How We Made: Billy Bragg’s A New England | billy brag

Billy Bragg, singer-songwriter

I wrote the song in 1979 when I was 21 years old, living in Northamptonshire and playing in the punk band Riff Raff. I was coming back from the pub one night and saw two satellites in the sky. I thought they were a great metaphor for a relationship, so when I got home I wrote, “I saw two shooting stars last night / I wished for them but they were just satellites.” When I went back to the song the following year to finish it, I realized I could really open it with the line, “I was 21 when I wrote this song / I’m 22 now, but I won’t be for long.” , like The green leaves of Simon and Garfunkel.

By 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been cast, the band had broken up, and punk had dissipated into synth groups, so A New England was my way of saying I needed a hug and a new ideology. The line “the girls I loved in school are already pushing strollers” was referring to my cohort. We had all left school at 16 and were looking for different ways to become adults.

As a singer-songwriter, I played electric guitar because if I had played an acoustic, the rock clubs would have sent me to the folk clubs. If the public interrupted me, I could turn up the volume. A New England is like a Ramones song: all downbeat chords on the bottom two strings. The quiet part before the solo, where I wet the strings with the bottom of my hand to get a rattling sound, was a technique I borrowed from Thin Lizzy.

Jeff Chegwin, the twin of TV host Keith, read a review of my tape in Melody Maker and gave me some studio time. He worked at the Chappell music publisher and was the first person who showed faith in me. When the resulting album, Life’s a Riot With Spy vs Spy, came out, I left a copy with the BBC.

That night Jeff and I were playing football in Hyde Park and then we stood around a car listening to the radio. John Peel appeared on Radio 1 during the Kid Jensen slot and asked if someone could get him a mushroom biryani before his show later. Fifteen minutes later, Jeff and I were at Broadcasting House, still in our football gear, having a mushroom biryani. I told John that he had left a record. Later that night, I tuned in and heard him say, “I would have done this without the biryani mushroom.” then he knocked The milkman of human kindness and I was away.

A couple of years later, when Kirsty MacColl said she wanted to record A New England, she said she would need the change of genre and an extra verse. She treated me to a fried breakfast and by the time she had cooked it, I had written the extra verse. His brilliant pop version got it into the Top 10. I think it’s better than mine.

Oliver HitchProducer

I was the in-house engineer at Chappell, where I recorded songwriters trying to sell their songs to publishers. Billy was initially booked for a day to see how he was doing. I didn’t really understand what it was about and I said goodbye in the hallway thinking: “What a nice guy. Too bad he will never make it.”

Then Jeff took me to see him play in a pub and that made all the difference. Billy could stand on stage, make people laugh, tell a story and make it the intro to the song. Back in those days, everything was becoming more about high production values, so seeing a guy do it raw and live with just an electric guitar was a whole lot different. I had an idea how I could record it.

We recorded Life’s a Riot in three days. We spent the first day getting a good sound using various delays and the studio’s very old-fashioned plate reverb on vocals. Once we had that, I could go through the set, do take after take, and we’d pick the best one at the end.

Billy was rough around the edges, but to me a New England, Richard and The Milkman of Human Kindness were really standout songs. A New England took a handful of shots, and not long after, Life’s a Riot began selling in huge numbers. I wasn’t due royalties on the record, but Billy, bless him, showed up at Chappell’s offices with a check that said, “I thought you deserved something.”