f26 Have Beard Will Travel
Billy Bragg’s a folkily bearded post-dad – nowadays more rural Dorset that urban Essex. But still a top chap, reckons Elizabeth Kinder. Snappage: Judith Burrows.
B
illy Bragg – Elvis Costello: the two iconic singer-songwriters don’t instantly spring to mind as being separated at birth. But the thought takes hold in a
small room above a London pub as Bragg, introducing his warm and intimate country-tinged new album Tooth & Nail (Cooking Vinyl), plays one perfect, gor- geously melodic, instantly accessible song after another. It’s not overtly political; it’s not at all what I’d expected.
Given a ‘plus one’ I’d rung a friend. He said ‘thanks but no thanks,’ he really liked Billy but was a bit tired of him. The friend who does come loves it, as everyone here seems to (and the place is packed). The friend who didn’t come would have loved it too. And that’s Billy’s biggest problem. Billy Bragg. Or rather the public percep- tion of Billy Bragg: the searingly honest, perceptive, tireless voice of the best of our collective social conscience – or that annoyingly predictable commie, depend- ing on your politics.
It’s a problem he’s very much aware of. “I’m always having to climb over fences that people are putting up. I got a load of stuff flung at me with Margaret Thatcher dying. ‘If it wasn’t for Margaret Thatcher, you wouldn’t be anywhere.’ Without her, I might still have been writing social com- ment songs, but they may not have been so ideological; her policies made me artic- ulate those ideas in the first place, which is what’s defined me. I have to be aware that I don’t look like a caricature, like a cartoon comic. Life isn’t all politics. There’s more to it than that.” It’s partly why Bragg embraces opportunities to do something unexpected, like shake hands with the Queen, or write a song when asked, com- memorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
“I’m not a fan of organised religion. I’d written five songs for a play called Pres- sure Drop. The director was doing a thing called 66 Books (marking that anniver- sary). I was interested to see if I could do it. He sent me Luke, which has ‘do unto oth- ers’ in it and it sort of came out of that.” What ‘sort of came out’ is track six on Tooth & Nail – Do Unto Others – a softly sparkling country/blues gem.
I’d taken it for granted that his gig would be explicitly political and right-on. But Bragg’s set is definitely rooted in the ‘life isn’t all politics’ category. Though still thought-provoking, the songs on his latest album seem personal, delivered by Bragg in an easily assured performance (despite a
cough) and backed by a great line-up which includes pedal steel guitar. The air is filled with a surprising sense of Americana which is carried not just in the instrumen- tation and the arrangements, but in the timbre of his voice.
The soft American accent has been around, he says since “the Mermaid Avenue records in the late ’90s. I just could- n't sing Woody’s words in my own accent, so I adapted my vowels to a more mid- Atlantic form. I immediately found this made it easier for me to sing in tune. Since then my voice has dropped a tone on the musical scale, which has also made it more manageable. Together, these two changes have led to people saying, on hearing the new album, ‘I knew you could write, but I never knew you could sing!’”
He’s got a beard too, grown as an experiment and kept because his wife likes “the rather fetching mix of copper and silver.” He is in fact the only person I’ve ever met who can make facial hair with even a hint of ginger seem attractive. “I think,” he says, “that maybe I’ve become somebody else in between the last album and this one.”
Not that the American sound of Tooth
& Nail is linked to this, in the way that say, the sound of England Half English (set to the tune of an Algerian folk song) is a sonic realisation of his belief that English identity is strengthened by its mix with other cultures. Rather it’s the result of ris- ing to the fresh challenge of recording in California with musicians and a producer he’s never worked with before.
So who has he become, I wonder. “I’ve become middle-aged Billy Bragg.
I feel different.” “How?” “My son’s growing up. I’m not 24/7
someone’s dad any more.” (Bragg’s son Jack, to whom he’s clearly fiercely attached, is 19). “ I still worry – you always do that – but I don’t have that 24 hour dad radar any more.”
“One night they had a party next
door. A teenagers’ party. Jack went with his mates. I stayed up ’til about 1 and he hadn’t returned. So I went to bed and I’m lying there. I couldn’t get to sleep because he was next door at a party and he hadn’t come home. Then I remem- bered that when I was 17 I hitchhiked to the French / Spanish border. I was away for six weeks thumbing around – and I’m worried about him being next door, for fucksake!”
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