Billy Bragg's My World Interview: “Sometimes I think Woody [Guthrie] was the first punk rocker”

“I’ve always made my living on the road,” Billy Bragg says as he’s packing for a trip to Las Vegas. “I’m going to play at a festival called Punk Rock Bowling. I can do one of those. I’m not sure I can do both, but I’m gonna do my best!”

Bragg has taken stock of this life on the road with The Roaring Forty: 1983 – 2023, a box set of 14 CDs. It’s a musical cairn, each new song another stone, building to 303 tracks. A scrapbook chronicles his career in images and notes: his guitars; handwritten lyrics; the letter, dated January 21, 1983, confirming that Charisma Records will release ‘some tracks’ (which became his first album, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy).

There’s a picture of a 1989 tour T-shirt, listing the dates and places. As well as the usual – the US, Australia, Japan – Bragg performed in the DDR (East Germany), China, Bolivia and Chile. This was the aptly named Victim of Geography tour. “We actually got to play somewhere beginning with X,” Bragg brags, jokingly. “Xalapa in Mexico.” Adelaide to Xalapa: almost, but not quite, from A to Z. “Yeah,” he nods, “that was some year.”

But what of the music he hears on his travels? Was the political songwriting in Chile, the nueva canción, an influence? “Yeah, people like Victor Jara. I had to pick up that tradition,” Bragg insists. “I had to. I didn’t really have a political education. My political education came from Rock Against Racism and the Miners’ Strike. Then, through listening to US singer-songwriters, but more importantly, US 60s soul music [from which] I picked up the politics of the civil rights movement.”

Before his international political awakening, Stephen William Bragg enjoyed, like many British youths, a free education – in the local library. Barking Library had a record section which included several albums from Topic Records, the label specialising in the British Isles’ folk music.

“I got into The Watersons and Bert Lloyd, but heavily into Shirley and Dolly Collins. There’s something about Shirley singing with Dolly’s pipe organ that took me back to 100 years before.”

The Braggs came from rural Essex to Barking in East London when the industrialisation of the area began with the building, in the mid-1870s, of a huge gasworks. “The gasworks were still there when I was at school and my great grandfather came from between Colchester and Clacton to work there… I felt somehow that Shirley and Dolly helped me to access that period… put me aurally and subconsciously into that space. I ended up hitchhiking there, wandering around churchyards, the opening bars of ‘The Sweet Primeroses’ going around my head.”

Those songs evoke ideas of Englishness that Bragg has explored – wrestled with – in his book The Progressive Patriot. But American music looms large and in 1995 Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, approached Bragg to write music for lyrics her father had left without tunes. This became, in 1998, the album Mermaid Avenue.

“[Woody would] take a song everyone knows and make [them] laugh because he’s tweaked the lyrics… Sometimes I think Woody was the first punk rocker. Other times I think he’s the last of the Elizabethan bards.”

Another US influence is skiffle, which swept through Britain in the 1950s. Lonnie Donegan earned the UK’s first debut gold disc with ‘Rock Island Line’. Soon there wasn’t a coffee bar in the land without a combo in the corner thimble-scraping a washboard, plucking bass from a string tied between a tea chest and a broom handle, and strumming a guitar.

In 2017 Bragg published Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. Changed the world? I suggest that Donegan, singing in a cod American accent, at a ludicrous velocity, about a train driver smuggling pig iron, is not really of much merit. Bragg sets me right.

“It introduced the guitar to Britain. It’s the first generation of teenagers making their own culture. And it was actually driven by young women who were working in factories in huge numbers in the post-war boom. They had money to spend. They aren’t allowed in pubs on their own, so they go to the cappuccino bars where you can not only drink coffee, you can look cool. So, the young man who’s learned to play guitar gets out of the Scout Hall and into the coffee bar… They made [this culture] for themselves. That’s the significant thing.” And that’s me told.

In his 2021 song ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Bragg sings: ‘Positions I took long ago feel comfy as an old armchair / But the kids that pulled the statues down, they challenged me to see / The gap between the man I am and the man I want to be.’ He is rising to that challenge. In the 1990s, when gays and lesbians were discriminated against with Clause 28, the AIDS epidemic, the false association of homosexuality with paedophilia, Bragg wrote a song called ‘Sexuality’. “It starts ‘just because you’re gay I won’t turn you away / If you stick around I’m sure that we can find some common ground.’ Well, going for a drink with a gay man is not very radical anymore, is it? So, [like Woody Guthrie] I tweaked the lyrics. ‘I won’t turn you away / If you stick around I’m sure we can find the right pronoun.’” Bragg turns the song into one of fellowship with trans and non-binary communities.

He addresses climate change in songs such as ‘King Tide and the Sunny Flood’. A life on the road poses challenges, too, and he’s changed how he works to reduce his carbon footprint. “I don’t take roadies. I just go on my own and I try my best to drive. It’s easier in America because the cities are often less than a day’s drive apart. It’s harder in Australia.”

Suddenly, Bragg remembers an encounter on the road that had a profound impact on him. “I was in a record shop in Dublin and there was music playing that sounded as if it had come from another fricking planet. I said to the geezer behind the counter, ‘Where the hell is that from?’ He said, ‘Scotland.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding me.’ ‘No, Scotland’. I said, ‘You’ve got to sell me a copy.’” The album was Gaelic Psalms from Lewis, presenting the singing tradition of Presbyterian churches in the Western Isles. The precentor sings a line which the congregation takes up, embellishing the melody with ornamentation, grace notes. It is powerful, moving and strange.

“The point is,” Bragg says, “Don’t overlook what’s on your doorstep.”

At 21, Bragg communicated by singing and playing a battered electric guitar. Now, at 66, he has more expansive means. He’s as likely to appear at a literature festival as at a music one. Is the end of the road in sight?

“I’m going to, in the words of Curtis Mayfield, keep pushing on. I’m playing the punk rock stage. Devo are on. Madness are on, so it should be fun. It’s Las Vegas. I’m staying at the Golden Nugget Hotel. Come on…”

Billy Bragg will be performing at Towersey Festival (August 23-26) followed by shows in the US and Canada

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today