Chart entered : 16 March 1985
Chart peak : 15
Number of hits : 14
As late as 1985 , also-rans from the punk era were still breaking through in new guises. Billy is the first of three such examples to feature in the next few posts.
Billy was born in Barking in 1957 to middle class parents. Billy learned to play the guitar at school absorbing folk as well as rock influences. He formed his own band Riff Raff with friend "Wiggy" in 1977 . He was turned on to the idea of using rock music to promote activism by seeing The Clash at a Rock Against Racism concert in April 1978.
Two months later Riff Raff put out their first record, the EP "I Wanna Be A Cosmonaut" on Chiswick . The title track is terrible, punk at its most oik-ish making The Angelic Upstarts sound sophisticated by comparison. Thankfully it's unrepresentative with second track "Romford Girls" being a tuneful and affectionate tribute to Essex girls although drummer Rob Handley wrote the lyrics. John Peel gave the record a spin and in September the band supported The Stranglers at a gig in Peterborough. After 18 months of getting nowhere in Northamptonshire Billy returned to London and with a re-vamped line up, Riff Raff released a string of four singles in 1980 on their own Geezer label, all dressed up in sleeves with sexist artwork that Billy must wince at today.
Riff Raff were never much more than the sum of their influences - Elvis Costello, The Jam, Tom Robinson Band - but they could come up with a half-decent tune with the very Costello-ish "Little Girls Know" probably the pick of the singles although their best song Handley's "You Shaped House" which could have come straight off Setting Sons was only a B-side.
At the end of the year the disillusioned band split up and Billy's reaction was to join the Army. He completed three months basic training then realised his mistake and bought himself out . Billy then decided to take his music to the people in the most direct way and started busking with his trusty electric guitar under the name "Spy Vs Spy". He got into the office of Charisma Records' Peter Jenner who put his demo out as the mini-LP "Life's A Riot With Spy vs Spy" on his Utility label in May 1983 .
The album consists of seven short songs and lasts just under sixteen minutes. Billy was appalled by the new pop ( particularly Spandau Ballet which caused him some embarrasment when the Kemp brothers signed up to the Red Wedge project a couple of years later ) and so you get Billy's foghorn voice backed by his abrasive guitar and his songs, nothing else. It's not a classic with only three of the songs worth putting on again, "A New England" with its Eddie Cochran riff and personal / political confusion ( later of course a big hit for Kirsty McColl ) "The Milkman of Human Kindness" , an update of You've Got A Friend and the sombre "The Man In The Iron Mask" a song from the point of view of a cuckold tolerating his partner's infidelity. Elsewhere the likes of "To Have And To Have Not " and "The Busy Girl Buys Beauty" sound like they were knocked up at lunch time in a sixth form common room and should have stayed there.
Charisma were wracked with financial problems which cost Jenner his job so he became Billy's manager. They managed to extricate the album from an uninterested Richard Branson ( Virgin had taken over Charisma ) and it was reissued on Go Discs at a fixed price of £2.99 ( not that cheap when you consider how short it is ) that November. Peel had got behind him and he appeared on The Tube which was where I first heard him. I was excited because he seemed like the natural successor to Jam-era Paul Weller and even entertained the fantasy that he might call up Bruce and Rick when he felt the need for a rhythm section.
Billy continued with his frenetic gigging schedule , aided by his new road manager Andy Kershaw. At the end of the year he released his first full-length album "Brewing Up With Billy Bragg". It's not quite as purist as its predecessor with Billy adding extra guitar lines and allowing a trumpet and organ on a couple of tracks. Despite a growing reputation as a political songwriter, there's only two songs that fit in that bracket, the attack on the tabloid press "It Says Here " which he got to perform on Breakfast Time and his soldier's eye view of the Falklands conflict "Island of No Return". All the rest are troubled meditations on love or kitchen sink reminiscences which Morrissey does rather better. It's listenable stuff but only "Sr Swithin's Day" and "The Saturday Boy" sound fully developed.
Billy got two big breaks at the beginning of 1985. First Kirsty McColl made "A New England" a big hit with Billy providing a new extra verse for her , then Kershaw got a presenting gig on BBC 2's Whistle Test , now an early evening show , and wasn't slow in securing Billy a slot on the programme.
"Between The Wars " was the title song on his EP released in February 1985, his first 7 inch release. It was inspired by the Miner's Strike which was about to collapse as Billy probably realised and is a call for old-fashioned socialism though its mournfulness suggests he knew it was further away than ever. The other songs compliment it. Besides "It Says Here" again you have the 1930s US trade union song "Which Side Are You On" directed at the police and "World Turned Upside Down " a song by senior folkie Leon Rosselson about a revolutionary land movement that briefly flourished during the English Civil War.
Billy was never destined to sell millions and aside from a fluke number one in tandem with Wet Wet Wet this remains his only Top 20 hit.
I'm perhaps one of the few people who doesn't mind Bragg's singing voice - perhaps due to being a terrible singer myself, it's nice to see someone equally limited making it! But his appeal to me was always his guitar playing and songwriting.
ReplyDeleteCan't say I've listened to his early stuff in some years (it got regular spins in my youth), though his mid-career albums still get regular plays. His biography written by Andrew Collins is a good read too.