Billy Bragg has always been political. He has played at benefit gigs for the miners striking in 1984 with baton-wielding police standing outside; at anti-a partheid concerts back in 1986 in London; and more recently, he addresses anti-vaxxers in his new single ‘Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained’.
“I thought I can’t go in and tell him to ‘Shut that racket up’, can I? I just sat on the stairs and listened to it as a proud dad.”
Was his son’s version better than his?
“No, f**k off,” he laughs. “He’s good but he’s not that good. Actually, he’s a better guitar player than me, but he can’t do Billy Bragg better than me. I’m the best at doing Billy Bragg.”
Jack, now 27, co-wrote the aforesaid ‘Ten Mysterious Photos…’ on his dad’s new release The Million Things That Never Happened, his tenth studio album.
Bragg’s own father Dennis died of cancer when he was 52. Billy was 18. “He smoked a lot. He had nicotine-stained fingers. He was a 30-a-day man. I would often go up the wood yard with him on a Saturday for a walk. He’d buy me sweets, then he’d get some wood and come back and make something,” Billy says.
Born in Barking, Essex, on December 20, 1957, Billy Bragg was always good at making songs. In 1983, he released his debut album Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy. 1985’s Between the Wars EP went to number 15 in the UK charts, with all the sales going to the striking miners’ fund. “How can you lie there and think of England when you don’t even know who’s in the team?” goes one of the most memorable lines ever in ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’, from his 1986 album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry.
In 1986, he fronted the British Labour Party’s Red Wedge tour, a collective of like-minded musicians. “It was a moment when I had an opportunity to find out if pop music could change the world. Music can’t change the world,” he says. “But it can turn people into allies of causes that they are not directly affected by, like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.”
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When newly elected Labour prime minister Tony Blair invited Oasis’s Noel Gallagher to Downing Street for drinks in 1997, Bragg was shunned. “I was persona non grata around New Labour because of Red Wedge.” It is unlikely he lost sleep over it. By that stage, he had taken four years off from his career to raise his young son.
His 1996 album William Bloke — his first since Don’t Try This At Home in 1991 — “articulates the transition into parenthood”, he says. At the end of the 1990s he put out the Grammy-nominated Mermaid Avenue album with singer Natalie Merchant and the band Wilco. It changed people’s perception of him, As did his appearance in 2002 on the BBC’s quiz show, The Weakest Link. He did it for his mother Marie because it was her favourite show,
“There’s not many things that you do in my job to impress your mum. The Weakest Link was filmed in advance. She was annoyed with me when I wouldn’t tell her how I got on. But the day that I won cheered her up no end.”
In October 2007, his mother was similarly cheery when he took her to a gala at the Royal Festival Hall in London. “I had written a new English language lyric to ‘Ode to Joy’ of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And the queen was coming. Then I went to the foyer and shook her hand. She wanted a signed copy of the score for the Royal collection.
“For me, it was more about shaking hands with the woman who gave the World Cup to Bobby Moore in 1966,” he says, referring to England captain and West Ham legend, the late Bobby Moore (Bragg is a lifelong West Ham supporter). He wasn’t concerned about jeopardising his left-wing street cred by shaking hands with the symbol of British imperialism.
“When you’re Billy Bragg, you have to do things that confound people’s expectations of you,” he says. “One of them is going on The Weakest Link and another one is shaking hands with the queen. People love to pigeonhole you.
“I got a lot of s**t off of lefties for that. I’m like: ‘Look, mate, when I do a gig, a lot of people hang around in the foyer afterwards to shake my hand and get my autograph. Why should I treat her any different? Was I supposed to turf her out? When you see me at her gig — at a Buckingham Palace garden party — then you can give me s**t.’”
In 2007, he wrote a book called The Progressive Patriot: A Search For Belonging about what it means to be English, which was partly inspired by the British National Party being elected in his home town of Barking.
Is it difficult to discuss the nature of being English without sounding like a fascist?
“It is, for some people,” he says. “I think the baggage that comes with imperialism and exploitation, for some people, it is too much. You have to recognise that there are many types of patriotism. There are many types of nationalism. You’ve got the British National Party and the Scottish National Party. Which of those two parties are the true nationalist party? They are both at different ends of the political spectrum.
“With a country like England with 60 million people, it is impossible to define Englishness,” he adds, “and particularly with the empire, because I would argue that the empire is a manifestation of Britishness rather than a manifestation of Englishness.
“Englishness has kind of been concreted over by imperialism. I think, hopefully, we can get a post-imperialist identity of English with a more cohesive, more integrated, more diverse society. But that discussion is difficult for some people because of the legacy of the empire.”
Britain post-Brexit is, he says, not great.
“Brexit is like a broken leg. We hobble along. And as always, it seems obvious to many of us that the whole thing will fall down over the Irish Border. It will be ironic if it’s the rights of the Irish Border that finally brings the whole thing down,” he says, “because I think there’s a stink of imperialism around Brexit. In the sense that we didn’t want to defer to 26 other countries in Brussels because it made us feel like we were somebody else’s empire.”
Last summer, a statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, Westminster, was sprayed with graffiti that called Churchill a racist during a Black Lives Matter protest. What does he feel about the wartime prime minister? “Churchill is a good example. He is both an imperialist and a racist and an anti-fascist who sided with Joe Stalin. People are a mess of contradictions. We are all a mess of contradictions”
And his contradictions? “That’s easy. I live in a big house. I travel around the world in big airplanes when I’m writing about the environment. There, easy to spot. No one is a saint. Everyone has to deal with those contradictions.”
Champagne socialist? “People call me that every day. Someone emailed me a four-paragraph email yesterday calling me that. Being called a champagne socialist is their way of trying to get you to shut up.”
He has been called worse. In 2011, a BNP supporter sent letters to 30 of Bragg’s neighbours in the village of Burton Bradstock in Dorset, calling him “anti-British” and the “village idiot”; and urging them to get him to leave.
In terms of sexual politics, he says, “The front line now is trans rights. To reflect the trans rights struggle, I adjusted the lyrics to ‘Sexuality’,” he says of his 1991 hit. He replaced the last two lines of, ‘Stop playing with yourselves in hard currency hotels/I look like Robert De Niro, I drive a Mitsubishi Zero’, with: ‘Just because you’re they, I won’t turn you away/If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find the right pronouns.’
He doesn’t have the right words to describe what has happened to Morrissey, who performed with The Smiths on the 1986 Red Wedge tour with Bragg. Morrissey is now making highly controversial statements (“England is a memory now. The gates are flooded and anybody can have access to England and join in.”) and supports the extreme far-right political party, For Britain.
“I thought of Morrissey as a comrade. That’s why I’m so disappointed. Eric Clapton was always an arsehole,” he says, referring to Clapton’s comments in 1976 — “This is England, this is a white country, Enoch [Powell] for prime minister! Keep Britain white!” —“but Morrissey wasn’t always an arsehole. He stood up for the outsider, the marginalised.”
Neither of Bragg’s parents were political. His political beliefs were first influenced by campaigning columnist John Pilger in The Daily Mirror in the 1960s.
”I read Pilger from an early age. But I really got my politics from the music I was listening to in 1969, like American soul, Tamla Motown. Almost all of that stuff was reflecting the civil rights movement,” he says. “You know, ‘Ball of Confusion’ by The Temptations, ‘War’ by Edwin Starr. I was aware that something was going on out there. Then I eventually got to Bob Dylan and I realised that music could be a vehicle for political expression. That’s where I got it from, sort of by osmosis.”
What does socialism stand for in 2021? “Accountability. It means holding those in power to account. Economic power. Corporate power. Political power. We have to draw a red line and say, this far and no further. You see people in leadership positions acting with impunity — from Trump, to Johnson, Putin, Xi Jinping. There is a rise of authoritarianism.”
They say Marxists deny the spiritual needs of man. Does Bragg believe in God? “Marxists have their own book. They don’t need Jesus’s book. I’ve met Marxists who have the same fanaticism as Jehovah’s Witnesses or whatever. As a poet, I would prefer to believe in the existence of something we can’t see like God because it makes the world a much more interesting place.”
Bragg is playing the Ulster Hall as part of the Belfast Arts Festival next month. “I was on stage there the night Margaret Thatcher resigned. That was a trip. They were dancing in the streets.”
Let’s hope there’s dancing on the streets for different reasons when the Bard of Barking returns to Belfast.
Billy Bragg’s new album ‘The Million Things That Never Happened’ is out on October 29. He plays The Ulster Hall in Belfast on November 2, Vicar Street in Dublin, November 4 and Black Box Theatre in Galway on November 6.
