S*M*A*S*H
BILLY BRAGG
NME FLOAT BRIXTON
written by Stuart Bailie
transcribed by Vu
thanks to Peter Stanley
Last week, 130,000 people marched through South London to celebrate unity in the face of fascism's recent rises. STUART BAILIE and ANGELA LEWIS grabbed their whistles and drums to join the ANTI-NAZI LEAGUE CARNIVAL.
REAL SURREAL, man: Billy Bragg gazes down Brixton Road - watching the thousands of passionate souls who've joined him in this rally, all of them buzzing on the music, the shouty slogans and the vibes. Suddenly, the sun kicks through the clouds and this exceptional, shiny gig is revealed at its very best.
Get the message? Nobody had guessed that this Anti-Nazi Carnival would have been so amazing - that maybe 130,000 people would bus it into south London from all over the country, throwing the tidy police cordons into disarray, all those yellow ANL placards catching the light like a million smiley faces gone mutant and rebellious.
From his place atop the NME float, Billy Bragg has an especially epic view. He's been up there for the two-hour journey from Kennington Park, celebrating and joshing with this crowd, blaming out his favourite party tunes and letting their high spirits take his own songs like 'New England' into giddy expressions of fun and shared aspirations.
Sometimes Bragg is just riffing for the fun of it; adding the names of the road signs into his songs, teasing the coppers (sample lyric: "Just because you're gay - Mr Policeman - I won't turn you away") and singing in mock Morrissey tones, whatever that's supposed to mean. Today, Billy is just priceless.
Since the sunlight has accentuated the day's awesome spectacle, the NME photographer wants to frame the setting for posterity. He is stood on top of a wobbly speaker stack, shouting the manically over to Billy, asking him to turn sideways by the mic stand, so he can place this great 'backdrop' into perspective.
Billy just laughs and peers back along the northern stretches of Brixton Road. He's incredulous. "You're calling this a backdrop?" he gibbers aloud, so his thoughts play over the PA system. "This ain't no backdrop, man. This is… reality!"
Masses of cheering, more hilarity, moral spiraling upwards. Such a perfect, perfect day.
OH YEAH, and S*M*A*S*H were there too - it was actually a frazzled version of 'Lady Love Your C---' that launches the NME's rolling wonder review at midday. Ed was originally the hesitant when asked to play aboard the only float of the rally (typically, the rest of the music press couldn't be arsed), but the cause was a proper one, and Bragg charmed him into it over the phone.
From NME (11 Jun 94) They met at the Chapel Studio in Lincoln where S*M*A*S*H were working. Billy had all these mad ideas, and had already chosen the songs they'd play. Two hours of jamming and jesting would form the basis for a blinding day's entertainment.
"It was f-ing great," Ed says. "Billy really enthused us. I was apprehensive 'cos we were so dedicated to recording, but he came up and we had the crack and it was like, wah-hey, we're gonna do this! What a great bloke and an entertainer - he made us feel good and gave us confidence."
When they arrived that morning at Kennington S*M*A*S*H were happier doling out free T-Shirts (new buzz-word: Enragé) and stocking up on political literature than disclosing the music agenda for the day. Any time Sal is queried, he just flashes that barmy, inscrutable stare he so famously directed at a Top of the Pops cameraman a while back. Something's weird in store.
Thus, everyone roared as the Iorry started moving and we heard 'Big Gay Heart,' with Billy straining hilariously to reach the top notes. Sometimes he swapped the word 'gay' with 'grey' - a jokey reference to his first conversation with S*M*A*S*H, when he promised he'd tidy up the words if they felt a bit bashful about the lyric. But there was nothing coy about this new version, especially when Billy bellowed "I don't need you to suck my dick" somewhere along Camberwell New Road, causing policement to blanche visibly.
It was a classic day for taking liberties. Twenty-four hours earlier, policmen were searching rented trucks in the area, threatening volunteers with arrests for being "suspected ANLA activists!" Yet by noon on Saturday, Billy was ranting about fellatio in public while tattooed girls danced rings around the coppers, howling "KILL THE BILL" and dissing them with confidence.
S*M*A*S*H's own songs were suitably spikey. The rush of hearing 'Kill Somebody' with its death-roll of Tory miscreants ("Virginia Bottomley, especially") was a massive thrill.
When it's released as a single next month, the tabloids will react in a full gasket-blowing style, and that's fine, but today the song and the circumstances raises the spirit of everybody.
That's not strictly revolutionary, but it's important alright.
Especially in the wake of the carnival, when you got home and discovered that the media had virutually blanked the occasion, concentrating instead on a march for the homeless that was a failure. How many hundreds of thousands of peaceful marchers does it take to get the press interested? And why did the blowhard at the Guardian simply sneer at the "New Age Hippies" - echoing John Major - when he might have been useful in reporting the positive news?
That's why pop music matters - throwing many ideas into the wind while so many other styles of expression are monitored and muted. Later, an excited Ed will try to explain the soul-stirring import of all this - how folks with guitars or marchers with banners can still make a difference.
"I read a piece in the paper that was saying this rally is a show of strength for all the Anti-Nazi League workers who've put up a lot of stick recently. Now they realized that they've got a lot of brothers and sisters all around the country.
"There's more than 100,000 pacifists out there just saying, I think everyone should love each other. And most of us do think like that but we're not organized. But this has been organized, and maximum respect to anyone who had anything to do with it. We've built ourselves a platform, too, and we'll be able to help in any way possible. Ask us and we'll do it, if we can."
"I'VE ALWAYS wanted to be a carnival queen," lies Bragg, as the Brixton railway bridge looms. By now the cops are getting especially edgy, but they'll freak altogether when the NME float deliberately stalls beneath the overpass. The metal and concrete high above the truck amplifies the noise, sucking it around the mangling the tone. 'Real Surreal' is demonic like never before.
Ed's song, ranting against a friend's suicide, was one of the key references in so many Angst letters we received after the death of Kurt Cobain. People found comfort in Ed's anger. This lyric and its sister song, 'Revisited No. 3' (now, scarily, hard-slamming like a Cobain number), was one of the rare comforts that some very fragile readers had for relief. Today, 'Real Surreal' is a vast, affirmative squall, with brick and girder, truck engine and hundreds of carnival whistles relaying the message. Wow.
A train rumbles over the bridge but not before the driver smiles down and blasted his air horn in empathy. Bragg takes the initiative and begins another song, an anthem for ten years back. The Redskins' 'Lean on Me' was performed frantically through the Miners' Strike and the Wapping Disputes in the mid-'80s - a call for united action while the Conservatives trashed and divided everything beneath them.
Bragg doesn't sing it like a historically tune, like some failed manifesto - he refocuses the meaning, forgetting lines ("That's 'cos I'm a revisionst") but constantly returning to the key phrase, "success comes to the strong", so it becomes a kind of mantra for the improved, all-possible school of '94.
You suddenly realised that in your mind, you always had Billy down as a kid - the upstart who pulled the brazen strokes through the '80s, who made folk music and protest funny and accessible. Now you watch him and you notice that his hair has turned fag ash grey, and that he's a dotting father now, and that he's viewed as a senior figure in today's celebrations.
Which is perhaps the coolest outcome of the occasion - the fact that a new breed had come through. By their own admission today, the ANL had practically forgotten how to stage a big-time rally - their pool of experience had almost dried up in the long interval since they last active (and all hail promoters Metroplis for sorting this out). Likewise with musicians; with the death of big GLC-funded festivals and the chilling of political music since the Tory realm seemed unbreakable, a lot of acts just gave up.
Six months ago, S*M*A*S*H were dropping their pants and flashing their arses to style mag photographers, basically being silly. Now they've baring their great bleeding hearts and genuinely touching people. Later, we'll see Credit to the Nation, Manics Street Preachers and the Levellers inventing the fury all over again, adopting old ideas, moving forward.
From NME (11 Jun 94) One of the prevalent themes on the banners and posters of the day was the SWP line, 'Stop racism at any price'. The inference is that dirty practices are acceptable in the anti-racist fight; that the closure of hostile political offices, selective violence, even the denial of free speech is valid in the extermination of a fiercely undemocratic, Nazi ideology. Ed from S*M*A*S*H seems sympathetic to this idea, even if it means withholding press access to musicians who use their power to flirt with Nazi imagery.
"Well, you can do that, and some people always throw the free speech angle back in your face.
But the angle I'm coming from is f-ing sanity. Just get a grip and get sane. F--- politically correct, all you do is look over your shoulder and see who's listening to you every time you say bollocks or c---. It's wank man, just get on, live a life, love thy neighbour."
So it is looking optimistic in '94?
"It is, because we're organised today, and there's a huge show of force. But we've put ourselves in the spotlight now, and during the next tour, if you get five BNP members down, they can ruin every gig. As simple as that. Five people can just run riot and the audience is just gonna leg it…
"Yet that march is so orgasmic. Looking back down and seeing all this unity, you're thinking, how can there be a problem when everyone is so unified?"
OPPOSITE ELECTRIC Avenue, the police finally make their bid to halt the float. At first nobody notices the thin line of PCs and a sole, paranoid officer standing at the front of the truck. They're shouting at the NME driver and motioning to the musicians that the noise should stop.
The crowds start to swell around the float, making any cessation of the music very unlikely and frankly, dangerous. Bragg's mate Grant Showbiz is going through the ritual of negotiating with the plods, humouring them, while the posse on the float are bashing out 'Big Gay Heart' a final time, trivialising the law, laughing at the cop-sucker blues down below.
The police see some sense and relent, leaving the last short stretch of the march to pass quietly. Bragg is singing the Small Faces 'All Or Nothing' and cracking up when he notices that a copper knows all the words. "Look at 'im," shouts Billy, "he must be an ex-mod!" Then he nominates his favourite placard of the day. It reads: "NAZIZ (sic) ARE THICK AND HISTORISTICALLY STINKY."
A royally exhausted S*M*A*S*H rip into 'Kill Somebody' again as a farewell bid to the marchers, before loading up their gear and hard-nosing back to the studio in Lincoln. Bragg checks his watch and realises that he's due to the main strage at Brockwell Park in five minutes, so we just congratulated each other on the beautifully successful day. Everybody's aware that grim times may resurface soon, but this new-found solidarity will easily be the measure of it.
Back to strife, back to reality. Maybe Derek Beackon did us a favour after all.