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Preaching to the Unconverted:
An Interview with Singer and Songwriter Billy Bragg

by Silja J.A. Talvi
03.18.01

PUBLICLY, Billy Bragg shies away from being pigeonholed as a political singer/songwriter, but there's simply no way to downplay the significance of his contributions to the canon of modern Western radical political music.

Like Woody Guthrie, his collaborator-in-spirit on 1998’s well-received Mermaid Avenue, Bragg has worked tirelessly since the early 1980s to bring both humor and sharp, insightful sociopolitical commentary to his albums. In the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Bragg's more ardent socialism gave way to a more accessible, community-based social vision that still maintains its critique of capitalism's excesses and short-sightedness, pointing out the illnesses of national chauvinism, poverty and hyper-individualism.

Bragg graciously consented to this interview during a tour stop in the Pacific Northwest.

An older video from the late 1980s, "Which Side Are You On," had you and fellow musicians touring the Southeast of the US in support of striking mine workers. One of the most interesting things about that video is the sheer diversity of your audiences: you were performing to equally enthusiastic audiences of miners, college kids, punks and [various] societal misfits. What do you think accounts for that kind of cross-cultural, cross-class appeal, and how important to you is it that you reach that kind of spectrum of listeners?

Billy Bragg: My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter. I try and write honestly about what I see around me now. There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them. My honesty just happens to extend out into the real world.

When I look at things around me, whether it's my personal relationships or whether it's what happens to be going on in the world, I'm forced by circumstances, particularly the circumstances in Britain in the 1980s, to respond in a way that questions what's happening, and that makes me write songs that have social commentary ... I guess it's the honesty that draws people in, whether I write honestly about my relationships or the situation in the world. That's my guess.

From what I can gather, you feel equally comfortable in front of all those different kinds of audiences, so I assume that it's rather important that you have that kind of diversity in your audience.

BB: It's more important that you reach people, first and foremost, and if those people are diverse then that's great, [and] means you're perhaps reaching people on a number of different levels.

I was talking to a guy in Victoria, where I played in British Columbia, who was a complete neo-conservative. He was telling me off for equating capitalism with fascism. Which is not exactly what I did. I didn't quite explain myself very well. We were talking about the gig in Victoria that was a benefit for some people here in British Columbia who are trying to get together a monument to the memory of the members of the Canadian Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain in 1936-38. I was saying that "It's about organizing if we're going to defeat fascism and we're going to defend ourselves against the worst excesses of capitalism ..." Except I probably didn't say "the worst excesses of capitalism"...I can't remember what I said, I was on stage. But it certainly brought out the neo-conservative in this guy, and [yet] this guy was there right down in the front throughout the gig, and had several albums for me to sign.

I want those people to come to the gigs. If we just play to ourselves, then maybe nothing changes. But maybe I should get his phone number and have his photograph so that when people say I'm preaching to the converted, we could ring him up.

During another segment of that video, you're talking with miners at Camp Solidarity about your own political inspirations, and you explain that you hadn't attended school past the age of 16 and that you weren't so much inspired by Karl Marx as you were by the policies of Margaret Thatcher—that that's how your radicalization took place. Can you tell me just a little about the circumstances of your family and your surroundings when you were growing up and the ways in which you began, as a younger person, to recognize the problems of the Conservative government?

BB: My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing. I lived in a company town, the company was the Ford Motor Company...Most of the people that I went to school with—I went to secondary school—we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else. Probably be in a band and be a rock 'n' roll star. I was quite inspired as a songwriter by Bob Dylan. The sort of general politics of Dylan—"The answer is blowing in the wind." I thought that was really deep when I was 15.

By the time I was 19, punk had occurred. It had a completely different cultural dynamic to it which rejected everything and started again from the year zero. The band that most attracted me was The Clash. Their politics were very conducive to you if you were 19 years old. I now look back and think [the politics] were more to do with the style of the band rather than real, solid political content. We read our own political content into The Clash, and they accepted it. That taught me one lesson which is that you're naive to believe that bands can change the world. Bands are very naive to think that just if their audience thinks that they can change the world, that they can. That was quite a lesson for my career, really.

I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all. Although one of them was about wanting to be a Cosmonaut, which had a kind of a strange resonance in some way. This is in 1978. [In the] 1979 election I didn't bother voting because I was an inverted communist—I was an anarchist. Which kind of meant that I was just grumpy.

I'm actually an anarchist and I'm not just grumpy. (Laughter.)

BB: I had an "A" with a circle on it scrawled on my jacket which really stood for "adolescent." I knew nothing about it, it was just something I picked up in punk. So I didn't vote in '79, and by 1983 I had been in the army for awhile, I had been unemployed for awhile, and I started going out and doing gigs on me own, playing that Bob Dylan kind of thing, I was writing songs that were political, but they were personally political.

The first album had ideas on it like "Just because you're better than me, doesn't mean I'm lazy," which were ignited by punk but driven by the much worse reality of unemployment in the early 1980s. Then in '83 Thatcher got in again. Clearly, it was because of the Falklands War, it seemed to me. That was my political awakening. It was clearly because she had killed all these people. Then she got elected purely on the back on that. That shocked me. Then [there was] the miner's strike [of 1985] and I felt I should go do gigs in support of the miners, particularly in the coal fields themselves.

In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there. I had to define my politics in more ideological terms and less personal terms. By the end of the miner's strike I was defining myself as a socialist, clued in and looking for the next opportunity to defeat the Tories. It was Margaret Thatcher's encouragement that forced me to become ideologically politicized instead of leaving it on a purely personal, humanitarian level, which is where my roots were, rather than learning politics from anybody.

I didn't study politics at school. I didn't know anything about Marx or the actual genuine politics of how countries are run or how revolutions work, but I felt that things were bad and it seemed to me that the reason why things were bad was because the government were deliberately making them bad in some ways to almost punish people. I don't know why I thought that, but I did. Punished for having a welfare state.

What did Mermaid Avenue and all the work and research that went into that album teach you about your own life or your life's purpose?

BB: It's very easy to get marginalized as a political singer-songwriter. Woody Guthrie is known to everyone for his political songs. And yet there he is writing all these great love songs. The surprise that people have that Woody should write a song of love about Ingrid Bergman. He was a human being. He wasn't a political animal ...

Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today. He would recognize the [murder] of James Byrd in East Texas. He would recognize that behavior. He would recognize the Ku Klux Klan. He would see that. He would recognize Jean Marie LePen in France. He would see those things and think it hasn't changed that much. He would see the poor people on the streets and know that the Okies only got famous because they were the first big wave of poor people that came after the cinema was invented. That was the one time that poor people got in the newsreels.

After that, forget it. Who gives a shit. Now they're just there. If you put all these people sleeping on the streets in the U.S. and Canada—there are more of them than you have Okies. They're among us. They're not [just] out in California or out in the Dust Bowl. They're people from our own cities who come to get their lives together or make a living or whatever. [ L i P ]

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