RobMCFC
Well-Known Member
Great write-up with a nice bit of background on how you got into Billy Bragg.Taking With The Taxman About Poetry - Billy Bragg
Two parts to this diatribe, the first a long ramble about why I like the album so feel free to ignore the origin/therapy story which I’ve stuck under a button and head straight to the album bit below it.
Mid 80’s, I’ve headed off to university, first in my family to do so. Superficially I’m full of excitement, a bit bolshie and with plans to sort the world out. Inside I’m not so sure.
Fairly quickly the edifice starts to fall, pretty much everyone who I talk to has something of a different life experience to me. After a few days, just from chatting with people it’s clear I’m the only person I’ve come across so far who lives in a council house and lots of people talk about stuff I have no idea about. First week though, so no worries I can do the rounds of the various societies. I head off to the National Organisation of Labour Students, trouble is I’ve recently escaped a Trotskyist cult and even though I’m looking for something a bit less intense I’m still deeply unimpressed with what I see as a bunch of bourgeois twats (whilst at the same time actually wanting to be a bit more like them, nothing like a bit of self-loathing for the spirit). Sport is probably a safer bet but there doesn’t seem to be any casual 5-a-side league type stuff which is about my level, the place seems full of young farmers obsessed with rugby. So, I head off to the Cross-Country Society but they are all built like greyhounds and have represented their counties when what I’m really looking for is just a bit of company out on my runs and if I’m gonna run on my own as they zoom off into the distance then I might as well just run on my own anyway. Never mind, I was the best tennis player out of my mates on the local park courts so lets have a look at that….ah everyone has been a member of a proper club and has been taught properly and are kindly but patronisingly explaining my service action is awful.
Even when it comes to music, the universal language, it’s proving difficult. I assume I’m going to find loads of New Order and Joy Division fans. However, I find myself talking to long haired lads who all seem to have dads who are either vicars or civil engineers and it quickly becomes apparent I have no idea who the fuck Grendel is and why anyone would decide to listen to a 20-minute song about him. I have zero interest in wizards and capes and in turn they explain how the music I’m listening to any muppet can play and so it’s not worthy of discussion.
Hmmm, they’re probably not my tribe either.
My confidence is sufficiently low that the idea of even talking to a girl is causing me palpitations and when I do get talking to one who seems nice, we get to discussing family and I say my dad’s a postman, she completely misunderstands and thinks he runs a post-office. When I explain no he delivers letters she looks at me as if I’m from another planet and explains it to her mate as if I’m an alien. Pulp’s Common People it was not.
I’m quite taken aback as, once you take out the dubious 80’s fashion, it feels more like the 1880’s than the 1980s. There must be some people like me around, I thought the education systems was supposed to be egalitarian these days?
Much of this of course is just a manifestation of my own insecurities which at this point are growing by the day. I oscillate between being an arsey twat and thinking I’m just going to leg it home, probably the only thing stopping me is knowing how gutted my mum and dad would be given the sacrifices they’d made.
Then in a student bar I meet up with a lad on my course who is talking to a couple other lads from the marine biology course both of whom are pissed. One of them is from West Yorkshire and is definitely not right as he seems obsessed with randomly mooning people (he will eventually hurt himself by falling out of a window whilst doing so). The other lad though is from Carlisle, he is light heartedly taking the piss out of the Yorkshire lad whilst simultaneously trying to keep him out of trouble and he seems pretty sound.
We are joined by a few others and start talking about music and the lad from Carlisle pipes up that he’s excited that Billy Bragg’s first full length album is out soon. Everyone else, including myself, has a bit of a ‘who the fuck is Billy Bragg’ expression at which point he is so outraged we don’t know him that we all have to head off to his room to have a listen to his EP Life’s a Riot.
It would be fair to say the reaction is the kind of mixed response Billy Bragg has elicited his entire career!
The majority make the snap decision that it’s tuneless bollocks, but not all of us. I mean he’s no Otis Redding but there is something I really like about him. I’m sat there listening to someone who even though he sounds nothing like me accent wise has clearly got more in common with me than it seems the 90% of the people I’ve spent the last couple of weeks or so trying to fit in with.
The music isn’t big and clever in the ornate sense of the word, it’s raw and straight to the point, earnest whilst still having a self-deprecating humour. It’s got a basic DIY punk aesthetic whilst being a bit more considered and ballad like than most punk. The political tracks really speak to me in my quite chippy mood but then they are tempered by ‘sort of love songs’ like A New England and by the end of the EP I’m in.
A week or so later Carlisle Dave and I have both got copies of Brewing Up With Billy Bragg. The lad who can’t help mooning has a listen and declares it’s ‘fucking mint’ primarily because he believes the line “the time it takes to make a baby can be the time it takes to make a cup of tea” is the most profound lyric he’s heard in the history of popular music. Along with a couple of others we are becoming mates off the back of enjoying shouting along to the very many singable lines and choppy percussive guitar style therein; and to be fair there’s far worse things to base a friendship on.
I find out a bit more about Billy and it’s clear he isn’t sticking to the stereotype of what’s expected of him. Having joined the army at 16 he’s thought sod this for a game of soldiers and has bought his way out in order to pursue a music career. So, if Billy Bragg can be unapologetically ‘common’ and just get on with following his aspirations maybe I should too?
I never did fully (mostly) get over my imposter/inferiority complex until later when I ended up in the workplace, but I did get a lot more comfortable with myself even to the point where I didn’t just bristle at the vicar’s sons who wanted to go and see the likes of The Enid or IQ but would instead go along too to expand my horizons. It cut both ways, we got friendly with a rather volatile lad who positioned himself as a Palestinian refugee but turned out to be something to do with Jordanian royalty, so we took him to see the likes of Billy and stuff like the Red Wedge tour. I seem to remember the Billy gig prompted him to express the view that there was a lot to be said for chopping people’s hands off and you could never really tell with him if he was joking or not.
What had started very shakily turned into a 3 year musical odyssey, very occasionally interrupted by having to get a degree, which in turn expanded not just my music tastes but my broader experiences of people and life. So, I realise this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea and Billy might be threatening the likes of Leonard at the bottom of the leaderboard , but this thread is about music that means something to you and once upon a time the gobby Bard of Barking helped a young man struggling with the next phase of his life to keep his head above water and for that, and the fact that he happily let’s Bill Bailey take the piss out of him, I will always have a place in my heart for Billy Bragg.
The album
So having banged on at great length about the first two albums, my choice is actually his difficult third!
It’s not necessarily my favourite but I choose this for several reasons:
Tied to the last point, I also quite like that this is in some ways an historical document of a time and place. It makes it somewhat anachronistic, cf. The Marriage, a song that culturally probably makes no sense to anyone born after this album was released, but then in some ways is still quite relevant.
- There’s a slightly greater ambition and gloss to the production and some of the arrangements with a roster of musicians rather than the one man and his guitar aesthetic. Some fans didn’t like the rough edges being knocked off, but I liked that it was indicative of his desire to progress and stretch himself.
- It’s a good example of his trademark mix of the personal and political and the overlap between those two.
- It contains possibly my favourite Billy Bragg song, Levi Stubbs’ Tears.
- It’s got the wonderful Kirsty Mccoll providing backing vocals, I love that live Billy sings her additional verse to New England as tribute.
- It’s got the equally wonderful, and on here very restrained, Johnny Marr lending a hand on a couple of songs.
- It has changes of pace and song type but remains a coherent whole with the possible exception of the, imo, out of place Train Train
- This is quintessentially British (or maybe English), for better and worse I can’t imagine this album could have been produced anywhere else on the planet. In that sense he shares some sensibilities with Ray Davies.
In terms of the songs on this album, I think broadly speaking those that talk to the personal are probably stronger than the political ones. For many years some of the political ones sounded very much of their time and a bit clunky, that said I’m not convinced some of them aren’t now as relevant today as they were when they were released. They are not his most incisive political songs, but you can never doubt the passion with which he delivered them, and what a song like Ideology lacks in subtlety is made up for by still being sadly relevant.
But it’s in songs like The Warmest Room and Greetings to the New Brunette that he shows his humour, talent and warmth. The personal can also veer from the humorous to the quite heavy observational side in songs such as The Passion. I think the high point of the album is Levi Stubbs Tears, which is a mostly back to basics song that combines the personal and ‘little p’ political in a dark piece of story-telling that is punctured by a simple but brilliant bridge and concludes with an again simple but spot on outro typical of the small instrumental flourishes on this album.
At times there’s a fair bit of borrowing go on, Help Save The Youth of America leans heavily into I Fought the Law, he nicks from Dylan at various points and There is Power In a Union is a lyric set to Root’s Battle Cry of Freedom, a piece of music I love. On the subject of which, Bragg’s relationship with America and Americana in particular has always been interesting to me. People may be familiar with the stuff Billy did with Wilco to put some of Woody Guthrie’s unrecorded lyrics to music. I genuinely think that Billy is one of the heirs of Guthrie’s type of music. To me this is ‘folk’ music in the best sense of the word, that documents (and sometimes defends) ordinary lives with humour and compassion. Especially in the early part of his career I think of him as a sort of punk balladeer if such a thing exists.
If you are listening to the reissue, the original album stops at ‘The Home Front’ but the second disk has some interesting bits, including a cover of the aforementioned Guthrie’s Deportees and an ‘entertaining’ version Tracks of My Tears.
In later years Bill has spent as much time curating, promoting and documenting a variety of UK and US music as he has done writing his own and he does that very interestingly I think. So, depending on your point of view a mouthy champagne socialist or one of this country’s most underrated singer songwriters and now keeper of the flame for a variety of roots music.
This will be an interesting listen for me - I've never heard a Billy Bragg album, only the occasional song (none of which I can name). I usually like people who sing with a common voice, although not cockneys - it all sounds a bit too Chas and Dave (see The Jam).
Having said that, I do like folk music of the type that stems from Woody Guthrie, and meaningful lyrics, so I will listen to this with an open mind.