f32 A Sudden Bragg
Here’s our first interview with Billy Bragg, as published in issue 24, April 1985, shortly before he hit the charts with Between The Warsand we went all glossy and became Folk Roots. Colin Irwinwas that scribe…
men in beards. Nobody working on the rock side would dream of being remotely associated with it. “All that’s crap. You’ve only to listen to Utah Phillips or that Rounder album of women’s coal mining songs… great album. Just listen to some- thing like that – it’s so inspiring. The more you get into it, the more you find there are some really good songs which are just as relevant now as they were when they were written.”
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“I’ll tell you, what finally done it was seeing Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey at Manchester Free Trade Hall singing The World Turned Upside Down. I thought ‘fucking hell, this is really powerful’. It’s like the first time you hear White Man In Hammersmith Palais by the Clash or In The City by the Jam – it makes the ’ackles on your neck rise. That song made me feel that way. I didn’t see why, just because it was two… well… middle-aged geezers, I didn’t see why it was any less interesting. I mean, Otis Redding would be middle-aged if he was alive, and I wouldn’t think twice about going to see him. And B.B. King, I’d still go and see him. And I wouldn’t think twice about going to see Ewan MacColl.”
ou don’t have any reservations about being featured in this magazine? “Nah… why?” Well, up until recently folk had a ter- rible image. You know – old
Billy Bragg is 27 years old (despite what you might hear in the first line of the current hit single of his song A New Eng- land by Ewan MacColl’s daughter Kirsty). He comes from the East End of London and is affable, forthright, impassioned, humorous, politically sharp, and unerring- ly direct. Working entirely solo (but cate- gorically not acoustic), he is – personally and musically – a rare bullshit-free zone. Whether directed at his latest romantic disaster or the struggles of the working class, his songs hit their targets with a brash, crude, yet nevertheless crushing power. This boy knows something about making the ’ackles rise.
William Bragg should be the product of the British folk scene. His songs are an articulate gut response to the world he sees about him, delivered in a highly indi- vidual, heartfelt modern style. Music of the people, by the people, for the people? If folk clubs had followed their original idealist guidelines, then this, surely, would be the type of music now housed within.
They didn’t and it isn’t. It was the Sex Pistols and The Clash that changed Billy Bragg’s life, not Ewan MacColl or Bert Lloyd. No matter – he made it in the end. As a teenager, Bragg heard Gaudete by Steeleye Span and dismissed it as “quaint.” He occasionally visited a folk club near Peterborough, which left no lasting impression. He had a succession of jobs. He joined the army and bought himself out of the army (“the best money I ever spent”). And he lost interest in everything else the day he heard The Clash. He and some mates got together to form a band (Riff Raff) in their image, displaying many of the home industry trademarks of the punk phi- losophy, including a cheaply made video.
Yet despite his present vigour and apparently overwhelming self-confidence, it took him a long time to break out of the concept of the traditional rock band format and decide to go it alone. When he did, they asked him two things: when was he forming a band, and was he the new Bob Dylan? He still constantly gets asked both, and nothing is likely to wind him up more.
“I never had any inclination to play folk clubs at all. Not in the slightest. Everyone used to say to me ‘solo performer – you should be playing folk clubs’. They didn’t understand that the only way I was gonna get what I wanted – which was scared and a lot of money – was by doing rock gigs. And standing down in a folk club playing to half a dozen people waiting to hear a 20- minute version of John Barleycorn wasn’t my idea of a Saturday night out.”
F
olk clubs were one thing, but folk music was a different mat- ter. As Bragg’s solo career pro- gressed – amid a cavalry of glib descriptions ranging from the new Bob Dylan to the new Paul Weller to a solo Clash – his musical horizons broad- ened. While his first album, the swash- buckling Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy, was on its way to clocking up sales of 250,000, Bragg refused to play the usual rock industry games, went around the country on the train (sometimes playing three gigs a day), stuck firmly with the independent label Go! Discs, and hung on to his sanity. Somewhere along the way, that sanity left his mind open enough to persuade him to go and see Leon Rosselson.
“Rosselson gave me a song book, and I bought an album. Reading his lyrics and stuff, it was so powerful. I had a chat with him about it, and the more I looked into it, the more interesting the whole thing looked. When Barking Library first opened, all the records they had were folk music, so I’d occasionally borrow one of them. They had a great Topic sampler album with Shirley Collins on it. I fell in love with her. Shirley and Dolly Collins became the Shangri Las of folk music… those beautiful, plaintive voices were just like the Shangri Las. The Watersons were on the same album, and A.L. Lloyd and people like that.”
“Then, a long time later, I started com- ing across LPs. I found a Watersons album – the one with the red cover – in Virgin Records, which was brilliant. And you start thinking ‘what happened to these people?’ Roy Bailey told me that they live in Robin Hood’s Bay and all that… that’s how I came back into contact with these people.”
The upshot of it all is that Bragg’s own inimitable version of Rosselson’s The World Turned Upside Down appears on his new EP, along with a cracking version of Which Side Are You On? (applied directly to the miners’ strike) and the epic title track, Between The Wars, composed by Bragg but which contains many of the qualities of majesty and lyrical muscle of the better folk songwriters (he rates Richard Thompson highly). He also plans to play Cambridge Folk Festival this year, has just returned from America armed with 50 albums (primarily folk and blues), and was so floored by hearing Dick Gaugh- an’s Handful Of Earth that he talks wistful- ly of wanting to meet him and maybe work with him. Born-again folkie, or what? Well, not exactly.
Photo: Ian Anderson
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