Must I paint you a picture - Billy Bragg in interview

Author: Andrew Lawless

 

England Half English

“You’ve got to be engaged, haven’t you?”, says Billy Bragg, responding to questions about his extra-music political activities, activities that have ranged from writing opinion pieces on Englishness for major newspapers, like The Independent, to making serious proposals for the reform of the house of Lords. Engaged is a good word to use when talking about Billy Bragg, and indeed it’s one that he uses several times during the interview. He can be accused of many things as an artist or activist, but lack of enthusiasm or engagement with the task in hand is not one of them. “You can’t expect to inspire your audience,” he continues, “ just by singing about it. You’ve got to walk it like you talk it, or else you’re just exploiting it, don’t you think? It’s hard to find a way to do that”.

On his last album, proper, England Half English, discounting last year’s retrospective compilation Must I paint you a picture, he provided exactly that: a musical and lyrical engagement with the notion of Englishness. It’s a theme that he’s passionate about, though it may not be to all his audience’s taste. “It’s not a very popular subject amongst my audience, who are by nature more internationalist, but I don’t choose what to write about, I don’t choose my subjects, they kind of choose me. I came into this whole business by going to see Rock Against Racism gigs with the Clash. That was how I became politicised, and making an argument for an inclusive sense of English identity, to me, is just a continuation of that same argument”.

Just as he sang All you fascists bound to lose, a lyric written by Woody Guthrie, so, in part, his decision to promote a new sense of Englishness, a pride in being English, was derived in no small part from the resurgence of a certain fascist tendency that he sees in British/English politics: “I think that the results of the European election went by, and the Nationalist parties, the UK Independence Party, and the British National Party, won about 21% of the vote, and it’s put nationalism on the agenda, whether we like it or not, and I don’t particularly like it because I’m an internationalist”. Framing his argument he continues, “the UKIP, looking at what they’re saying, although they’ve used the Union Jack, they don’t really have much support outside of England. They’re really a sort of English nationalist party. The BNP are much the same. They don’t have any support in places like Wales and Scotland. They use the Union Jack because it has all those imperial connotations, but underneath there’s a nasty strain of English nationalism that’s bubbling along, and it’s not helped by the fact that most people on the progressive side of politics won’t deal with people’s genuine feelings of identity, the fact that lots of people find flying the flag of St. George says something about them, when England are playing in the European championships for example. All those people aren’t fascists just because they’re flying the English flag, they’re just saying “this is us, here we are”, and when you look at the England team, it’s a multicultural team. So I think the time has come to stop allowing those on the right to make all the running on this issue, because what they want to do is they want to define not just what Englishness is, but also who is and who isn’t English, and by our failure on the left to make any case for an inclusive English identity we allow them to make an English identity that excludes most of the things that I find really, really important about England”.

This notion of Englishness is difficult to work out though. It’s easy to define what it’s not, but what exactly is it? “The catch 22 is that I don’t know exactly what that is. I’m not capable of defining Englishness." he replies, continuing, What I’m trying to do is clear a space where we can have this debate".It's a debate that revolves around notions of identity: "My feeling, from talking to people about this, is that identity is a very personal thing, and no amount of me saying “you’re English, mate”, will make them feel English if they don’t feel it".

Part of the problem is in the lack of a shared common history, I venture. Bragg is quick to disagree: "The question of History is the Right wing’s agenda, that History is more important, and our history is all about being Anglo-Saxons, beating the Celts, fighting the French, fighting the Germans, subduing the Natives. I totally disagree with that". He expands on this, "I grew up with the History of post war Europe, immigration, economic struggles etc. That’s more important to me than what happened at the Battle of the Boyne, or Scottish football fans when they come to Wembley talk about 1314, which was the Battle of Bannockburn – those things are interesting, and I’m not dismissing them. Nobody should have to dismiss part of their ethnicity to be part of England; it’s just that the old definitions of Englishness as an ethnicity don’t really fit any more. What does ethnically ‘English’ mean? Look at our football team. It’s not about ethnicity is it? To qualify for England you don’t have to be White or Protestant – it’s about something else, innit? It’s about something more abstract”.

But, lest we forget, Bragg is first and foremost a musician, and so these concepts of Englishness get expressed, from the stripped down acoustic polemics of Take down the Union Jack through to the Arabic dance sounds of Baby Faroukh, all filtered through his trademark Essex voice. It’s vibrant and interesting, and far from what you’d previously define as ‘English’ music, but that’s half the point really, isn’t it? “I was trying to explain to someone, the other day, why I was never able to get into progressive rock. Why I was never into Emerson, Lake, and Palmer when I was in school, or Pink Floyd, or Yes – those kind of bands”. Bragg tells me. “The only way I could explain was that there wasn’t enough 'Blackness' in the music, or the 'Blackness' that was in the music was too watered down. I liked music that still had that dimension. I liked a lot of Soul, Reggae, Punk, that obviously had that, as well as R’n’B. That sort of crossroads, cultural crossroads, in music is much more interesting to me. I’m not really interested in Morris Dancing [laughs], I don ‘t mind people doing it, but to be honest with you it doesn’t turn me on.

Trying to define Englishness is impossible, when you start to make a list of what is or isn’t English, people start to feel excluded, and I don’t want to exclude people, I’m trying to include people. It’s more intangible than lists, it’s about a sense of belonging or not. I’m trying to make a case for those people who don’t have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history”.

The Political vs. the Personal

A conversation with Bragg, much like his musical output, veers from the polemic, to the thoughtful, from the blunt to the subtle. He’s an interesting performer precisely because of that – he’s not afraid to write the bluntest political protest song possible, for example The Price of Oil, where over an acoustic guitar he sings “Don’t give me no shit about blood, sweat, tears and toil, it’s all about the price of Oil” [the verses link it directly to the Gulf War, lest you were in any doubt], while at the same time he’s capable of the less certain, nuanced songs like Levi Stubbs tears. The stereotype of him is with a guitar singing the Internationale, but he’s as likely to be singing Upfield with a great horn section backing him up. For him he’s happy to do it all.”Political songs tend to rely on topicality. It’s not about shelf life though, strangely, because old songs can come into fashion. I’ve had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return. So they can become topical again. But, in the end, even a song that’s as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn’t get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan’s love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now. So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time. I think that’s why people are a bit shy of writing political songs, because they want to write songs that are more universal than specific. I’ve never had that problem. I think you can do both. I don’t see why it should be one or the other”.

It goes back to this idea of engagement. When there’s an issue he approaches it. “What I’m trying to do is to articulate something that I don’t see reflected in the media. I’m trying to put my tuppence in. Sometimes it has to be like “For fuck’s sake, this is how I feel” as was the case with The Price of Oil, and at others it needs to creep up a little more on the listener, for example with The Wolf covers its tracks. The price of Oil is a piece of raw reportage. The Wolf covers its tracks is something I could keep playing. It pertains directly to terrorism and the responses to it. It’s a more considered song, rather than banging out the Price of Oil which is how that one was written, sitting down with a guitar an pen and paper, and banging it out. It was trying to put in a bit more nuance. One of the great things about music is that it’s strong enough to deal with both of those. It’s not such a gentle medium that it can’t hold nuance. I’d happily play either of those songs”.

Reclaiming Woody Guthrie

In 1998, Bragg took up an invite from Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter, to look through the extensive archive (over 2,500 items) in order to produce some new material. It was a bold and courageous move, on both parts. Bragg started writing songs, using the lyrics he found, and later invited American group Wilco to work with him on what would become the best selling Mermaid Avenue. It was a groundbreaking project, which had personal resonances. Elsewhere Bragg has talked about reclaiming Guthrie from the political protest songwriting pigeonhole to which History had consigned him. When I suggest that there’s a dangerous parallel with Bragg, he’s dismissive, but supports the idea at the same time, that his politics earn him an easy label as a songwriter. “I don’t worry about it. I’m quite happy with what I am. I don’t mind being labelled a political songwriter, but I do get annoyed when I get dismissed as a political songwriter”. The stress on “dismissed” is sharp. ”When people think they know me when they’ve heard Between the Wars or Take down the Union Jack, but maybe they’ve never heard Levi Stubb’s tears or Valentine’s day is over or Must I paint you a picture, and when we came to putting the compilation together [Editor’s note: Must I paint you a Picture] it became more about the love songs than the political. The political songs are on there but the majority of the songs are love songs, and that probably reflects who I am. The political songs will always get the headlines, but I don’t think to myself, “I must write more political songs”, I just write what I write. What I try not to do is write political songs about the same bloody thing all the time. I try to get to grips with things that are harder to articulate, like England Half English, or Take down the Union Jack, trying to get close to a subject like that, in a way that doesn’t bore the tits of people”.

The project with Wilco became one of the most celebrated albums of 1998, and received a Grammy nomination, as did its follow up album Mermaid Avenue Vol II. The project gave Bragg a particular boost in the States and he says changed his songwriting. “It made me think more about collaborating in the studio. I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it’s me who has to come up with all the ideas”. And indeed his last album was with a full band, the Blokes, and there’s every chance his next one will be as well. The collaboration with Wilco though was not without its tensions: “Yeh, there was some tension. Jeff Tweady and I have never had someone else on our albums who had a yes or no over the mix. What happened was that we had an agreement that I’d mix the songs that I wrote, and they’d mix the songs they wrote, which was about 50-50, but what happened then was that after they’d gone back to Chicago they said that they’d like to mix the whole album, and I said “well, that’s not what we agreed, guys”, so I said “Fine, go ahead and mix the whole album, but if I like my mixes better, then I’m going to use them, for my songs” and I liked mine better".

Unsure as to whether I've hit a raw nerve, he continues, "That was on the first album, and so if there’d been so much grief and hassle on the first album they wouldn’t have come back to do a second album, but they did. And they recorded an extra five songs for that album, just because of the process on that first album. They hadn’t written as many songs because I’d been on board for 18 months before I brought them on board. So they went away and wrote some more songs, went into the archive, choose the songs, wrote and recorded them. That doesn’t sound like the behaviour of a band that can’t bear to work with me anymore". He pauses, and then moves on, " And it was great. I think the second album tilts a little bit more to Wilco, while the first album tilted a little bit more towards me. And that’s right, and I’m glad it worked out that way. We had our disagreements in the studio but that’s part of the process you know. There was a film-maker [Editor’s Note: Kim Wilson's film Man of Sand] working with us, filming the whole thing, and when she wanted to put it out, she said “Look Bill, this is a really important part of making the album, and the film, you’ve got to let me put it in”, so I said that if the guys from Wilco were o.k. with it, I’m o.k. with it. If they’re not embarrassed by it, seeing us argue, then I’m not, and to give them their due they just got on with it. I’ve no qualms working with them again, I enjoyed the whole process. It was a shame that it had to end really”.

One criticism that could be voiced at the project was the closeness of style between Guthrie, Bragg and Wilco. They all shared certain characteristics. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to send someone from a completely different tradition into the archives? “That’s what Nora’s doing. There’s all sorts of people working on stuff in the archives. The Klezmatics are in there, a band that plays Klezmer music, and they’re doing an album – a Woody Guthrie Klezmer album. Nora’s constantly finding people. There’s a lot of spoken word stuff, a lot of prose, stream of consciousness stuff, and she’s got people like Lou Reed doing stuff. We were very close to working with Andy Irvine on this." he says enthusiastically." He’s a huge Woody Guthrie fan, I think he may have met him when he was a young man, he made a pilgrimage. We wanted to work with him when we were in Dublin, but he just wasn’t able to at the time. He would make a great album. There’s so much stuff there. Nora could keep doing this project over and over. I think she just needed someone to prove at the start that it could be done. That you could do it and that people would appreciate it. That’s what we did, me and Wilco. We showed you could do it without upsetting everybody and without diminishing Woody’s status".

Red Wedge, American Style

Though he’s always had a following in the States, the Mermaid Avenue projects undoubtedly brought Bragg a new profile and a new audience. One can’t help but feel that the current climate though, where numerous bands are becoming increasingly politicised in the run up to the American Election, obviously suits Bragg. He’s played the Tell us the Truth tour, organised to protest against ongoing media consolidation, adding his voice to those of artists like Steve Earle, Tom Morello (Rage against the Machine, AudioSlave, and Nightwatchman), Mike Mills of R.E.M, and others. It was an experience he relished: “Playing with Steve Earle was a great pleasure. I’ve a great respect for the man. The people playing on the tour were the sort of people it’s great to go around America with because they’re positive Americans. America gets a very bad press, I think. I’m in a privileged position, and I get to travel to the United States a lot, and to talk to people, so I know that the bullshit we get from the Republican Party, and the Bush administration, is not what everybody thinks, so part of my gig is to try to express that to people in the rest of the world, but also to say to Americans that we are conducive to an America that takes its responsibilities seriously, and that signs up to treaties to ban nuclear proliferation, that protects the environment, that respects the Geneva convention. An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone”.

Current preparations for a high profile tour of artists like Springsteen and Michael Stipe, in swing States, to mobilise the vote for the Democratic Party hark back to the days of the Red Wedge tour in Britain during the 1980s when artists like Bragg and Paul Weller toured to raise support for the Labour Party. Does he see parallels in the situation in America now? “It’s just like Red Wedge, in fact it’s so like Red Wedge that I refused to be a part of it. I was asked to go along by Tom of Audioslave, but I said to him ”This is about a foreign election, I really can’t come and be saying to people – Vote Democrat – in a foreign election” but I think what they’re doing is really great, and it’s the closest thing to Red Wedge that I’ve seen”.

This may be an unwelcome comparison, as the British tour found itself out of step with public opinion come Election Day. As panicked voices in Europe start to suggest that, to their horror, George W. Bush may win. Is there a danger of a great political disillusionment for the artists and fans mobilising? Bragg is philosophical in his response: “Politics often ends in disappointment, doesn’t it? I’m still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I’m much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that’s because they’ve moved, not me. The most important thing for anyone, I think, is to be engaged, whether you’re an artist or a journalist is to be engaged in the process at some level. The Americans who have lived in a hitherto non-ideological society, their society is becoming increasingly ideological but not in the strict left and right, it’s becoming ideological in a cultural, conservative vs. liberal sort of way, which is really weird to witness”.

There’s a growing sense, in my mind at least, that the ranks are closing amongst the celebrity supporters of John Kerry, and to question his abilities and the future direction of a White House under his stewardship is seen as to somehow be tantamount to support for Bush. Bragg though is happy to talk. Will a Kerry victory make the slightest bit of difference? “That’s a very interesting question. For a lot of people there’s not a huge amount of difference between Kerry and Bush, but what we used to say in Britain about Labour and the Conservative party, in the '60s and '70s was that although there may only be an inch of difference between the parties, in that inch a lot of people survive, a difference is made to a lot of people. The reversal of the tax cuts would be a start, signing up to nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and accepting that the only way to deal with the world’s problems is through the United Nations – I think they’ll all make a significant difference. I think it’s going to be very close again". He continues,"The Americans haven’t decided what America is going to be like at the start of the 21^st century. Whoever would have won the last election, neither of them could have said that they had a mandate. That’s the problem with Bush, he acts like he has a huge fuckin' mandate to act, when he doesn’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if no-one got a significant mandate from this election”.

It’s not just the liberals that are being mobilised though, and you can certainly question the worth of stars getting involved when you have to weigh up the arguments of people like Britney Spears, who tells us that we should just trust the President in everything that he does. Can’t you argue, though, that her view is as valid as Bragg's, that both are using Celebrity to push a partisan view? Bragg bristles predictably at the mention of Spears. “That’s not political though is it? Of course it’s political, but the Radio doesn’t report it like that. It only gets classed as political if it’s left wing. Saying that sort of shit never gets you classed negatively as political – nobody says about Britney Spears “Wow Britney’s really political”, they just presume she’s saying something that everyone else thinks”. Fair point, there’s little danger of Spears being pigeonholed as a protest singer.

While he feels unable to campaign in the US election, a British election looms, and it seems that there’s a particularly English version of the ABB (Anyone But Bush) syndrome. How disillusioned has this Labour party stalwart been with Tony Blair’s Government? “Very disappointed about that, the whole cosying up to the Bush administration. It was a really good opportunity for Blair to show his European credentials by standing alongside Paris and Berlin, and he failed to do that. The damage done to the United Nations, and the future prospects of the European Union are quite significant, so I’m very disappointed with that, but the election isn’t going to be about the war, it’s going to be about whether or not you want Michael Howard to be Prime Minister, and I really don’t want him to be Prime Minister. So I’m going to have to do what I’ve done for the last couple of elections and that is to find good Labour people in there and work with them”.

And what of his future musical plans. Is there a new album in the offing? “I’m writing songs. I’m kind of between albums. There’s going to be a general election probably next may, and I’m going to have to put a lot of work in on this Lords reform thingy if I’m going to get a bit of a run on that. By New Year, I should know one way or another I should know if the Lords reform thing is going to happen in the context of a general election. By then, I’ll be ready to put down some songs in the studio with the other guys. I’ve been teaching myself the mandolin this summer. It’s been driving everyone in the house crazy! I’m not saying that the next album is going to be a mandolin album, just that I’m doing stuff. I’m not just gazing out my window dreaming about abolishing the House of Lords! I’m still writing and playing".