THE 12″ LUCKY DIP (34): Billy Bragg – Levi Stubbs’ Tears

mp3: Billy Bragg – Levi Stubbs’ Tears

I’ve written about this single before.  Well, sort of.  I typed out and published these words:-

‘This is one of those songs where, no matter how hard I try, I can never come up with the words to do it justice. Maybe because it is the saddest song I’ve ever heard’

I’ve hunched over the keyboard again, but still the right sort of words won’t come to me.  I’ve remembered the first time I heard the song.  It was courtesy of the ‘promo’  being aired on an edition of Whistle Test.  It had been trailed that the new Billy Bragg video was going to be played at some point in the programme, and so I sat patiently with the finger never far away from the record button to capture it on a VHS tape.

I didn’t buy the single at the time….money was a tad on the tight side in the summer of 1986, what with an expensive rent to pay, even in a shared flat in Edinburgh, and a lot of socialising being done, so I wasn’t one of those who helped it enter the charts in mid-June at #44 or one of those who bought it over the next couple of weeks as it climbed up to #29.  I was happy enough to constantly watch the video and wait until the release of Talking To The Taxman About Poetry in late September to get my hands on the studio version of the song with it’s fade-out instead of  the ‘oi’ ending.

Levi Stubbs’ Tears remains, all these years later, one of the most astonishingly brilliant songs I’ve heard in my lifetime.  The tune is simple, effective and memorable.  The lyrics are as evocative, powerful and emotional.  Oh, and tear-jerking if I’m being totally honest.  I’m kind of welling up just now as I type these words….I think we all know someone, or at least we know someone who knows someone, who is the woman whose life-story mirrors this tale.  I’ll stop there.

Many years later, I picked up my first copy of the single, finding it in a second-hand shop in Toronto in 2007.  It was the Canadian release, a six-song EP on Polydor Records.  In due course, with my love for vinyl fully re-ignited by getting this blog underway, I soon picked up the UK release, on Go Discs, with these three cuts as the b-sides:-

mp3 : Billy Bragg – Between The Wars (live)
mp3 : Billy Bragg – Think Again
mp3 : Billy Bragg – Walk Away Renee (version)

The live track was recorded at the 1986 Festival des Politischen Liedes (Festival of Political Songs). The festival was an annual event, held in East Berlin, between 1970 and 1990, organised by the Communists the official youth wing of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Billy certainly got around a great deal in those days, as just one man and his guitar didn’t track up too many expenses.

Think Again was written by Dick Gaughan, a Scottish folk singer with left-wing leanings, who has long been one of Billy’s heroes and inspirations.  I was lucky enough to be at a gig in 1997 when Billy and Dick co-headlined a show as part of that year’s Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow.

Walk Away Renee has the word ‘version’ in brackets for the fact that as Duane Tremelo (who in due course would be unmasked as Johnny Marr) plays the song’s melody, Billy doesn’t deliver the words we all knew from The Four Tops hit, but instead embarks on a spoken tale of a man falling in love, going through the amazing/scary emotions that come with such a happening…..and then getting jilted, before finding what seems likes a very superficial a reason to accept it’s all over as far as he’s concerned (or maybe he was being metaphorical?).  Either way, it’s quite magical.

JC