Billy Bragg by Andrew Collins

Author:Andrew Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753549230
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

11. BROKEN-HEART SURGERY

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

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