WOBBLESOX – THE OTHER HALF

Recently Braggtopia! was contacted by Jane Pooler-Williams (now Jane Billing) who was half of Wobblesox, the girl band that Billy Bragg & Wiggy played with briefly back in 1980 on their Xmas single. The other Wobblesox, Sue Fisher-Hendry, was interviewed by Braggtopia a few years ago, and then…

Jane: My brother typed my maiden name into a search engine and I was quite amused and flattered really that my name brought something up…and it was nice to know where Sue was as I haven’t seen her since about 1983 and I had no idea where she went.

Braggtopia!: So how did you two originally get together?

Jane: We’d known each other since about 1977 and around 1978, I think, I discovered she could sing so we got together. We had a mutual friend in Hampstead who had a big Steinway piano and Sue and I spent a lot of time there writing songs. Originally it started off that she had loads of lyrics so she asked me to put music to them which I did. Then gradually as I did that she got more confident herself and began to write her own tunes. It was about 3 or 4 years that we were writing together, doing gigs and private stuff and that culminated in our writing a Christmas song in 1980. We had this very strange idea…

Braggtopia!: The infamous “Get Your Socks Off”.

Jane: That’s right, it’s a great song (laughs). It was a bit rough and ready but in the 1980s it was like that. Anything went. We’d got through the punk era and punk sort of simplified music a bit. It was pretty easy to do something gimmicky. In fact the charts were full of gimmicky stuff at the times. So, it would have worked, perhaps, if John Lennon hadn’t died and if we were a little earlier with our campaign.

Braggtopia!: After the interview with Sue I had an email from Jackie MacKay (an early manager of Billy and promoter of Wobblesox) who said a similar thing about the death of John Lennon.

Jane: Yes, it practically closed the industry down for a couple of weeks. I know Stiff Records were about to sign us, they were talking about it…

Braggtopia!: Did you have any thoughts about re-releasing the record the next Christmas?

Jane: We may have had those thoughts but in the scheme of things we were both pretty busy and it probably just didn’t cross our minds. In 1981 I was back working in the film business. I was on films like Gandhi and Escape To Victory.

Braggtopia!: What was your job on those films?

Jane: I was the accountant. That was my straight job and then I was doing odd gigs and things, and I also met my husband around the same time. So, although Sue and I spent time together there was a lot going on.

Braggtopia!: So, yourself and Sue had written this Christmas song, but how did it then involve Jackie MacKay and Billy and Wiggy?

Jane: I’m sure I’d met Wiggy before. I may have even worked with him as I worked with a whole load of people in the 70s who went on to become famous but I didn’t know who they were at the time. We got together with a guy called John Bassett who was a record producer and he had got us doing a Dennis Waterman song called Ave Maria, which really didn’t suit us at all. It all evolved from there. Sue did most of the liaising as she was good at public relations She had the gift of the gab while I concentrated on the creative side. Anyway, somehow Sue organised things.

I don’t know if you know Suzanne Horton, she’s an American actress who used to go out with Warren Beatty. She was hanging around and we played the song to her. She was sitting very demurely on the sofa and when she heard “Get Your Socks Off” the next second she was on the floor kicking her legs in the air in hysterics and that set us off. Sue and I did 15 run throughs with the song before we could sing it without collapsing. That inspired us and Sue got things together with the Basement Studio in Fulham and managed to get Riff Raff in, or at least Billy and Wiggy. I was on the piano.

Braggtopia!: And I gather you wrote the arrangement for the song.

Jane: Yes. I was the main musician so I put the thing together.

Braggtopia!: Do you have much of a memory of that session 27 years later?

Jane: I do. In fact I’ve got my Melody Maker diary from 1980 in front of me! Jackie came in and released it on her Freewave label and we went up to Liverpool to promote it. We went to places like Virgin Records, gave them a few copies to sell. They played the record and we danced around wearing St. Trinians outfits like we were in the cover photos. We built up a bit of a following…there was a bit of fan mail up to four months later. We took Liverpool by storm! We went to Penny Lane Records and other places and Record Mirror were following us and we appeared in it that month. Apparently the producer, John Bassett, put the record out across the country to 600 DJs for which we were supposed to get some payment but never did. So we did get some notoriety but I don’t know how many records we sold, no idea…and I’m very tempted to put it out again! (laughs)

Braggtopia!: Since that time have you recorded anything else?

Jane: Oh yes. Loads of stuff. I’ve been back to college and trained as a jazz musician. I’ve worked with people like Peter Schleff who wrote “On the wings of love”, David Pomeranz who has written a lot of stuff for Barry Manilow, and loads and loads of things. For the past four years I’ve had a band doing stuff for charity trying to help with things like gun crime. And I’ve just recorded a classical album for the first time which quite amazes me and I’ve also released a Latin album.

Braggtopia!: And is this all under your own name?

Jane: I’m actually calling myself Jane Vanessa from now on. I’m about to relaunch myself (laughs) – I’m being put into a little tube and fired !

Braggtopia!: How does the Latin, the Jazz and Classical fit with St Trinian’s uniforms and “Get Your Socks Off” ?

Jane: ….there isn’t much relation really. Sue and I were just “having a moment”. We did actually write another song called “Sweet Liberation” which was a protest against feminism and “The Female Eunuch”. I agree that women should be paid the same but not with the loss of femininity, so we wrote the song with lines like “I’m burning my knickers instead”. It was just a funny protest. Sue and I were into the comedy side of things as well as producing decent music.

Braggtopia!: Sue mentioned other songs you two recorded. Did they just sit on the shelf?

Jane: Yes, there was one called “Give Me Space” I remember we recorded. There were about six songs we had published through John Bassett. But things got very busy for both of us.

Braggtopia!: It sounds like you have enough material there for an album. Billy recently put together a compilation of all the old Riff Raff songs and released that.

Jane: It’s a possibility. I would like to talk to Billy about his ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ project and the gun crime campaign I’m working on.

Braggtopia!: You could do a gig with him in Wormwood Scrubs dressed in St Trinians outfits ?

Jane: No, I don’t think so…I wouldn’t fit into the skirt these days…but I do still have the tie !

Jane Vanessa’s website can be found here:

http://singandearn.com/

Right click here to download an mp3 of "Get Your Socks Off" !