f28 “I


kept a diary from when I was 16 and when he turned 16 I thought it would be interest- ing for him to read it. But he read the first couple of pages


and left it on the kitchen table. So I read it. Oh my God, I couldn’t believe what I learned about being 16 years old! Chasing women, going to pubs, driving cars when you shouldn’t be. It made me think he’s not 12 any more. I’m going to have to stop treating him like a 12-year-old. He’s 16! I was at work when I was 16! I’d left school. It really brought me up short. That’s how you deal with the dad radar.”


It’s a radar finely honed partly because of the time Bragg’s had to spend away from his wife and son due to his work, on tours he’d make to coincide with Jack’s school term. He says: “I know some people who can’t wait to be away from their wife and kids. I don’t have that myself. It’s always been the worst part of my job. Sometimes I had to really steel myself to get on the plane. One time I was going to Australia the day Jack went back to school after the six-week holiday. It was heart- breaking, really an awful time; none of us saw it coming ’til we were right on top of it. He must have been nine or ten – he was still at the village school.”


One of the reasons the Braggs moved out of London to live by the sea in Dorset was to address that work/life balance. In London Bragg found that he was engag- ing a lot with “the periphery of the music business”, into which he lumps his Satur- day afternoon Radio 2 show. He got it “by accident” and whilst he enjoyed it, says it “totally ballsed up my weekend.” The bit of coastline he now calls home, he describes as very cosmopolitan, featuring a lot of people from Essex there for much the same reasons as he is.


This doesn’t mean that they share his politics though. Bragg recently found him- self pilloried for voting Liberal Democrat. “You can imagine the shit I get for that. My vote was a tactical vote to try and stop the Tories. The people who have a pop at me because they think I’ve changed my politics don’t see that where I live, voting for the Lib Dems is an anti-Tory vote. I wasn’t out there canvassing for the Lib Dems. In fact I spent the entire election in London doing a play which enabled me to spend a good deal of time out in Barking and Dagenham knocking on doors asking people to vote Labour to stop the BNP from taking over the council, which seemed to be a real danger then. They lost all their seats. The headline says I voted Liberal Democrat, but I’m doing exactly the same as I always did.”


Do politicians still seek him out, as Kinnock did in the days of Red Wedge?


“Some of them do. There are people


in Westminster now who were introduced to politics through Red Wedge, like Tom Watson, whom I have a lot of time for.” I expect him to say that he felt betrayed by the Labour party and by Blair, but he felt more betrayed by Alistair Darling’s refusal to use his veto on bonuses at RBS.


“I refused to pay my tax at the start of 2010. I was paying my tax on the Friday and they were paying the bonuses on the Mon- day. I thought ‘Fuck that’ – if I’m going to pay my tax so you can give it to RBS! An economy that has in it businesses that are too big to fail, that’s not capitalism. Capi- talism is governed by Adam Smith’s invisi- ble hand that takes away those companies


that have fucked up. If a company is too big to fail, Adam Smith’s invisible hand doesn’t work any more. Obviously we were all terribly disappointed about the war. But that wasn’t the Labour party, that was Blair. Like many people I despair of main- stream politics. Expediency seems to be everything rather than principle.”


Bragg himself remains refreshingly principled. He puts his money where his mouth is and gets involved, his finely tuned social conscience keeping him actively engaged in projects which now include working in prisons. He’s no daft idealist; he understands the complexities involved and doesn’t shy away from addressing them. He has he says, always been pragmatic. “If you can be a pragma- tist and a dreamer, that’s good, because you dream practical things.”


His own dreams, he says have been achievable. He started off simply wanting a different life to the one mapped out for him at Ford motors in Dagenham, which a school trip showed him to be a fiery vision of hell. Having won a school poetry com- petition, he found writing it was some- thing he wanted to continue.


The idea that this might be useful for songwriting came about after he heard Bridge Over Troubled Water at a friend’s house. The Bragg family didn’t have a record player. But seeing young Billy’s love of music they bought him a reel-to-reel tape recorder one Christmas and he duly taped his mate’s sister’s record collection, which as well as the Simon and Garfunkel album included Tamla Motown’s greatest hits. It’s where music and politics first hit home. “If you listened to the ’60s soul music of America you couldn’t help but hear the voice of the civil rights move- ment. Motown Chartbusters put The Jack- son 5 next to Edwin Starr singing War, or the Supremes next to the Temptations singing Ball Of Confusion.”


But it was Simon and Garfunkel who particularly resonated with him, connect- ing him more closely to his town’s iron age roots and mediæval past. He delivers a brief and unexpectedly fascinating histori- cal tour of Barking, previously a place redolent with the power and influence of kings. “Weirdly,” he says, “that was still tangible if you knew where to look. There’s older stuff too. I used to deliver a newspaper down Victoria Road. It curves because it’s built along the edge of the iron age earthworks. When I was there on dark winter mornings when I was a paper- boy, about ten years old, I never looked down those alleyways on that side of the road, because the alleyways went to the iron age. All that shit seemed to come together in Scarborough Fair.”


The song led him to Dylan, and also to the exploration of the records in Barking Library. “Topic put these samplers out in the late ’60s early ’70s that were themed around work, sex, death, those kind of things. I really made a connection with the Watersons, and Shirley and Dolly Collins, to both the music and the lyrics. They spoke to me of a time that was still almost tangible, I had an aunt born in the 1880s who was still alive in the 1970s. The world that she talked of somehow seemed to be tied up with the music of Dolly and Shirley. It had that earthy sound. It was English and based in the tradition. It seemed to me to be like what Simon and Garfunkel were doing but in a more rootsy form. Scarborough Fair made me feel connected with that tradition. It was my way in.”


way in, but Bragg makes the point that he’s not of or from that tradition. “When I got the Radio 2 Folk Award earlier this year. I had to ’fess up. ‘I’m honoured to be considered a folk artist, but I’m here because I write topical songs and the folk audience has been responsi- ble for keeping the topical song alive in the last 30 years since it became unfash- ionable.’ I wanted to say a big thank you to them. Also the great thing about folk music is that you’re actively encouraged to grow old.”


A And have a beard, actually.


“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. If I’m still doing this in fifteen years, god willing, when I’m 70, if I look like Burl Ives, no- one’s going to mind!”


Bragg’s first single with Riff Raff, the band he formed with a few school friends and whom he first recorded with in a stu- dio on a Norfolk farm, has just been re- released. “Roger Armstrong (his first label boss) got in touch saying ‘someone’s got the rights for the vinyl release of the Riff Raff single, we might start making a profit.’ It only cost him 300 quid! I’ve often said to Jack, if this was all I’d done, just put a single out in 1978, I’d still think I was a rock star: if it had all ended there, I’d still think of myself as part of it. There was a box set from Rhino records of the punk years and Jack was all over it saying how great it was, and I was saying, ‘I’m on there as well, with Riff Raff!’ and he was like ‘I can’t believe it, you’re on the same record as the Ramones!’ It was real- ly fabulous!”


Bragg is in reflective mode. It’s clear


listening to Tooth & Nail as much as it is from our conversation over lunch (Billy: “tuna mayo sandwich on brown, no spring onion and a cuppa tea please”), in the bar of the St George’s Hotel, with its views over the rooftops of the West End. We can see the BBC where John Peel kick-started Bragg’s solo career when Peel announced on air that he was so hungry he’d do any- thing for a mushroom biryani: Bragg famously took him one and then Peel played Bragg’s first single without a band.


His career has enjoyed such extraordi-


nary longevity, I suggest, because he is continually, vitally engaged with what’s going on around him, in life and politics and that this combined with his talent for a good tune keeps his music relevant. Bragg seems momentarily uncomfortable. He bats away anything that might seem like flattery, as something false, as if he’s dealing with an annoying fly. He replies simply by saying that since the beginning every album he’s made is “a broadside from where I am.”


“Jack was born after Don’t Try This At


Home. Then there’s a gap. Then there’s William Bloke. I’m talking about the baby in the bathroom. What’s happened in between this new album and the last one is that my mum passed away. That’s reflected in January Song and Goodbye, Goodbye. It’s a more reflective album.”


His dad had died long before his mum, in 1976. He says things were never really the same after that. “The greatest regret in my life is that my dad never met my son. I think they would have really got on with each other. Both of them would have got a lot out of it.”


“Now all of a sudden, people my age are having experiences that I had when I was 18, losing their parents. Songs like


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