31 f H
as the way he says it changed? “I think in time I’ve become better at articulating it.” In some ways the immediacy allowed by the internet has
helped. “When I write a topical song now I just put it up for free download. I wrote a song a called Never Buy The Sun about the phone hacking scandal. I wrote it on Friday, debuted it Saturday, posted a clip of me singing it Sunday, recorded it Mon- day, put it up for free download on Tues- day. Whereas during the miners’ strike I had to wait until 1986 when I made Talk- ing To The Taxman About Poetry to record There’s Power In The Union. I don’t have to do that any more. I don’t have to hold on to my anger. Conse- quently having put out five songs for free download in between the last album and the new album, when I came to making Tooth & Nail and looked in my shed of songs, they seem to be of a deeper hue. Maybe that’s good for an album to be a place of reflection.”
I ask middle-aged Billy what he’s most proud of and he movingly talks about the songwriting project he undertook with women dying of breast cancer. They released a song under the name of Rosetta Life. He’s not proud that it achieved the highest chart position (no 11) that he’s ever had, but that it enabled the women he worked with to express difficult emo- tions that they “couldn’t discuss over the dinner table. Every now and again some- one comes up to me, usually a woman and tells me how much that record means to her and how much it helped her with her mum dying or her daughter dying. That happened to me in Minneapolis once. And I stop and I think about those girls who aren’t with us any more. When we started the project I said to them, ‘look, you may not be here next year, but the song you make will be. You know how you feel when you hear I Will Always Love You?’ I said ‘we can make your family feel like that’. And three of them committed to the project and we wrote the songs and now when other women come and mention it to me, I think ‘there you go girls, told you, immortal!’ That’s the thing I’m most proud of. The rest of it’s just my job. Nine to five, it’s what I do.”
The job as he sees it is to offer a fresh perspective through music. He makes me laugh when, giving an example, he talks about writing a song about the sinking of the Titanic from the iceberg’s point of view. But he’s serious. His realisation of exactly how music could effect change really hit home when he marched for Rock Against Racism, from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park in 1978. “I was in a working environment at the time where there was a lot of casual sexism, racism and homo- phobia. I was an office junior, I never said anything about it.”
“When we got to the park in Hackney there were 100,000 kids just like me. I realised that in the way that being against the Vietnam war was the motif for the ’60s generation, ours was going to be against discrimination. It wasn’t just about racism. Tom Robinson was singing Sing If You’re Glad To Be Gay. We were going to define ourselves as a generation in opposition to discrimination of all kinds. When I went back to work as a mes- senger for a merchant bank – this was before we went to the Norfolk farm with the studio to make our first recording – I realised I was different to those guys I
worked with. I believed in multicultural- ism and they didn’t. That day gave me the courage of my convictions. It still informs what I do today. It wasn’t The Clash (who were headlining) that gave me my inspira- tion, it was being in that audience. It was hearing those people sing those anti- racist songs that gave me a sense of being part of a community; the sense that peo- ple in my city were opposed to racism in the same way that I was.”
“That was crucial to my political devel- opment but also to my perception of the power that music has. It does have power but the real power is not on stage: it’s in the audience. As a musician the most you can do is what those bands did for me that day, which was to give me a perspective. They didn’t change me. I changed me. I was the one who spoke out. They were the ones that got me there and pulled that audience together.”
“Music can bring people together to express their solidarity. That’s what hap- pened during the miners’ strike. If there wasn’t a mine in your town, you could still go to a gig there and express your solidari- ty. The money raised would go to help the situation. But don’t imagine that by doing a gig you’re changing the world. You’re changing people’s perception of the world perhaps. And that’s the highest aspiration of pop music.”
And his aim now?
“That’s my aim. Period. The main message of my shows now is that we need to fight against cynicism. There’s a song on the new album, Tomorrow’s Going To Be A Better Day that I can hook that argument around. But it’s not just general cynicism we have to fight, it’s our own cynicism.” He’s keen to make the point. “It’s not apathy, that’s understand- able. We all get tired and bored from time to time. It’s not doubt – and it’s not scepticism, which can be quite construc- tive. Cynicism is the person who’s given up and they want you to give up too because it makes them feel better. We’re all prone to it. Cynicism is corrosive.”
I
t would be easy to be cynical about Billy Bragg, to brush him off as a car- icature of himself, to ignore what he says, what he does and the records that he puts out. But if you look he constantly defies the cartoon image with which he’s so often lazily boxed in and of which he’s so aware. It might sound fanci- ful but an hour or so spent with Billy Bragg is like swimming in cool fresh water after a day spent hot and sweating in compromise and hypocrisy. His new record Tooth & Nail is brilliant. He’s bril- liant. Deeply thinking, funny and astute. We’re doing both him and ourselves a disservice if we take him for granted. He’s all you hope or expect he might be – whilst yet defeating those expectations. He’s so much more.
www.billybragg.co.uk F
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