg there is. But if you do it year in, year out, after 20 years it does become … not a chore, but predictable.’
Writing and playing with the Blokes had, crucially, allowed him to articulate his feelings about Englishness using polyrhythms and world music shapes. Instead of approaching the subject in a traditional way – like ‘The Home Front’, which, with its trumpet reveille, had been all ‘jam and Jerusalem’ – he was able to use musical multiculturalism to head off misconceptions that he was coming at patriotism from a right-wing position. After all, it had been Morrissey’s refusal, or failure, to articulate what he meant by ‘Bengali In Platforms’, and the skinheads and the Union Jack, that left him open in the early 90s to accusations of racism and fascism. ‘You don’t have to defend yourself, you just have to explain.’
On first hearing the coda of ‘England, Half English’ – ‘Oh my country, oh my country, what a beautiful country you are’ – some friends thought Billy was being ironic. He wasn’t. But expressing complex feelings in song was, by definition, limiting. Which is why writing a book suddenly felt like the right thing to do; somewhere to organise the thoughts banging around in his head. Plus, he wanted to sort out his ‘work–life balance’, determined to be around when Jack made the transition from junior to secondary school (‘that was the final nudge’). To the constant advances from various publishers, he finally succumbed.
A more profound balance was disturbed on 22 December, by the sudden death of Joe Strummer. With no prior warning, his heart packed up while out walking the dog near his home in Broomfield, Somerset. He was 50, just five years older than Billy.
Numbed by the news, a generation mourned. A lot of Clash records were played on that horrible day. Strummer’s importance to Billy has been stated before, but in losing him, it all swam back into focus: how inspiring The Clash had been, how irreplaceable, how enduring. The last time he’d seen Joe was at a Mescaleros gig at London’s Astoria, where they ran through the usual fistful of Clash numbers, including ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’. He’d received a Christmas card from Joe two days before he died.
‘I think Joe’s passing was a moment to step back and think about what The Clash had done and how it had made a difference to our lives. My whole approach is based on lessons learned from The Clash, both positive and negative.’ There are, as Billy notes, a whole generation of ‘middle-aged Clash fans’ in positions of influence: Mick Rix, former ASLEF general secretary, heavily involved in keeping the BNP out of Barking, Andy Gilchrist of the Fire Brigades Union, who had been at Victoria Park, and Bob Crow, RMT boss and ‘awkward squad’ stalwart. They’d all stepped up when battle came down.
Billy and Joe had even been talking about doing some US shows together in 2003. What might have been. A gloomy end to a year otherwise crammed with hope and activity.
At the start of 2003, Billy bought the laptop. ‘When you sign a record deal and they give you an advance, you have to make a record and form the band and pay for the videos. When they give you a publishing advance, you just have to buy a laptop. We’re in the wrong business!’
He had a clear vision for the book, but no idea how long it would take, or what form. Time to knuckle down. But distractions were everywhere, and not just the kettle and the dog.
On 15 February, Billy was ‘shuffled to the front’ of the biggest public demonstration in British history, the Stop The War march in Central London. Amazed and heartened by the sheer variety of the turnout – young, old, hard left, soft right, seasoned politicos, march virgins – he reached Hyde Park and watched as the multitude streamed in, thinking, ‘This is bigger than anything I’ve ever been part of. As the estimated figure reached a million I thought, Wow, something is going to happen. This is going to be really powerful.’
It got to 4 o’clock, and Billy’s thoughts turned to the train home. He bought soup and a roll, and cut back through Piccadilly, ‘and the march was still going. That really did my brain in.’ (The media recorded the final tally at one million, the organisers said two, while the police helpfully massaged it down to 750,000. Numbers aside, as Madeline Bunting wrote afterwards in the Guardian, ‘The very best of Britain was on the city’s streets.’)
Billy Bragg was not alone in thinking that this unprecedented display of pacifism might actually stop Tony Blair taking us to war.
On 20 March, the insultingly-named ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was launched, coalition forces entered Iraq and the second Gulf War began. Mission was accomplished by 1 May, when George Bush, a real ‘war president’ now, entertained the troops on aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln with some well-chosen words of victory (‘the United States and our allies have prevailed’). This speech, historians now unanimously agree, was somewhat premature.
Workwise, apart from a week of gigs in Belgium, a Strummer tribute gig in Southampton, Maydaze in Glasgow, various talking shops, a Question Time and The Weakest Link Champion of Champions, for the first half of the year Billy kept his head down and his laptop up.
Then, having helped launch the first roadies’ union at Glastonbury in June (Roadcrew Provident Syndicate, a branch of the doughty GMB), he was off touring Canada for the whole of July and Australia in September. In between – a quiet year, indeed – he joined an illustrious gang on stage for two Concerts For A Landmine Free World, on a bandstand in Edinburgh and at Leicester’s Summer Sundae festival: Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, Chrissie Hynde and Steve Earle. It was Earle who’d got in touch with Billy: ‘Fancy taking it in turn to sing some songs, and do some together?’ It was a speedy yes. He’d never met Harris or Baez before.
Walking with these two formidable women in Edinburgh the night before the first gig, and coming upon the statue of Walter Scott, Baez happened to say how much the Ivanhoe author looked like tragic folkie Tim Hardin. Conversation got round to ‘(Find A) Reason To Believe’, the Hardin song made famous by Rod Stewart – Baez said, ‘It would be wonderful if we could do it.’ She wanted to send out for a CD, but Billy said, ‘Don’t worry, I used to be a busker.’
Their rendition, with Hynde, turned out, in Billy’s words, to be ‘really beautiful’. He also sang the Flying Burrito Brothers’ ‘Sin City’ with Harris (‘I’m flat as a pancake, she’s singing like an angel’), and debuted ‘Bush War Blues’, based on Leadbelly’s ‘Bourgeois Blues’, which stormed it in Edinburgh, at which point Baez, the queen of folk, leaned over and said, ‘Fuckin’ A, Bragg!’ A nice moment.
In August, Billy took godson Jamie, who’d turned 15, to his first Reading Leeds Festival. Having been blooded at Glastonbury, it struck him as ‘just a gig in a field’, which is hard to argue with. Neil Pengelly, booker for the festival and dyed-in-the-wool Bragg fan with a New England tattoo, had convinced Billy to play the Concrete Jungle new bands stage, tipping him off that many visiting American bands – the likes of Death Cab For Cutie – saw his tattoo and expressed their admiration. So he went for it.
Grant pushed the sound right up to combat the DJ in the tent next door, Billy broke three strings in the first song, and they stayed up drinking with the whippersnappers keen to touch the hem of his wellies. Next day it was on to the Christian-run Greenbelt in Cheltenham, where he and Jamie got to sing ‘Soldier Girl’, in robes, onstage with the massed choral ranks of The Polyphonic Spree – because group leader Tim DeLaughter was another Bragg fan. Jamie loved it. Another victory for the smaller festival.
This was the year in which Billy celebrated 20 years in showbiz with a stout, 40-song salute, Must I Paint You A Picture?, released in October to mark this historic milestone and supported with assorted radio appearances and in-stores. If nothing else, he’d made it this far without splitting up.
In November, the Tell The Truth tour ensured that his nose wouldn’t stay in the book for too long. It was that pesky Steve Earle again. He’d corralled a bunch of activists in America to oppose corporate ownership of US radio, Clear Channel the sorest thumb in this regard, with over 1,200 radio stations in its portfolio, 30 TV channels, outside advertising space in 25 countries, and tentacles in venues and booking agencies. The tour, very much in the mould of Red Wedge, began at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, and alongside Billy and Earle, featured Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, trading as The Night-watchman, political rapper Boots Riley, and Lester Chambers from The Chambers Brothers, who’d been active in the Civil Rights movement. They all travelled around in a bus, visiting places Billy had never been: Asheville, Indianapolis, Tampa.
‘The great thing about my job is that I get to go America and meet those kinds of people. Your average Brit has this kneejerk reaction to Americans, but there are good people there trying just as hard to rectify what George Bush and the neocons are doing as we are. We mustn’t lose faith in those people – they need all the support they can get.’
He’s talking about people like musician and activist Jenny Toomey, director of The Future Of Music Coalition, one of the many organisations with a presence on the tour, Mike Mills of R.E.M., who joined them on some dates, and comedian Janeane Garofalo, who compered. Awareness was raised, rousing songs sung, questions asked, answers given.
Undaunted by the Truth being Told, the ravenous Clear Channel’s next step was to buy out ITB (International Talent Booking), Billy’s agents in the UK – ‘just after I’d told them not to book me into any Clear Channel venues!’
The solution was clear: he found a new agent.
A new year, 2004, and Billy’s book was still languishing in that limbo between intention and prose. Welcome distraction came with Lords reform, still a hot topic for Billy, especially after the Iraq demonstrations, which caused him to wonder who these people would be voting for come the next election. Surely not Labour? A proportionally-elected second chamber was more crucial than ever, to convince the public they still had a stake in democracy. Billy had forged a good working relationship with Paul Stinchcombe, Joint Committee member and Labour MP for Wellingborough (albeit one who would not survive the electoral bloodbath in April 2005). He got Billy in to see people like the influential Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer, leader of the Commons (and tamed firebrand) Peter Hain, and party chairman Ian McCartney.
In February, a debate and vote in the Commons was sidetracked by the issue of what proportion of the second chamber should be elected or appointed. The honorable members ended up with seven options. Everybody voted for the one they fancied and against the other six, and it was eventually thrown out. When Blair came out in favour of an appointed House, that ‘fucking killed it dead’.
So was that it? No. With the help of a filmmaker he’d met at party conference in 2003, Billy made a windswept three-minute non-party-political broadcast, Apathy Into Action, and, helped by Stinchcombe, sent a DVD of it to all Labour MPs and a VHS each for their constituencies. If nothing else, hundreds of the party faithful would see how splendid the cliffs and beach at Burton Bradstock were.
Over a well-chosen soundtrack of ‘NPWA’, leaning against a gatepost and facing a prevailing wind, Billy urges, ‘Forget the Tories and the Liberal Democrats – at the next election our biggest enemy is going to be apathy.’ Summing up the secondary mandate, he says, ‘One tick in the box and you’re sorted.’
He put forward his proposal at a debate called ‘A Democratic Lords: the Third Stage?’ hosted by the Fabian Society at the House of Commons. This was flagged up by a hugely supportive comment piece by the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland (‘It is not poetry, but it is a compromise that could work – which is what practical politics is all about’). Hain and Falconer praised the Bragg plan publicly.
Billy thrashed it out with anyone who’d listen – Shirley Williams, Tory peer Lord Strathclyde – but kept being told, ‘You’ve got to convince Prescott on Lords reform; if you don’t – forget it.’
So it was that in April, between the soundcheck and gig at the Barbican, he was taken to the Commons canteen by deputy PM John Prescott. They had a long conversation about the Lords, ‘but there was something else preying on his mind, and I realised what it was when we came to the end of our plates of egg, bacon and chips. He said, “Did I see you with your eye on that spotted dick pudding?” I said, “Yeah, it did look pretty good. With some custard, I thought.” He said, “Yeah, it looks really, really good.” I said, “I shouldn’t really be having this, I’ve got a gig in half an hour.” He said, “I shouldn’t be having it either.” I never did convince him about Lords reform, but we achieved unanimity on the spotted dick.’
In June, Billy was asked on to the august bill of a Lonnie Donegan memorial at London’s Albert Hall (Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Rolf Harris). He was squeezed between the Barron Knights and Rick Wakeman singing with a woman from Cats. Donegan’s widow, Sharon, had seen Billy play in Newcastle, and invited him to come and do a Woody song. It was good to be part of. England were playing Croatia in Euro 2004 that night and Billy will always remember watching the game backstage with Gerry Marsden and a wizened old guy ‘like Albert Steptoe’, who turned out to be Chris Farlowe (Number 1 in 1966 with the Stones’ ‘Out Of Time’). ‘I was the youngest person there!’ he laughs. ‘The audience was prehistoric!’
Billy had been lucky enough to meet Donegan, the father of skiffle, a few years before his death in 2002, through John Peel. Billy was summoned to Broadcasting House – another canteen in a government building – for no discernible reason, other than Peel wanted him there. Billy duly went along. He and Donegan talked about Woody, a bit of politics, a lot of skiffle, but Peel said nothing for the entire time. Not a word. On the drive home, Billy asked his plugger, Dylan, who’d set the meeting up, what had been up with Peelie. It turns out he was too in awe of Donegan to speak.
Six months later, Billy was doing the Peel show at the DJ’s Suffolk home and, off-air, asked him about the incident: ‘How could you not speak to Donegan?’ In response, Peel went off and came back with an original 10-inch of New Orleans Joys, the 1954 Chris Barber album with Donegan’s version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’ on it, and started misting up. ‘It said a lot about Peel. That he was such a fan.’
On 26 October 2004, John Peel died after a heart attack, while on a working holiday with his beloved wife Sheila in Cuzco, Peru. Billy received the grim phonecall from Porky, now the breakfast DJ on digital radio station BBC 6 Music, just before the story broke. If anything, the waves of national bereavement went further than Joe Strummer’s. Billy, who shared his feelings with the listeners of 6 Music that very afternoon, says, ‘People always think of the John Peel who helped bands like me and The Smiths and The Fall, but they don’t understand how important he was to Led Zeppelin, the Faces, Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Donegan story proves that he was still able to use music to take him back to the first time he heard it.’
The funeral, held on 12 November in Bury St Edmunds, to which a thousand people turned up, and at which eulogies were read by Paul Gambaccini and Peel’s brother Andrew Ravenscroft, was ‘very, very, very difficult. In the church, I was behind the Undertones and next to Robert Plant, and I came home on the train with Joe Boyd. You expect these people to be around forever, Peel more than anyone else, because he’d been around forever.’
The loss of Peel, whose absence has created an unfillable vacuum, not least at Radio 1, threatened to cast a pall over the rest of the year. But a lift, for Billy, came with the publication of Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1. ‘The phones started ringing as soon as the first books came out,’ he says. Billy got a mention in Bob Dylan’s back pages.
For the record, it’s toward the end of Chapter Two, ‘A New Land’. Dylan goes to see the ailing Woody Guthrie in Greystone Hospital, New Jersey (‘an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind’). Woody tells him to go to the house at Coney Island, speak to Margie, his wife, and get his hands on a bunch of songs and poems that had never been set to music. Dylan treks out to the end of the subway line and through a swamp, to Mermaid Avenue, but Margie’s not there, just their ten-year-old son Arlo and a babysitter. Dylan stays awhile but never does see those songs. ‘Forty years later,’ Dylan writes, ‘these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them.’
And that’s the mention. ‘It’s like getting a knighthood!’ Billy proclaims.
Billy cleared the decks as 2005 rolled around. He was writing his book. No more gigs.
Actually, there was a General Election on 5 May, and he’d promised a lot of MPs he’d turn out for them, those who’d helped him with Lords reform, or those facing the BNP. He played Leeds and Burnley in one weekend, the NUM in Barnsley, in Dewsbury for Labour candidate Shahid Malik, and at a school in Keighley on a Sunday afternoon where Ann Cryer was standing against BNP leader Nick Griffin.
Criticism came Billy’s way during the campaign for supporting pro-war Labour MPs. We’ll call it the Oona King Problem. King, who’d voted for the invasion of Iraq, was fighting what had become an unsafe seat in Bethnal Green and Bow, East London, against Labour-rebel-turned-independent George Galloway, running for his own Respect Party. Billy made an appearance.
‘It put me in a difficult position,’ he concedes. ‘It would have been simpler to duck out, and it did cross my mind when an agent made a speech before I went on stage comparing Galloway to Oswald Mosley. When you get involved in local politics like that, shit hits the fan. My name was added to the list of people Galloway condemned when he got elected. I can live with that. If anyone wants to know where I stand on the war, I made my feelings explicit and I continue to do so within the Labour party. You can’t work with politicians without getting some shit on you. I’ve always known that.
‘I can’t remember being involved in a General Election campaign where I didn’t get called a scab by the SWP. It’s par for the course for me. There are bigger fish to fry – to keep focused on the BNP and the Tories.’
Thanks in part to an unconvincing performance by creepy Tory leader Michael Howard, Labour squeaked home to history: a third term but with a majority of just 66, losing safe seats to the left, the right and the centre. Labour held Barking and Dagenham, but the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook overtook the Lib Dems, a worrying trend after the party’s showing at the September 2004 council elections, winning the Barking ward of Goresbrook with 52% of the vote. If nothing else, the shifting of the political plates brought Billy’s book into sharp focus. ‘Is that where I come from?’ he asked himself. ‘What happened to me to make me different from those people who voted for the BNP?’
Answer: he’d heard The Clash when he was 19.
‘I’ve spent all my adult life fighting those people and the first seat they win in the London area in a generation is in my home town. A real shock.’
Billy, the author, was looking at a virtually clear, commitment-and gig-free three months until Christmas. But Maxine Eddington got in the way, and looking back, Billy’s grateful that she did. Back in February, he’d been sought out by Rosetta Life, a fantastic charity that sends artists and musicians into cancer hospices to encourage those living with the disease to express their feelings in song, or art, or film, or poetry, whatever captures their imagination. He ended up visiting the women at Trimar Hospice in Weymouth for six consecutive coffee mornings.
‘I wanted to do it because when Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1975, they sent him home from the hospital and said the best way to deal with it was not to talk about it. So we never talked about it. And I deeply, deeply regret that.’
He played them ‘Tank Park Salute’, and encouraged them to talk about their experiences, which he would help interpret as songs. After a tentative start, he began to ‘get a vibe’ in week three. One woman wrote a poem. Another had some ideas about a road and a shining light. Another brought in a photograph of herself and her 15-year-old daughter, taken when she was diagnosed: all done up, smiling, laughing. She said, ‘I did this because I want her to remember me when we laughed.’ This was Maxine Eddington. Week four, Maxine didn’t turn up, she was too ill. But she asked her carer to pass an envelope on to Billy.
It contained 36 handwritten pages – ‘Do you remember when we went swimming with a dolphin off Portland Bill? And we laughed. Do you remember winning that medal for belly-dancing? And we laughed.’ The song wrote itself.
Rosetta Life had sufficient budget to record three songs, using a band recruited by Billy, led by a vocalist he’d found singing in the pub called Helena. ‘We Laughed’, ‘The Light Within’ and ‘My Guiding Star’ were made into modest videos, using family photos, home movies and studio footage and made available on a website. (Artists involved in parallel projects included Michael Nyman, Roots Manuva, and Jarvis Cocker, who conducted a live ‘Cyber-jam’, linking between Great Ormond Street and a hospice in South Africa.)
It all went off beautifully. They’d done what they set out to do.
Then, in August, Maxine, now in remission, started pestering Billy about putting ‘We Laughed’ out as a single. He told her it wasn’t as easy as that. ‘There’s no point putting it out next year,’ she baited him. ‘I haven’t got that much time.’
In the week before World Hospice And Palliative Care Day in October, marked by 74 countries across five continents, he and Maxine appeared on Jeremy Vine’s lunchtime show on Radio 2. She told her moving story and Vine played the song. The BBC were swamped with calls: people who wanted to share stories with Maxine; a lorry driver forced to pull onto the hard shoulder in tears. Listeners loved the song, which was not available in the shops.
So Cooking Vinyl pressed up a thousand copies for free and put it out. Thanks to Vine, and local support from the likes of the Dorset Echo, ‘We Laughed’, credited to Rosetta Life Featuring Billy Bragg, went to Number 11 in the Official UK Chart in November. Maxine was a star, and well enough to join Billy at some in-stores. One, in Poole, ‘was like a religious meeting. They were coming to her and she was literally laying her hands on them. It was incredibly powerful. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Which just goes to show, you never know how a year is going to pan out.
Maxine had been given a matter of months to live when Billy met her at the beginning of 2005. She kept going, powered by the human spirit, until finally succumbing to cancer in September 2006. ‘She was a truly inspirational person.’
By February 2006, Billy had writer’s block. He’d produced 40,000 words – out of 80,000 – but couldn’t get to 50,000, and it was driving him ‘fucking bonkers’. Then he was asked by his publishers to talk up the half-written book at a sales conference in Amsterdam. He went on before Bill Bryson, and ‘it suddenly got real.’
The experience unblocked him. He had 70,000 words by the time he went to America in March to promote the first Billy Bragg box set, ‘pretentiously titled’ Volume 1. (Pay no more than £46.99, or nearest offer.)
The box came about because Elektra records (‘who’d been very kind to me for 20 years – they got my records out there’) was effectively boarded up after 54 years. Parent company Time Warner sold the Warner Music Group to private investors, who weighed and measured Elektra and decided to merge it with the better-performing Atlantic. Such decisions are rarely tainted by sentimentality. Still, due to the ‘reversions’ in his contract, Billy’s catalogue all came back to him.
He struck a deal in the States with Anti, who would put out his new records, and Yep Roc, who’d look after the old stuff – hence Volume 1 (and, in October, Volume 2), whose bonus-disc unreleased rarities were mined by Wiggy and Grant. ‘It was nice to be boxed,’ Billy says. ‘I wanted to do something tactile before music became the clicking of a mouse.’
The handsomely-tooled box pulled in some nice retrospective reviews (the Chicago Tribune wrote, ‘Bare and unvarnished, the records function as messenger pigeons whose emotional fury and empathetic pleas fly in the face of empty-headed love songs, harken back to the urgency of first-wave punk and co-opt the spirit of civil rights-era soul’), including a big up in the NME. It further cemented Billy’s standing among the next generation of bands: rising stars Hard-Fi, from Staines, invited him to support them for five nights at Brixton Academy; Sheffield popsters Milburn got in touch, and he joined them in the studio.
At the local elections on 4 May 2006, the BNP won 12 seats out of the 13 it contested in Barking and Dagenham, after a High Court ruling on the 12th. Nationally, it more than doubled its number of councillors, from 20 to 52: Epping Forest, Sandwell, Stoke-on-Trent, Burnley, Kirklees, Redditch, Redbridge.
‘It gives me no pleasure to say that I got my retaliation in four years early’ – i.e. England, Half English – ‘but it encourages me that my cultural antennae can pick up stuff as it’s happening.’
In June, the cover of trade magazine The Bookseller was wrapped in the cross of St George – a powerful teaser ad for The Progressive Patriot (‘a stunning, timely polemic from a straight-talking icon: hardcover, £17.99, October’). The book itself wasn’t actually finished. The author had hoped to sign it off by the World Cup. But the proliferation of England flags flying from cars and vans across the land in a wave of optimistic patriotism merited a new chapter. He handed it in on 31 July. England went out in the quarter finals. Some of those flags, tattered and forlorn, are still flying.
One more act of defiance and principle: MySpace, the online social networking platform that seemed to be leading the way in the mid-noughties – and still provides a free, user-friendly marketplace for music – had crossed a critical Rubicon in July 2005, when News Corporation bought it for $580 million. Open to anyone with a hotmail address, it was also now prime advertising real estate for Rupert Murdoch. Still, in essence ‘What a great idea!’ says Billy, without irony. ‘You’re sitting in your bedroom in your parents’ house. You’ve written all these songs. Now you’ve got to find a bunch of guys, form a band, learn to sing, get some gigs, get a manager, and maybe one day get a record deal, and then people out there will get to hear your music. With MySpace, you write the songs, click click click, and there they are, everyone’s got them.’
Sarah Hyde in Billy’s office had set a MySpace up for him in October 2005 (he would always need an initial leg-up into Cyberspace). But it took Fionn O’Lochlainn’s manager, Sue Ellen Stroum, to bring to their attention the small print of the terms and conditions, through which MySpace claimed a ‘worldwide royalty-free licence’, giving them the right to sub-license, use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, store, reproduce, transmit and distribute content on and through the service. In May, smelling a rat, Billy pulled his songs off the site, with a message saying, ‘We wouldn’t grant these conditions to a record company, we don’t see why we should give them to a corporation owned by Rupert Murdoch.’
The press picked up on it. Debate ensued. The official defence was that Madonna puts songs on MySpace and clearly they don’t own Madonna’s work. ‘Yeah, but Madonna has a lawyer and a recording contract and a publishing contract. The majority who put their stuff up there have no legal contracts at all.’
The argument pinpointed a paradigm shift in the music industry. Previously, you’d sign to a record label for life copyright, and they own your records until they can’t make money from them any more. Record companies traditionally invested in the physical production and distribution of discs. Now all they do is drag songs onto iTunes, so the necessity to sign isn’t there. Billy gives the example of Ian McLagan: ‘Whenever we’re on the road in the UK and we stop at a service station, there’ll be a compilation of 60s hits in the shop with a Small Faces track on, from which he earns no money whatsoever.’
This, he reasoned, could be the fate of some future breadwinner on MySpace. (Billy would never sign for life copyright with Go! Discs. ‘Whose pension should this be?’ he would ask Andy Macdonald. ‘Yours or mine?’)
A week later, MySpace changed the ‘proprietary rights in content’ clause in their terms and conditions: ‘MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials, collectively, “Content”, that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose etc. etc.’
The dominoes fell. After MySpace came Bebo, a then fashionably like-minded, UK-founded social networking site pitched at the McFly demographic. Billy told the Guardian, ‘If this new medium is to attain its full potential, it is crucial that artists are able to post content secure in the knowledge that doing so will not hinder their future career and earning potential. I believe that all sites which host member content should follow this lead by modifying their own terms of use.’
At the time, the next stop seemed to be YouTube, followed by the internet channel MTV Flux (which actually closed in 2008). Meanwhile, Facebook, launched on American campuses in 2004, and Twitter, in 2006, would soon reach their own critical mass. An activist can never sit on his hands, as the frontiers keep on expanding.
When spanking new Tory leader David Cameron was interviewed by the New Statesman in June 2006, he was fresh from Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, on which he’d chosen records by The Smiths, Bob Dylan and R.E.M., hardly the standard fare for those on the right.
Under the worrying headline, ‘Equality, croquet, Billy Bragg and me’, he revealed that ‘A New England’ (the Kirsty MacColl version) had almost made the final cut.
On the matter of whether this would have been an appropriate choice, he said, ‘This idea that you can’t like the music of people who don’t agree with you politically would kind of limit your musical choices a bit.’
A near-miss for Billy that said as much about shifting generations as it did about the vacuity of the next Prime Minister. Only 39 when he was elected leader, Cameron was an undergraduate when Billy and The Smiths and R.E.M. first made their mark. Perhaps his appreciation of their pinko sounds was genuine. In some ways, let’s hope it was hollow, opportunistic, please-like-me spin.
The only thing David Cameron and Billy Bragg have in common is Oxford. Cameron attended Brasenose College, and Billy was given an Honorary Doctorate by Oxford Brookes University in September 2005 (‘the cap and gown, all that shit’). The only thing.
This is Cameron, and it certainly rings true: ‘When I grew up in the 1980s, there was a big gulf between left and right. You were either for CND or Nato, privatisation or state ownership of industry, cutting taxes and setting people free or high rates of marginal tax, for the trade unions or for trade union reform. It seemed to me we made a choice on those sorts of grounds.’
The question Billy still asked, after 23 years in showbiz, two box sets, a Number One, a doctorate and a ‘knighthood’, remains disarmingly simple, ‘Which side are you on?’