Firstly, I’d like to thank all those wonderful people on Twitter who took the time and made the effort to suggest questions for my Billy Bragg interview. The questions from @thenewbrunette, @itsonlypretend, @penny_b and @Joanne_Hartley were especially thought provoking, insightful and incisive. Secondly, I’d like to apologise to all those lovely Tweeters (especially the aforementioned) for being so slack, stupid and supremely dim as to leave all my notes in the back pocket of my favourite jeans on laundry day . . . all that cloud sourced inquisitiveness reduced to a pat of inky mush. In the end I decided just to wing it and just listen. Listening, I can do.
My main anxiety about the phone call – aside from the fact that Billy Bragg was a hero of mine from a very early and impressionable age, and it’s inevitably awkward conversing in anything resembling a normal tone with an idol – was that I didn’t want to come across as a flat capped, flatter vowelled, Northern oik. I’m not sure I entirely succeeded judging by the numerous times Billy stopped me with “What . . . could you repeat that?” In fact, I probably spent more of the phone call repeating my increasingly gormless questions than I did actually asking anything interesting. I’m surprised he allowed me to witter on so long to be honest, but that’s Billy Bragg for you, total hero. Has been for as long as I can remember.
When I was but a lad and Mrs Thatcher was in charge of the British Empire, and the masses were striking and getting sacked all over the place and we were fighting some silly wars in places we really ought not to have been romping around in, there were really only a couple choices when it came to the kind of music you identified with. On the one hand there was Duran Duran, all floppy hair, synthesizers and sartorial splendour, pratting around on yachts or being attacked by semi-naked amazonian types in some inexplicably daft futuristic film set; or there was Billy Bragg, who was never going to be pin up material, twanging a battered guitar, singing songs about ice cream and tattoos, teenage pregnancy and car breaking, fighting fascism and turning the world upside down . . . I knew I’d never be pretty enough for the Durannies and I fancied myself as a bit of an agitator in those days, so the identification was a bit of an obvious choice. Things haven’t changed that much. Billy is still banging on about the same old stuff, and I’ll never be a New Romantic, not with this haircut anyhow.
Billy is still unrepentantly polemical and defiantly oppositional. He’s always been more into causes and campaigns that connect with the heart than any strict party line that could only make sense to a very hard boiled intellect. He’s not the sort to toe any party line like a spinster aunt going over the maid’s dusting with a white glove poised for ideological impurity. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet the SWP you know what I mean by that. He even voted Lib Dem (damn it, I wish I’d asked him if he regretted that now!) . . . though he’s still up for punching the BNP in the street so we can forgive him that little foible. His latest project, Jail Guitar Doors, has already been written about on here so I don’t need to repeat the background. What fascinated me most about the project was that Billy doesn’t see it simply as being nice to poor unfortunates; he’s quite clear that this isn’t a “soft option.” When he hands over the guitar he always asks, “are you up to the challenge?” The guitar represents some kind of reparation, and writing songs and making music become a means to make sense of difficult emotions and disturbing experiences. Billy is quite open about his own song writing being a process of purging, purifying and polishing raw turmoil and turning it into something that enables him to make peace with himself, his songs are actually grapplings with life, desperate bids for beauty and truth and the slaking of personal need. That’s what he wants to share with prisoners. Not some sing song distraction to pass the time of day but a way to make music that transforms and builds bridges back into the common world outside the prison walls where we all have to get along. I’m sure Billy expressed it much better himself on the phone. And I’m sure he’ll tell the story again fabulously this Saturday evening at The Hyde Park Picture House . . .
To win a pair of tickets to see him in conversation after a screening of Breaking Rocks alongside Alan Miles, & JGD graduates Jonny Neesom & Leon Walker, on Saturday 24th July, 7.30pm. Just Tweet ‘I want to see Billy Bragg at the Hyde Park Picture House Sat 24th via @Culturevultures do you? http://ow.ly/2eY7L RT to enter.’ We will choose at random on Friday 6pm
Nice one!! Good luck to all who enter…if you don’t win please go! Wishing I was in London.
Tim