The following interview first appeared in 2008 in an alternative tabloid publication of limited circulation in Hamilton, Ontario. Since Billy Bragg will be appearing at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on May 3, here’s the interview again for those who missed it the first time.
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In the early eighties, Billy Bragg, from Essex, England, began recording a unique hybrid of punk outrage, socially-concerned protest inspired by the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan template, and folk tradition. Over time, in his albums, he has balanced songs of leftist politics and of love and relationships, both written with consummate imagination. His lyrics are at one time wry and witty, sincere and uncompromising, sharply intelligent and humane, rich with detail and compact, while his accomplished knack for catchy melody has produced consistently memorable tunes. Long a chart-habitue in Britain and a widely-popular cult figure in North America, Bragg is also an author, an unstoppable leftist and anti-war/pro-peace activist, a family man, and always an outspoken and inspired social and political critic. We spoke at the CBC in Toronto..
James Strecker: You write both personal songs and political songs, and I wonder if the two overlap.
Billy Bragg : In the best songs, the personal and the political overlap because life overlaps. The ones I’m most proud of are where a successful story has a political message. Or sometimes you can use them either way. I have song called “I Keep Faith” which is both a love song and a song of commitment to humanity. The commitment is through my ongoing belief and faith in the audience’s ability to change the world, rather than me change the world. Singing a song can’t change the world, it can just offer you a different perspective of the world. But the audience, through their collective action, can make a difference and my job is to remind them of that and inspire them to go out a do the stuff that makes a difference. In “I Keep Faith” it’s how I pitch it to them that makes a difference, using the intro of the song to set the song up in a way that is unambiguously focused on what I want it to be, whether it’s the personal or the political.
JS: Because of your song The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie, you’ve been criticized and called a “mate of the terrorists” by someone on the internet. Any comment on criticism?
BB: Well, they will, particularly on the issue of Israel-Palestine. If you don’t agree with the Zionists, therefore you are a terrorist, or if you don’t agree with the Americans who agree with the Zioniists, therefore you must be a terrorist, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your point. Those people are trying to close you down, trying to stop you from making your point, trying to undermine the legitimacy of what Rachel Corrie was trying to achieve. They’re trying to obscure the murderous intent of the driver of that bulldozer. They can call me any names they like, but, in the end, you’ve got to try to bring the news from nowhere to somewhere and that’s what I try to do. Criticism doesn’t particularly bother me. It didn’t back then or now. You know, if people aren’t getting upset by the songs you write, you’re probably not writing the right kind of songs.
JS: You say “I prefer it all to be open” in the song “Sexuality” and I remember Jeremy Irons telling me about the film he’d been in, Lolita, and how people didn’t want to address the fact of an adult’s attraction to a young girl. So what are the current unsaids in society?
BB: Well, that’s the key one – isn’t it? – pedophilia. It’s an issue people don’t address and don’t feel comfortable talking about. The song “Sexuality” was really a post aids anthem to make people understand about practicing safe sex and not stigmatizing the gay community as social lepers because of the problems of HIV. I do try to work with marginalized people and I did a songwriting workshop with a bunch of terminally ill women in a hospice in Weymouth, writing songs with them and trying to help them say the things they couldn’t say around the dinner table, which were namely, “I love you but I’m dying.” That was very inspirational, working with them. My own father died of cancer thirty years ago and the process the doctors encouraged us to do at the time, the “best way to deal with it,” was not to talk about it. So we didn’t say any of those things we should have said. We just sat around while dad kind of withered away and I really regret that. So working with these women seemed a way to help them to overcome that difficult silence.
JS: Do songs help those who do not speak of things like death and dying?
BB: Songs give legitimacy to whatever it is you want to say. I also do work in prisons and last year I set up a fund to raise money to buy guitars for people doing rehabilitation work in prisons, but writing songs does legitimize people’s experience in a way that other things don’t and it’s simple and easily communicable. You put a beat to it and rhythm and a rhyme, and it goes straight into your heart immediately and you can’t forget it. That’s why I’m songwriter, rather than a novelist or straight forward poet.
JS: What do you do about an apathetic society in which people take in what is said on television news shows which are owned by the corporations. Can songs penetrate that situation?
BB: Songs can offer you a different perspective, that’s the most they can do. People don’t always want a different perspective, so you’ve got to make them note it whether they want it or not. A couple of years ago I started writing songs about the politics of identity and a lot of left wing people don’t like that. They are not interested in discussing an inclusive sense of identity. They believe in internationalism and any form of nationalism or patriotism is an anathema to them. But there are as many types of patriotism as there are types of socialism and we ignore them at our peril, because, if we don’t talk about these things, we leave a vacuum which is easily filled by the far right. So we need to take that ground.
JS: How much flexibility do you need within the left wing to accommodate divergent points of view, yet not dissipate its integrity?
BB: That’s a difficult one because we live in a post-ideological period at the moment and people are trying to articulate these things in ways that accommodate where we are rather than constantly hearkening back to Marxism. I think the energy of Marxism is more or less shot. But the ideas that Marx was trying to deal with have not been resolved, so we have got to find a new language, and poets and songwriters can play a part in that. All great art has the potential to accommodate a new sense of identity, but the problem is that identity is personal and, rather than talking in blanket terms, you have to focus on what it is that makes you feel that connects you with the place where you are from. I’m talking about your sense of belonging and that’s what society seems to miss these days. So I do believe in family and my life is really shaped around my family activities, the length of time I go away on tour, when I make my albums, and what songs I write. They’re trying to reflect the family life I live.
JS: The first time I knew about you was when I heard you sing The World Turned Upside Down, one of my fave songs and it’s on Dick Gaughan’s album, and I thought “He’s playing solo electric guitar, it’s folkish music, what the hell’s going on?” And now you’re part of The Imagined Village, a group that updates performance of traditional songs, so innovation is part of the game?
BB: If you want to move the game forward, yeh. If you want to be sort of stuck in aspic, then it’s not innovation and you want to go backwards. But those of us who want to broaden the idea of what English folk music can be want to bust out of the idea that if you play solo guitar you have to be an acoustic guitar player. You’ve got to zig when everybody else is zagging. Of course, you do have to make a few compromises here and there because, if you make no compromises, things become rather precious or brittle. But as soon as you make compromises on your terms, you’re probably all right. That means you have to make sure that you are comfortable with the things they want to do rather than acquiescing to things you don’t feel are you. And I’ve had my fights with the record company. They tended to win the little ones about which single to put out from the album and I tended to win the big one like who owns the back catalogue -and I own all of my back catalogue. It’s very important for young artists to understand they shouldn’t sign their rights away for life for copyright.
JS: You have written “We can be what we want to be.” So what is it that prevents us, from doing so, because it is a tricky place between societal pressure and our own inability to do something?”
BB: Our sense that how others might see us, the urge to conform, is strong because we don’t want to stick out, we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, we don’t want to be talked about. It’s something inculcated at school, that period of eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen when you want to look exactly the norm and you want to be right in the middle of that. But the norm moves about and every now and then the norm rushes ahead of where the mainstream is, as in punk. So if you’re fortunate to have been liberated from your worries about how people see you, then you have the opportunity to become a genuine individual.
THE BILLY BRAGG INTERVIEW PART II
In Part II of The Billy Bragg Interview, the popular protest singer talks about his Woody Guthrie albums, his approach to writing songs, his explorations of English identity, his influences, and America today.
JS: How difficult was it writing songs with Woody Guthrie’s words -or was it easy for you to do?
BB: There was some worry about the legend of Woody Guthrie and how people would feel if we did stuff that was contrary to it. But Nora, Guthrie’s daughter, specifically wanted us to do stuff that was different, she wanted us to choose songs that challenged people’s perception of Woody, that added a third dimension to that two dimensional figure of a dust bowl icon. So I was worried that, with some of the lyrics we chose, hard core Woody Guthrie fans might find it difficult to reconcile with their iconic image of him. And Nora helpfully said, “Don’t worry about the legend, I’ll deal with the legend and you just tune into the voice in the archives” and that kind of gave me license to do whatever I wanted to do. I did feel a sense of connection with him and that happened when we recorded a song called “Another Man’s Done Gone” in Dublin. In fact Nora chose that song. She brought that lyric, and I wrote the music for that, and Jay Bennett played it on the piano, and Jeff Tweedy sung it, and so the four component parts of the project were there, me Jeff and Jerry and Nora. And it’s the one song where Woody refers to the lyrics and he talks about “I feel like this scribbling might stay.” It was recorded in a two hour period and it seemed to me that we actually in some way connected with him in that moment. Nora sat in the room with us when we recorded it and at that moment I thought this is when we actually touch base with the little guy. Now I don’t think my accent would have worked with his words, and I really had to put on a bit of that mid-Atlantic thing just to connect with Woody. It would have sounded very odd singing in my voice “I live in a place called Oklahoma.” I needed to modulate toward the middle of the Atlantic and that wasn’t a bad thing, I wasn’t selling out by doing that. And in the songs that we write and the causes we support, both Woody and I, it was sort of a way of approaching politics that isn’t dogmatic and a way of approaching songwriting that’s entertaining and engaging people, rather than lecturing them. Nora said that Woody talked a lot and played little and I can do that sometimes. I get in trouble for that.
JS: Tell me about any experience of writer’s block you’ve had.
BB: If I’ve got something to write, I write, but then when I was writing my book, I didn’t write anything for ages and I couldn’t really write any songs till I finished writing the book. Once I finished writing the book, the songs just came. Every sound check I would plug the guitar in and I’d write another song. The book took two or three years, eighteen months of tossing it about and eighteen months of doing it. There were no songs and it was like a big block in the way and I just kind of chipped away at it to fragment it.
JS: Some of your songs nail a subject and some leave a lingering ambiguity.
BB: That’s not a bad thing to have ambiguity sometimes and help people fill in the gaps, particularly in relationship songs. There’s a lot of ambiguity in relationships, a lot of unsaid things, but I try and keep the ambiguity in the love songs and keep the political songs a bit clearer and straight forward so you know exactly what I’m saying.
JS: In your book, you discuss a sense of English identity.
BB: In my book I’m trying to explore how the first feelings I had about Englishness were engendered by “Scarborough Fair” by Simon and Garfunkel. Now Martin Carthy, my countryman, was playing that song from my culture about two miles from my house around that time, so why couldn’t I get my culture from Martin? Why did it take two Jewish guys from Queens and Bob Dylan’s backing band to give me my own culture? Now I’m exploring how that process works and, most significantly, I see it in the work of Bob Dylan and his use of the British folk tradition to upgrade his songwriting by taking an old English song “Lord Randall” which says “Where have you been Lord Randall my son, Where have you been my darling young one” and turning it into “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” That alchemy was so revolutionary and people like Martin Carthy were blown away not just by the song, but by the content and the imagery and what Dylan had done in taking this old tune and then totally revamped it. And as soon as he recorded that, Dylan went to England and got a lot more folksongs of people like Martin and came back and wrote some songs that were based on English folksongs. So it’s back and forth, because my own culture is here in Canada and in the US too. That’s what’s part of my culture as well because that’s what I’ve listened to and there’s a sort of feeling loop that pushes and pulls and comes and goes. There’s North American survivors –in Appalachia and Newfoundland, and there’s the Irish and the Cornish and the Scots down through the centre of Canada, and you get to the very edge of the continent in Victoria and you find mods running around on scooters listening to The Who.
JS: Who were significant influences on you? I imagine there are fifty thousand.
BB: There are a lot, yeh, but two of the biggest influences were The Clash and Bob Dylan. And, of course, Joe Strummer, before he called himself Joe Strummer, referred to himself as Woody, because he was influenced by Woody Guthrie and that’s why The Clash wrote slogans on their guitars. So both Dylan and Strummer were influenced by Woody, so he’s the father of my political song tradition. He was pretty cool. He sang “Gypsy Davy,” which is a song he learned from his grandmother, and when Childe went to collect those ballads in Appalachia, it was “Gypsy Davy” or the “Raggle Taggle Gypsies,” or whatever you wanted to call that song, that had the most variants. So with Woody singing that in Oklahoma in the 20s and 30s, there’s an argument to be made there that he was the very last of the Elizabethan balladeers, since that song was first written down in Jacobean England and it must have been old then. The same time he writes “This Land is Your Land” as an alternative to a song he keeps hearing on the jukebox that was all over America in 1940 called “Bless America.” He writes “This Land Is Your Land” and originally the punch line is “God blessed America for you and me” which he changed to “This land is made for you and me.” The point is that he’s trying to be an alternative musician, so he’s kinda like the first punk rocker as well. He covers a lot of bases that little guy, he really does.
JS: What about existential validation, feeling that you mean something through doing your music?
BB: Yeh, that’s a really important part of what I do. For the first few years I really didn’t feel as if I existed unless I was doing gigs, but I don’t feel that way now. But after twenty five years of just not being able to do it, to then have the ability to do it, the urge to go out and do it was very, very strong. I do what I always wanted to do and I get paid to do it, how fucking great is that? That’s the definition of success. And now I’ve also got a little balance in my life, I’ve got a family and other things.
JS: Some years ago you wrote a line, “If America is truly the beacon of freedom…” and I wonder what America is to you now.
BB: I have two words to say: black president. Say it: black president. The idea of it is exciting, is engaging I think the Americans are going to surprise us this November. For the first time since the war more, than half of them are going to vote in the election. I have a lot of respect for the American people. Where I come from there’s too much knee jerk anti-Americanism that doesn’t take on board that vast numbers of Americans are appalled by George Bush as we are and we need to recognize that and support those American who want their country to be a force for good in the world, rather than a force of destruction. If you’re looking for a sign to say the Bush years are over, nominating a black man for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate is a pretty clear message. I think that politics do matter, that grass roots politics matter. Ultimately our biggest enemy in making a better world isn’t capitalism or conservatism, it’s cynicism and we have to be vigilant against our own cynicism all the time because our enemies rely on us thinking we can’t do this, it’s too long, it’s just me, it’s a little big. That cynicism is what defeats people who want to make a better world, so we have to fight against that.