Billy Bragg: The First Four

The quartet of albums that launched the career and causes of a one man version of The Clash.

If you're lonely, I will call
If you're poorly, I will send poetry

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

— The Milkman Of Human Kindness (1983)

Empathy is the engine that drives Stephen William Bragg. Whether he’s singing about the next great political leap forward, or simply “looking for another girl”, Billy Bragg’s heart is firmly attached to his sleeve.

Bragg learned to play guitar at 16 and quickly went on to form Riff Raff, a punk band, with his best mate, Wiggy. After a favorable review in NME of their debut cassette, the band split up and Bragg bounced between odd jobs.

In 1981, with few other options, Bragg joined the army and spent three months in a basic training program as part of a British tank outfit. He loathed it. Upon finishing the initial training, Bragg borrowed £175 from his parents to buy his way out of the remainder of his service contract.

With few other options, Bragg moved back in with his folks in the town of Barking, and began busking around London daily with a mobile electric guitar rig under the handle Spy vs. Spy.

He managed to make a few connections, including posing as a TV repairman to gain entry to the offices of Charisma Records where he managed to find an advocate in the form of Peter Jenner.

Bragg booked a half day session to record some demoes with staff producer producer Oliver Hitch. Billy and the producer got on quite well, but Hitch didn't see much in Bragg’s potential.

“I didn’t really get what he was about and waved goodbye in the corridor thinking: What a nice bloke. Shame he’ll never make it.'”

A few weeks later, Hitch caught Bragg live, and it clicked for him.

“Billy could stand on stage, make people laugh, tell a story and turn it into the introduction of the song. In those days, everything was becoming more about high production values, so to see a guy doing it raw and live with just an electric guitar was very different.”

The sessions took place at Chappell Music’s Park Street Studio in London over the course of just three days.

Hitch sought to capture the energy of a Billy Bragg gig. The seven songs on the album weren't even mixed. Both the vocal and electric guitar were recorded directly to two track tape, essentially cutting the record live.

The resulting Mini-LP, Life Is A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy was released in the UK in November of 1983. With a runtime of just fifteen and a half minutes, the vinyl was cut at 45 RPM, instead of the standard 33 1/3.

Infamously, BBC DJ John Peel mistakenly played ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’ at the wrong speed, and then later corrected the error on air by spinning the track again.

Peel’s broadcast of the song had come about when Bragg and a friend were playing football (soccer for the Americans in the crowd) and heard Peel tell his listeners that he was hungry. Bragg immediately began to make his way to the BBC studios.

Earlier that very day, Bragg had left a copy of Life Is A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy at the BBC front desk. Still in his football gear, Bragg trudged in with a mushroom biryani and snagged back the desk copy. He found his way upstairs and delivered the meal and the album to John Peel himself.

For his part, Peel insists he would have spun the record without the biryani, and would have spun it again because it was good and not because he had inadvertently played it at the wrong speed. Billy Bragg had a very influential new fan.

Mixing pop with politics was central to the ethos of Bragg. In his elevator pitch, he described himself as a “One man Clash”. On stage, he would talk about political events and progressive activism, but he would also discuss the human condition and offered a wonderful sense of humor.

This was not a dour singer/songwriter reeling off ballads from a century ago. This was a brash, boisterous young man with a thick cockney accent, a distorted guitar and a genuine point of view.

Regularly at his gigs, Bragg would invoke the spirit of Emma Goldman, the Russian-American anarchist philosopher and political activist. Bragg would remind the audience by quoting Goldman, “If I can’t dance to your revolution, I don’t want to be a part of it.”

The songs were smart, sharp and catchy. While many of them were deeply political, others were deeply personal. Bragg’s love songs are just as powerful and just as central to who he is as a songwriter.

On ‘A New England’ Bragg offered a side of himself that he later said,

“By 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been elected, the band had broken up and punk had dissipated into synthesiser groups, so A New England was my way of saying that I needed a hug as well as a new ideology.”

The record continued to get airplay and gain traction through to the new year and in January of 1984, Life Is A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy hit #30 on the UK charts. The following year, Kirsty MacColl would turn ‘A New England’ into a top ten hit.

July of 1984 found Bragg back at work in the studio, this time with producer Ted de Bono. The pair had first met during a session that Bragg recorded in ‘83 for the BBC when de Bono was working there as a staff producer and engineer.

While the recording approach was still quite spartan, Bragg did overdub additional guitar parts for the second LP. Additional players Kenny Craddock and Dave Woodhead were brought into add organ and trumpet, respectively, on a smattering of songs.

Brewing Up With Billy Bragg arrived in the UK in November of 1984. The album’s eleven tracks sound very much like the utilitarian Life Is A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy. However, the melodic touches of the additional parts, better use of studio techniques like reverb and delay, and a more assured set of songs elevateBrewing Up With Billy a Bragg to a new plateau.

Famed music weekly NME named it the #6 record of the year in their vaunted list of the best albums of 1984. It outpaced records that year by REM, U2, Echo & The Bunnymen, Prince and many more.

‘It Says Here’ kicks the record off with a scathing look at the hypocrisy of the British tabloid press. Other polemics such as ‘Like Soldiers Do’ and ‘Island of No Return’ bring Bragg’s progressivism into a sharper view.

It’s where the personal and the political converge that Bragg is at his most effective. In ‘The Myth Of Trust’ we hear the story of a failing relationship and dreams for better days. It’s impossible to know if Bragg is talking about a personal encounter, the England of his youth, or all of the above. Regardless, it is startling in its honesty.

The first Billy Bragg song I ever heard, ‘The Saturday Boy’, recounts a young man’s crush on an older girl who toys with her would-be suitor. I remember being awestruck by the line, “I never made the first team, I just made the first team laugh/And she never came to the phone, she was always in the bath.”

With a guitar, voice and trumpet, Bragg paints a vivid picture of the awkwardness of puberty, and brings the painful and lustful memories home so deeply, one scratches at the wound as though it were a phantom limb.

‘The Saturday Boy’ manages to touch on nostalgia without becoming cloying. It harkens a genuine sense of first love without wading into the melodramatic. The specificity of it makes it universal.

Brewing Up With Billy Bragg went to #16 on the UK charts. Bragg toured extensively with acts like the Clash, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Style Council and more. Bragg would use his relationships with these acts and others to form a progressive musicians activist group called the Red Wedge.

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry is subtitled, the difficult third album. After a pair of stripped down recording affairs for the first two albums, Bragg opted for a much more orchestrated approach this time around.

Bragg chose BBC producer John Porter for the sessions. Porter had made his name as a producer largely on the success of the Smith’s debut record. Kenny Jones, drummer for Small Faces and The Faces, was brought in as co-producer and drummer/percussionist for the sessions.

Friends like Kirsty MacColl, Johnny Marr, and Ken Craddock provided understated melodic support. While it’s hardly orchestral pop, the sonic diversity and subtle variety of Talking With The Taxman About Poetry are its greatest assets aside from the songwriting itself.

Album opener, ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’ features the chimey guitars of Johnny Marr ascending above one of Bragg’s finest love songs. Masterfully combining lovelorn young men and the difficulties of a bleak economic future, Bragg evokes the hopelessness and agony of wasted youth. The song is also a prescient look at toxic masculinity.

The album’s centerpiece, ‘Levi Stubbs Tears’ is a haunting tale of an abusive relationship and the soothing salve of music. With nothing more than a reverb laden electric guitar and his voice, Bragg drops us sqyarely into the living room of one broken family, and holds us there for three and a half minutes.

‘There Is Power In A Union’ and ‘Help Save The Youth of America’ are two of the most overtly political and powerful songs of Bragg’s career. The latter is a scathing look at America during the Reagan years. By the time I discovered Bragg and this song in 1989, Reagan would be gone but his legacy is still felt in our crumbling democracy.

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry would stand upon its release as Bragg’s most assured work to date. Hitting #8 on the UK album charts, it appeared that the record buying public thought so too.

Bragg’s fourth long-player, Worker’s Playtime, is the high water mark of his first four albums. Embracing an imported Americana seemingly bequeathed from the Kinks, and a more raucous production approach found Bragg fronting what could be confused with a rock band.

By now Bragg’s live band included his old mate Wiggy from Riff Raff and Cara Tivey on keyboards and backing vocals. Now, they were joined by Mickey Waller on drums and Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas.

Pop gems like ‘She’s Got A New Spell’ and ‘Little Time Bomb’ meld Bragg’s overt Britishness with a roots laden folk-rock. Country barn-burner ‘Life With The Lions’ displays Bragg’s razor sharp wit and his adoration for American country and British skiffle music.

The personal, political, and private converge in a stunning tableau of intimate moments and grand gestures. From the trenches of war to the broken promises of Mao, Worker’s Playtime weaves the most defined and elaborate pastiche of Bragg’s output.

The album came with a suggested retail price of ‘Pay no more than $4.99 for this LP’. Along with the price tag came a pointed phrase, “CAPITALISM IS KILLING MUSIC”.

Each of his previous releases had included a suggested ‘pay nor more than’ price, but on 'Worker’s Playtime, Bragg sought to poke the greedy bear that was the British music industry.

Throughout the 1980’s, the British Phonographic Industry sought to stem the tide of dubbing and music sharing with a campaign called ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’. Bragg saw their gambit as nothing more than a veiled excuse for corporate greed. Hence, “CAPITALISM IS KILLING MUSIC”.

Worker’s Playtime received favorable reviews and managed to crack the Top 20 on the UK albums chart. Billy Bragg was hitting his stride with a full band, and Britons were still waiting for another round of the one man Clash.

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While it seemed he was taking a commercial step backward at home, Bragg was ascendant in the United States. The terrific album closer ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards” received significant airplay on MTV’s 120 Minutes as well as on American college radio stations.

Bragg’s connection to popular groups of the time such as R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs and Robyn Hitchcock helped to solidify his reputation in America. These bands also provided important touring opportunities to attract new audiences.

Within a five year span, Billy Bragg went from biryani delivery-man to political pop provocateur. He’d emerged from the army, the factory floor, and busking the London streets as a fully formed political voice with a fiercely powerful conscience.

Best to let Billy Bragg himself have the last word on the subject,

“I like to think my personal songs are just as powerful as my polemics, and long ago stopped worrying about striking a balance between the two. Whether you’re lovelorn or radical, I’m just trying to help you make sense of the world, because that’s what my favorite songs did for me.” - Billy Bragg

Cheers,
Matty C