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Jackie MacKay played a key role in the early days of Billy Bragg's
career. Early in 2003 she spoke with Braggtopia!
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You and your husband had set up a studio in your house,
Bearshanks, and in August 1976 Riff Raff turned up on your doorstep in response
to an advert you'd put in Melody Maker. But how did you come to set up the
studio in the first place ?
The house "Bearshanks Lodge" was in Northamptonshire,
miles away from anywhere. We bought this pile of stones for 4 1/2 grand and
built the house - it didn't have a roof or proper water or a telephone, so it
was a really scratch built thing. My husband, Ruan, was a musician and it was
really everybody's dream to have a studio in a country house. So we bought the
house.
It had a very long row of barns beside the house which was about 2
or 3 times as long as the house itself and we turned that into the studio.
Along one wall were windows and from those you couldn't see anything but fields
for miles and miles. It was miles from anywhere and on the edge of a wood
called Bearshanks Wood. It was called "bearshanks" because in the
16th century Scotsmen came to the area to see if they could rescue Mary, Queen
of Scots as she was held locally at Fotheringay. "Bearshanks" meant
that they didn't have trousers on - they had kilts.
Anyway, we had this house and the recording studio although it
wasn't actually a recording studio but a demo studio. You couldn't make
finished records there but you could record demos. We put an ad in Melody Maker
to get paying guests along to bolster the finances and the very first people
who answered were Billy and Wiggy.
They had a week or two
weeks holiday and all the guys were into music, so they decided that instead of
going off to a holiday resort, they'd come and stay. They were very nice and
enthusiastic and we had a really good time. In fact that had such a good time
they wanted to come back and start up a proper band. We said they could come
back at weekends - which they did. They stayed and we supported them to start
the band. We called it Riff Raff - I think it was me who thought of the name
but I can't remember too accurately - everyone always thinks they thought of
everything !
Then we started booking
local gigs and it went on strong from there. Later on we bought a lorry - you
can see a picture of it on the Riff Raff
Rare website - which was an old British Road Services lorry. I turned
it into a wagon as I didn't want to be a musician's widow. I had a couple of
kids but I wanted to go along to the gigs. In the lorry, over the cab, we had a
triple bed and underneath that two bunks for the boys, and a table and cooker -
all of that kind of thing.
So you could go on tour in it ?
Yes, we actually lived in it. We'd go down and visit London - we'd
sold our house in London so we'd park the lorry outside somebody's house and
run a wire inside so that we could play records. It was great fun !
Were Riff Raff playing many gigs in those days
?
There was a regular gig at one of the local pubs. Also we used to
go down to The Marquee (in London) regularly - at least it seemed quite
frequently. I booked every gig, got things ready and drove the equipment to the
right place. This was a big truck by the way, an eight tonner.
I imagine it was pretty big - there were 4 guys in the
band plus yourself and Ruan and your two boys.
Ruan didn't always come at that time, but he joined the band later
when their bass player left. We got plenty of tapes of them playing at Clopton
- I've forgotten the name of the pub.
There was the "infamous" one that Billy
mentioned to me - "The Red Lion". He said that's where the live video
of Riff Raff was filmed.
Yes, I think that's it. That live video had Oscar playing drums as
well but that bit was filmed later. When Ruan joined the band playing in pubs
was the in thing, it was quite new. In fact Ruan's earlier band "Bees Make
Honey" was part of the pub-rock breakthrough because until that point it
was either jazz or folk in pubs.
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He also played with Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance, didn't he
? Yes, he also had his own band "St. James' Gates" which
had a deal with Richard Branson but the record never came out. They broke up
when the singer left because although Ruan had a very good voice he never had
enough confidence to sing. There was the single "Sweet
Narcissus". Was that a B side for something ? Well it's a hard to find one. It was credited on the A
side as Ruan with Riff Raff backing him. On the B side was Riff Raff's Barking
Park Lake. You know I'd forgotten that ever came out as a single ! There's a great sax solo on that record. Oh yes, as a sax player he was brilliant. He played sax on
"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" with Bryan Ferry. |
How did that kind of background fit in with country life
?
We were a bit "beyond the pale". The locals used to
tolerate Londoners coming up and buying houses but we were really a bit OTT - I
used to pop into town in the lorry and do my shopping in full length Laura
Ashley dresses and wellies. Some locals thought they'd tease us a bit, so one
farmer who had hundreds of acres dumped his pile of shit opposite our house -
was this in Billy's book ?
I did read about that. Didn't you phone up Esther Rantzen
from the TV Show "That's Life ?
That's right. The shit pile became so huge - it was as big as
the house - it was quite alarming in fact. So, Ruan wrote a song which went
"I came out to the country to get peace of mind / The city's far behind
me, my glass is filled with wine / And retribution followed me for having too
much fun". He played it down the phone to Esther Rantzen and they suddenly
thought "Wow - this'll be fun". So they wheeled up with a huge
production team with cameras and everything. They got the band and Ruan on top
of the pile of shit playing this song while I was rushing around with an air
freshener spray ! The night it came on TV we were playing a gig so we got a
little television out and watched it in the break. It was a hoot ! The farmer
was absolutely amazed, everybody was amazed that we were on national
television. Afterwards we didn't have shit dumped in front of the house again.
After living at Bearshanks for a while Billy and the guys
moved in with some other people ?
Well, Billy had become friendly with quite a lot of people around
town and eventually had his own little house there. By then he was with Katy
(Spurrell) who was the subject, I think, of "Kitten". He was very
fond of her and quite a lot of people thought they would hook up for good, but
it didn't happen. She was the daughter of one of the local people, the vet.
Then I sort of drifted away and he went into Oundle - and you know that song
"New Home Town" ? That was Oundle. It's the home of the oldest public
school in England.
I recall reading about how one night Billy broke into the
school and got arrested. Do you remember that ?
I don't though I heard about it. Billy was quite a character, he
did all sorts of things. He had quite a hot reputation amongst the locals. He
was a bit of an idol. In fact some of the kids used to pass by Billy's house so
frequently that quite a lot of the parents became suspicious as to why, so they
got the local police to do a drug bust. Which was quite unfounded as Billy was
quite clean anyway. It was really funny because when the police asked people
"Do you do drugs ?" everyone
was trying to be frightfully honest and saying things like "Once I might
have done" or "I did two years ago" and they got hauled off for
further questioning. When they confronted Billy it was like "No. No. Don't
do it. Never done it. Never will do it" - in such a strong way that they
thought they'd leave this guy alone. It was quite unfounded but in the early
days they all thought that the boys were holding sessions when in fact they
were really holding court.
So in those days did Billy stand out as a character
?
Oh, indeed - Billy was always a character from when I first met
him !
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Was Billy always the leader of the band ? Well, in my personal view it was more a Billy/Wiggy partnership
because they were really fantastic as a pair. Billy was the front man and Wiggy
was his supporter but I got the impression that Wiggy was one of the basic
foundations, the strength behind him. Though Billy was obviously going to be
the star. He had a cross between charisma and balls. He was very outspoken and
very sharp with it. I gather that once the band had settled into Bearshanks
they started to turn out a lot of songs in a short amount of time ? Oh yes, Billy was very prolific. He wrote songs on a very regular
basis. He wrote songs about everything that happened. You know how The Beatles
wrote about off the track things, things you'd not normally write songs about,
like Taxman. |
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Not just love songs.
Yes. Well Billy was very much in that category. For example there
was one really strange weekend where it was stormy and the atmosphere was
absolutely awful. People weren't talking to each other for no particular
reason. The next weekend he came back with a song called "Weird
Weekend". You see my point - he wrote about stuff as it happened. That was
a good song actually - I don't know what happened to that one.
Are there any recordings around from that time ? There
seem to be a lot of lost Riff Raff songs.
The person who is Chief Librarian is Wiggy. He has everything very
neatly organised. Wiggy likes Star Trek so he has all the videos of Star Trek
in several rows. And he's got all the tapes of all the songs. He's got
cassettes galore - all neatly labelled.
You actually got together with Wiggy for a while and set
up a video production company.
That was quite a long time later. I'd moved down to London and
started off on my own with "Audio Visual" and made videos. Then Wiggy
came along - he's a brilliant engineer. We made commercial productions for
businesses like housing companies, British Rail, the British Tourist Authority.
We made two educational videos, "Smokey Joe" and "Two
Saturdays" which Billy helped with.
Nobody had ever made a video for slow learners before so I marched in
and said "You need two songs in each video or you'll lose their
attention". They took my word for it so I managed to get some songs in
there !
I wrote one of them and Billy actually wrote the anti-smoking song
"Smokey Joe".
How did the Riff Raff package of 8 videos come about
?
Well, my whole purpose in putting that together was to be able to
do a video which would be the very first video album. Nobody had ever heard of
the idea - but we took so long about it, because we didn't have the money, that
Blondie pipped us to the post with "Eat To The Beat". That's what the
four Riff Raff singles were for - not as singles but as promotion to go with
the video which was called "Every Girl An English Rose".
Did you sell the video by mail order or what ?
No, we never got round to releasing it properly. We only made a
very few copies of it. Then Billy decided to go off and join the army so we
couldn't do any more with it. Basically Billy and I had had a bit of a row. He
wrote a song which I didn't like and didn't want him to sing it as it was a
slag off of someone I was very fond of at the time. He didn't like anyone
telling him what he could and couldn't sing and thought it had gone far enough
with this "bitch MacKay". He decided to leave, he wasn't happy about
me and Wiggy, things weren't right.
However when Billy bought himself out of the army you and
Wiggy gave him a job with AV Movies.
Yes, well it's always been a strength or a weakness of mine that I
like to keep things "in the family" and Billy was a great help at AV
Movies.
Many years later, in 1996, your son Fionn played bass on
Billy's "William Bloke" album so the family connection has lasted
many years.
Yes, Fionn went to one of Billy's gigs recently in New York and
they remade their friendship. Billy was one of Fionn's childhood heroes. These
days Fionn is playing with Rich Robinson from The Black Crowes in a band called
Hooker Brown.
To wrap things up - if you had to sum up Billy how would
you describe him ?
Billy is one of those people who people like to listen to. He's
outrageous enough to be part of the genre of Top Brits, but I don't think he's
developed his wit and humour quite enough. I think he's too politically
attached. When he rises above political attachment I think he'll be one of the
greats.
Billy is 45 now. Do you see him in 15 years time as a
singer-songwriter or will he move on to something else ?
No, one of his great strengths is writing. He's a genius with
words and I think some of the lyrics he's written and some of the things he's
said are brilliant. He's a wit, he's a sharpshooter wordwise and as a writer I
think he will establish himself as an influential Brit.
Jackie has a Riff Raff Rare website where you can read more about the band and also buy some of those rare vinyl singles.
