Billy Bragg: life’s a riot, thirty years on

Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Billy Bragg’s first solo album, came out in 1983. Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher’s bleak England was the background to his passionate songs about broken hearts and trade unions. Thirty years on, the angry young man who would later take on folk icon Woody Guthrie’s song archive still draws on the same inexhaustible sources of inspiration: girls and politics.

“I think despair is the best way to describe it, because it was probably my very last chance to make it in music,” says Billy Bragg about the frame of mind he was in when he wrote red-blooded and urgent songs like “To Have and to Have Not”, “A New England”, and “The Busy Girl Buys Beauty”. “I had been in the band [Riff Raff] since 1977 and I had even already made an album with them, but nothing came of it. Now I finally had an opportunity to record some of my own songs and I think you can hear that ‘now or never’ feeling in the recordings. But alongside despair, there was excitement too: I felt I had something in my hands. I knew from my gigs that people identified with it. But I was 25 and it really had to happen ‘now’. It was as if I was just in front of the goal in Wembley, saw the ball coming my way, and had to decide what to do.”

In June you played the album in Union Chapel in London for a live audience. That recording is included with the re-release. Has much changed in those thirty years?
Billy Bragg: Maybe not so much. The advantage is that the record is still only seventeen minutes long, so I can play the whole album as an encore – and I do that sometimes. And then I feel that the tracks still hang together. They belong together. And yeah, there was a crisis then, just like now.

And that crisis inspired you as a songwriter?
Bragg: Yeah. Take “To Have and to Have Not”. You can hear in that how society shaped the background of my lyrics. It was the time of the yuppies, the young urban professionals. They were making it in life. In comparison with them, I and a lot of other people were suddenly at a standstill. I wanted to write that out of my system. As a songwriter I wanted to say that that didn’t make them better than the rest, than the workers.

(© Andy Whale)

Over those thirty years it seems indeed that not much has changed. On the contrary, the difference between the haves and the have nots just seems to have got bigger.
Bragg: That’s the tragedy of the topical songwriter. I’m not the only one to experience that. On my new studio album, Tooth & Nail, which came out earlier this year, I recorded a version of Woody Guthrie’s song “I Ain’t Got No Home”. It’s about people who lose their homes to the banks, about families who are split up because they have to travel a long way to work, about millionaires gambling on the stock exchange while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. That song is more than 75 years old, but you can’t get much more relevant and topical than that.

Is it not difficult not to become cynical?
Bragg: Yeah, but I’ve come to the conclusion that cynicism is the greatest enemy of people who want to make this world a better place. I realised that above all when I was ploughing through Woody Guthrie’s song catalogue. Woody never wrote a song that made people depressed or put them in a bad mood. At first, people even found it hard to believe that he had written a song like “Bound to Lose” – how could he come up with a song about people who were fated to lose? – until it dawned on them that he was talking about fascists. The best way to combat cynicism is through organised activism. But that has become harder over the last few decades, with the cult of individualism. That’s true of everyone. If the Occupy movement, whose concerns I share, wants to achieve anything, it has to organise itself, because cynicism is still our greatest enemy.

BILLY BRAGG • 4/11, 20.00, €22/25, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, + interview with Billy Bragg: 4/11, 18.00, HUIS 23, Steenstraat 23 rue des Pierres, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be