Besides, it was an excuse for me to play one of my favourite songs, Read It in Books by the Bunnymen.
Lloyd Cole : Billy Bragg asked me to do some dates, and I like him and broadly agree with his politics, so I said yes. We were all keen to learn the chords and have a bash at it because it was perfect for what we were about, but I think he didn’t trust us to do it well enough.
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Robinson: One curious thing was that Jerry Dammers refused to do Free Nelson Mandela. I mean, you can’t help it, can you? He’s pretty irresistible. Somerville: One of the best things for me was duetting with Billy Bragg on Tracks of My Tears, because I had a bit of a crush on him at the time. It amazed everybody because Spandau were not what most people thought of as a socialist band, but he was politically well sussed and he played a great set. Spencer: Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet turned up to do an acoustic set in Manchester. We had to keep finding new ways of keeping them off. That’s not how you change the minds of rock fans. The last thing we wanted was hardline party blokes going out there and lecturing the crowd on the evils of capitalism. Tom Robinson: The artists got along very well, but these politicians would turn up and want to go on stage. I’m not talking about what’s happening to our planet or our country, but about organised politics.
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It was an eye-opener it brought me full circle in how I feel about politics.
Paul Weller : The MPs we’d meet around the country were more showbiz than the groups. So you had these very stolid, long-term party members suddenly finding themselves confronted by young people who wanted to talk about the environment, gay rights, minorities, and to get all these things on the Labour party agenda. They expected the tour to be a gong-banging exercise for the Labour party, but we were much more ambivalent about it. Spencer: As well as playing gigs, the musicians had to do press conferences, a lot of meeting and greeting, mixing with local MPs and union dignitaries, people who had never encountered rock musicians and were, frankly, out of their depth. Musically and socially he came from a different background than the rest of us, so it was great that he came. We were very out and proud then, and it was great to be two very loud gay blokes in this bus full of straight men.īragg: I think the guy I was most pleased to see on the bus was Junior, because he was the one with the most to lose. Labour in those days still had a very cloth-cap mentality and we wanted to help change that. We particularly wanted to do it in order to provide Red Wedge’s gay visibility. Jimmy Somerville : We supplied the camp element. Jerry Dammers’ function was to sit red-eyed in the back of the bus with a huge blaster playing reggae at fuck-off volume. He’s a very quiet guy, bespectacled, almost professorial, and then suddenly he’d turn into Paul Daniels and start doing all these brilliant card tricks. The big surprise was Richard Coles, the other half of the Communards.
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He would stand on one leg right behind the driver with his arms out to one side like he was surfing. He was last on every day, and he also had a habit of bus-surfing. He treated the whole thing like a military exercise, but Jimmy Somerville drove Kenny up the wall. Spencer: First man on the bus every day was Billy Bragg. Paul Weller with GLC leader Ken Livingstone and Labour leader Neil Kinnock at the launch of Red Wedge in 1985.
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