Billy Bragg Interview Part i

originally in cut-and-paste handwritten zine format, now on *the internet* omg..probs a bit harder to read all that text on a computer screen, so maybe make a cup of tea before you start reading and defo get comfortable first xx

Billy Bragg interview, backstage at Rohre, Stuttgart
interview: Kylie + Michl + Possum

Kylie: Can you tell us a little bit about the way or ways that you were politicised or became politically aware, and was punk a part of that for you?

Billy Bragg: YES

K: But then I saw you play and you mentioned the Miners Strike...

BB: Yeah well it was before the Miners because punk, punk where I lived was 1977, and the Miners was 1984, and what the Miners did, it took my politics that I already had and it made me express them in an ideological way...you know, more focused on ideology rather than just general politics. I didn't have any politics when I was growing up, my parents were not political. When I first had the opportunity to vote, I was 19 in 1979, and I didn't vote. And that was the year that Margaret Thatcher won, so I felt really stupid about not voting.

The very first political thing I ever did was 1978, I went to see The Clash, and they were going on the first big Rock Against Racism march, which was through London to a park in Hackney in East London. And I went on the march with the Anti-Nazi-League and Rock Against Racism. There were about 20,000 people on this march and I saw The Clash play in the park, but also on that day was a guy called Tom Robinson.

And Tom Robinson had a song that was called "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and when he played this song, the men standing where we were in the crowd began to kiss each other. And you know I grew up in a working class area, and I'd never seen or met any gay men who were out - well I mean I'd probably met gay men - but never gays who were out. I'd never seen gays before. And they had a big banner which said "Sing If You're Glad to be Gay" and my first feeling was "Why are these people at an anti-racism march? This has nothing to do with being gay, this is about black people."

But I realised quite quickly that the fascists hated anybody who was different in any way, and so I promised from that day to be as different as I could be, and to ask as many awkward questions as I could. So the lesson from that is not just that I'm politicised, but that music, although it cannot change the world, it can change your perspective of the world. Because I came away from that concert with a different perspective about politics. And so that was the first political experience for me, thank you to Joe Strummer for bringing me there and to Tom Robinson for showing me that song, and to those gay guys and to the whole moment to make me political - it still inspires me.

Possum: Can you think of, off the top of your head - like sometimes you see something and you just have such a clear image of it in your head, and it stays with you for the rest of your life...can you think of anything?

BB: Yeah, I mean that day in the park, seeing those gay men, stays with me. When Joe Strummer died, that's the first thing I thought, you know, Joe had been my great inspiration, in that sense he'd been the most political person in punk, he made The Clash political. So there are these moments for me... a moment where you see something in perhaps a clearer way and you find a way to articulate that in a way that people can understand. That's the real art, I think, of a songwriter.

If you're gonna write stuff that challenges people, ya gotta be able to articulate it in a way that engages their interest. If you just bang them over the head with it all the time, it's like a fanzine without pictures, you know, it's tough, ya gotta draw people into it. So you're always looking for ways to say things that are entertaining, ways to attack capitalism in a smarter way than just saying "capitalism is shit" is approaching it through Farenheit 451.

P: Like in the way you approach a larger audience, a festival audience, compared to a smaller audience, like in small pubs...?

BB: Well, a festival audience is different, you can't talk so much to a festival audience. Because in a festival, a lot of people are there just to see whoever's on, they're not really there to see you. But with an audience like this (at a small-ish rock venue -kylie) where you can talk very early on. After playing 3 or 4 songs, I was able to talk a little bit and people were listening, it's that kind of audience. So you find in your first few songs what the audience is like, some nights you can't talk and the audience are sometimes more enthusiastic than you. Like suddenly you realise "Fucking hell! It's Saturday night", everyone wants to have a beer and is up for singing the songs, and you just go for it and you just maybe at the end talk a bit.

K: Speaking of audiences, what do you hope happens in terms of audience participation at your shows? Like, if music cannot change the world, but it can change your perspective of the world, what would you like people to do with the information you give them at a show? What would you like to see happen at a show, or perhaps more importantly, what do you hope that people take away with them from a Billy Bragg show?

BB: Well, I hope that they take away that information about what's happening in Holland (he's talking about the Dutch government's approach to refugee issues -k) and that they find out something about that. I mean you can't follow the audience home and make sure that they do what you were talking about, it doesn't work like that, ya know. You have them for that hour or two hours, and you have the opportunity to put some ideas in their heads. First, to make them relax and make them smile, make them think about love songs. And then after you've done that, to just focus on the one thing you want them to take away with them, the Dutch thing, you know at the beginning of that rap, they laughed, at the end of that rap they weren't laughing.

I was talking about all that stuff about reunification and that's one of the most important things that has happened in our lifetimes, the result of very difficult situations that have been resolved positively. I think reunification is important because the East Germans managed to do it without having a Vaclav Havel or a Lech Walensa, they managed to somehow do-it-themselves. I think that's a very good encouraging thing...it's a shame it turned out the way it did, but there's something very encouraging in the way it happened. It was genuinely people putting pressure on the SED in Germany that actually made that change.

You know I've just been up to Berlin, and I've seen a lot of my old friends from those days and I still find it very positive that they managed to achieve that in Germany for all of Europe, you know, for all of us...that the Russian soldiers went home, the British soldiers went home, the French soldiers went home - and maybe one day the American soldiers will go home, probably not for awhile, but maybe they will.

I know I can't change the world from singing songs, but I can challenge the perceptions of people. You know, like tonight when I say to the people "I want you to aim your anger at the Dutch", everyone laughs, but I'm not joking, I'm serious about that. And I want them to go away and think about that. It would be easy for me to attack the Americans, everybody in the audience already has those negative feelings or else they wouldn't be here. I wanna push them further and bring 'em another perspective and talk about that shit that's going down on their continent which is important. When I'm in Australia, I wanna talk about Christmas Island and all that shit, you know.

So that's my job to challenge the perception of the audience, not just to be the person they think I am, and when they come to my gig, I don't wish them to just have their political view confirmed. I wish to challenge them as well. I do wish to entertain first, but I also wish to challenge people, which I hope is what you try to do with this, and what you try to do with your fanzine as well.

Michl: Coming to the business aspect of it all, how much influence do you as a person have on the whole "Billy Bragg" thing, in terms of prices of shows and choices of venues...obviously this was not your favourite place to play...

BB: No, I wouldn't say that, no...I do like these kinds of venues, I play a lot of venues like this..

K: stand-up deathmetal clubs...

BB: We haven't played in Stuttgart for probably 15 years and we really wanted to play. So if we have to put up with Nosferatu's fucking dressing room...! You know, I'm sure a lot of that audience doesn't come on deathmetal night, but you know, I like these kind of nights, I like these kind of audiences.

I was very fortunate to be on stage on Saturday night in Hamburg at the Grosse Freiheit, which was a fucking great night. And you know, I had to play a festival set there because the audience was so fucking rowdy, so up for it, they were singing louder than me. It was just brilliant and I came away with twice as much adrenaline as I put in. You just have to judge the audience, some nights you have to ramp it up, you have to close up the gaps. You don't have the long slow songs, you can't play a song like "The Wolf Covers its Tracks", it's a song people are not familiar with. Some nights you can't play those songs because people really want to sing "New England" and that's cool, I don't mind that.

So yeah...I do have some control, but in the end I've got to make a living doing this, so it's trying to balance that. Plus you don't want to be away from home a lot, or as much as I used to be. When I was younger I didn't give a shit because I didn't have a home life, you know, this was how I lived and it was great. And now I have a son and a wife and like everybody else I try to make a balance between my work and my home.

So you try and make sure you play the places where you know for sure you can pack them out, like Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, but also you have a chance to play Stuttgart or Munich. And well fuck, we went to Munich last time, but when was the last time we went to Stuttgart? It might be 20 years, it might be that long, certainly 15 years, so you want to try occasionally to come on tour...

M: Back to that business aspect, you have a professional management that organises stuff for you, but are you yourself involved in the business side of "Billy Bragg"?

BB: No no no...I have no interest in all that shit and I have a manager, the same manager I've always had. Before he managed me, he managed Ian Drury and the Blockheads, the Clash and he managed Pink Floyd back in the 1960s and he's the last of the old style managers. He's not a rich man, but he's very political. Everybody else I've ever worked with, the bands are very political but the manager is always not very political and says "We shouldn't do this, this is bad for our career." But my manager is the opposite, he finds more interesting things for me to do and I think without my manager I wouldn't have been been able to do things like Red Wedge because he could understand why I would want to do that.

Instead of saying to me "Are you sure you want to do this?" he would take the idea and he would run with it, so my relationship with him has been like a collaborator. He's a very very important person to what "Billy Bragg" is, he's really helped me to be true to myself, to make it possible for me to be true in that sense, and because he managed The Clash as well for awhile, he understands where I'm coming from.

P: What is Red Wedge, what did you say about that...

BB: Red Wedge...in the 1980s, after the Miners Strike ended, those of us who'd been doing gigs together to support the miners and other issues like Nicaragua and anti-apartheid and Rock Against Racism, after the Miners Strike we sat around together and said "Well, what the fuck are we going to do now? You know we feel very strongly about this, we found each other, and we do have a power here, so what can we do?" So we decided that the best opportunity to get rid of Margaret Thatcher was the 1987 election and that the best vehicle to do this would be the Labour Party, the British Labour Party.

At the time the BLP were unilaterist anti-nuclear anti-racist, they were much more left-wing than they are now. So we went to the BLP and said "We would like to do some gigs with you, where we bring young people in and say to them 'Look, you know, you must participate in the election, you must think about this, here's the Labour Party, let's have a debate about whether or not they're a good idea." In the music press at the time, there were 3 big weekly music papers in England so we ended up doing a tour which was me, Style Council, Jimmy Sommerville and other bands came and joined in, Madness came, Lloyd Cole came, the Smiths (gratuitous use of bold font, ha!) came, Prefab Sprout came and we had an incredible tour, it was just brilliant. And the 1987 election happened, and Thatcher won again. And after that, it was very difficult to get people's energy up, but it was trying to make sense of that whole thing of making a difference with your music.

[the interview time is almost up]