The 15 Fame-Filled Minutes of the Fanzine Writer

[billy bragg interview part ii]

[the interview time is almost up]

Kylie: I have another question I want to ask you...

Billy Bragg: Go baby....

K: I think that songs like "Valentines Day is Over" take an approach to love that go beyond the simplistic Top 40 romantic lovesong formula...as a man, is it important for you to write about love and relationships and responsibility in a way that other men can relate to?

BB: Yes, I mean "Valentines Day is Over" is a very good example of that, because when I first wrote it some feminists came up to me at a festival and they said "Look, you've written a song from a female perspective, how do you know? How can you write this as a man? You don't know what it feels like to be the victim of male violence."

And I said "Yeah, you're completely right but you know, there are many great songs about this subject written by women, but I am trying to write a song about this for other men and say as a man, to other men "this is not acceptable." And the best way I feel I can say that is from a female perspective, to be brave enough to write and sing "as a female" so I can say to these men "Look, as another man, it's just not acceptable that this happens."

And so I also like "Valentines Day is Over" because it's both personal and political, it talks specificially about how brutality and the economy are related, how I understand that the pressure of trying to live in a capitalist society does put stress on relationships, that's not to make an excuse but...I think the best songs are not either personal or political but for me the best Billy Bragg songs are the ones in which...

K: the two are definitely not separate but are interrelated, in the way that our lives are not either simply personal or simply political...?

BB: The world is like that, the world is not only political or only personal, all of these things are interrelated. Sometimes I can write a highly political song like "There's Power in a Union" and another time I might write a purely personal song like - what did I play tonight? "The Fourteenth of February", something like that or "Saturday Boy".

But to me, the real good ones are where I can manifest the way the two fit together, which doesn't always kinda come off, but I do try, particularly with the ones with regard to violence to women. "Levi Stubbs Tears" tries to get into that position as well.

K: Actually at the end of the set when you held up your cup of tea to the audience...well, we were just talking on the way here about George Orwell's essay about how to make the perfect cup of tea...and it's interesting because he's kinda known for being so purely "political"...you know that essay?

B: Yeah, of course! I'm a huge Orwell fan. We were just in America last November doing a tour against media consolidation against Clear Channel. They own a lot of radio stations in America, like 2000 radio stations, and they have one playlist, so the Americans were concerned.
I was on a tour bus with Jill [Jill Sobule, who played the show tonight -k], Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Boots Riley from The Coup and Mike Mills from R.E.M and we were travelling on this tour bus and the most amazingly weird thing happened.

It turned out that Steve Earle, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine and Mike Mills were all huge Lord of the Rings fans! So they got into this argument about Lord of the Rings and then Earle went out and bought the Two Towers 4 CDs on the bus, and it was just driving me fuckin' mad!

And they're saying to me that this is the greatest novel from the 20th century and I'm saying "Listen, guys have you ever heard of George Orwell???" Okay, the greatest novel of the 20th century is 1984, it says more about the 20th century than any bunch of fuckin' hairy-toed hobbit bastards running around.

So I am a huge fan of George Orwell. I'm very interested in Englishness because my last album England-Half English is trying to address that and of course Orwell is the kinda king of all that shit, if you know your Orwell. Maybe I should get a kinda George Orwell tshirt together with the explanation of how to make the perfect cup of tea on it, I wonder if I could get away with that, or maybe I should set it to music..?

P: Boots Riley would have known Orwell though...

BB: Yeah Boots and me...Boots wasn't interested in Lord of the Rings, we had another video of Parliament "Funkadelic" and that was put on instead of Lord of the Rings, if we could get on the bus first.

M: Okay another question we came up with on the way here: how the fuck does one dance to your music?!
K: How does one dance to Billy Bragg?!

BB: Well firstly, when I'm solo it's not dance music. When I play with a band it's more dance music and people do dance then. The toughest thing is the audience themselves are not prepared to dance, but they're much less prepared to see me dance! And when I have the band with me I sometimes dance and it really freaks them out because I can only dance one way -- and that is like somebody's dad because I am somebody's dad!

Before you have children your dancing is different and once you have children you spend five years dancing to make someone laugh. You dance with your kids making them laugh, so when you go back to dancing in a disco, there's nothing you can do man, you're fucked. That's the way I dance cause I'm someone's father, it's more like ska, I can do an awful lot of ska!

M: thanks for your time..

and then! the tape-recorder was turned off and we kept talking.. about zines and independent media. and BB said one more thing, which for the purposes of documenting, went a little something like this:

"George Orwell said if there's any hope, it lies in the proles, and if there's any hope for punk, it lies in the fanzines."

(and then we continued to loot the backstage buffet, like any good self-respecting punks would)