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Tank Park Salute dealt with that.” Although he recorded that song in the early ’90s he says people still come and talk to him about it in emotional terms. “They’re in the same situation. You don’t resonate with people by trying to write to the lowest common denominator, you write as honestly as you can bear to about yourself. Tank Park Salute is the most hon- est, naked song I ever wrote. I’d never spo- ken to anybody, not even my brother, about my dad dying, ever. I was trying to write about Lockerbie and I came up with this line, I closed my eyes and when I looked your name was in the memorial book. And a door opened. Thirty minutes later I had the whole song. I sat and looked at it and thought, what am I going to do with this? Sometimes you write songs you can’t sing. But it was about time. Nineteen years after my dad had died it was about time I faced up to it.”
Of all songs in his set, he says it’s the
one where he’s “the 24/7 me. The purest me. Rather than the political me, or the unlucky-in-love me, or the dad me. So when people tell me how much it means to them after a show, it really pleases me, because I’m really having to sum up diffi- cult things to sing about. And if it enables them to talk about their loss, it works both ways, doesn’t it?”
“My mum loved it. Whenever she came to a gig, she’d always say, ‘I hope you’re going to play that song,’ she’d never refer to it by name. ‘Yes mum.’ And then my nephews who’d be sitting in the audience with her would ask, ‘Why do you keep play- ing that song that upsets Nanny Marie?’”
S
ongwriting, for Bragg, is an instinctive process, one that a brief stint in the army after Riff Raff came to an end did nothing to quash. Trooper Bragg
24600765, finding that success in the caval- ry, rather than putting an end to his dreams of becoming a musician, simply inspired him to write more songs, bought himself out. Songs kept coming into his head and wouldn’t go away. “Sometimes you’ve got a tune, and you keep writing lyrics and they don’t work. Sometimes you’ve got a brilliant line and you wait and wait to get a tune. Sometimes, you’re sitting in traffic and a line comes into your head and you have to reverse engineer the song from that – writing the verse that ends in that line and that melody. Some- times you pick up the guitar and the song’s there, bang, before you know it. There’s no one way. It’s all intuitive. When I’m in the studio my intuition is tuned, when I’m making a record I could write songs all day.” He won’t be drawn on fur- ther airy-fairy enquiries into this. “Surely the very nature of intuition is the ability to do something without thinking about it?”
Tooth & Nail probably owes its exis- tence to Bragg’s mother. “Mum passed away in March 2011 but by the autumn me and my brother had sorted out the effects and the estate and I needed to engage in some project to take all my time, to move on from the place I was in and that’s when I decided to make the album. I rang up Joe Henry (the Grammy award-winning producer) and said ‘Joe lis- ten, you know we were talking about
making an album in your basement in five days, when can you fit me in?’ He was like ‘great, come in January’.”
“That was my way of moving on to the next thing. The album isn’t about mum passing away, it’s informed by that, but I feel like a different person. I am a differ- ent person, I’m the oldest person in my family now. When this all started, I was on the ground floor, my parents were above me and my grandparents were in the attic. Then I was on the first floor, and my mum was above me and Jack was on the ground floor. Now all of a sudden I’ve turned around and I’m on the roof and there’s nothing above me except the sky. If that doesn’t give you pause to reflect I don’t know what does. That’s why this album is a more personal album.”
I ask what middle-aged Billy thinks of
young Billy. It turns out that it’s possibly slightly easier for Billy Bragg to answer this than it might be for most of us, on account of the fact that in 1984 a South Bank crew trailed him for the making of a pro- gramme. He had to watch it recently to approve it for inclusion in a box set.
“I was dreading it. I could see this young firebrand who would say ‘I hate people who live by the sea and drive a 4x4 – and wear elasticated boots’ (!) But when I watched it, this young guy was a lot more forgiving and a lot more com- passionate than I remember him. He was- n’t a firebrand after all. He was a lot more considered and really not a lot of the stuff he said was that different from what I say now.”
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