Billy Bragg

26:30We were on a school trip somewhere. And it was one of those moments where I was, it just, I don't know, somehow it just, it was on the radio, on the bus, on the trip, and it just, it was a, I don't say this lightly, but it was a transcendental moment for an 11-year-old. It took me out of my little world into a completely different world, and something magical in it, the storytelling, the sound of it, and um i kind of started really i must have been really into music but for my parents that following christmas brought me a reel-to-reel tape recorder so i could record songs on the radio so they wouldn't have to buy me records basically which is smart and if i lugged this around the corner to my mate's house his sister leslie who was probably 15 at the time older than us but she had a brilliant record collection she had quite a few Simon and Garfunkel records and several Motown Chartbuster compilations.

27:30And I more or less taped Leslie Chalmers' record collection, and that served me. My apprentice, I then started trying to write songs like Paul Simon and Smokey Robinson, and still do some days. Older siblings with good taste are a crucial part of the music. Except I never had one. I never had an older sibling of good or bad taste, so I was kind of blind until my friend's older sisters, because basically when I worked my way through them, I got all the Simon and Garfunkel albums because Simon and Garfunkel were very popular among Winsome young, you know, adolescent schoolgirls at the time, you know, Sound of Silence and all that kind of stuff, you know.

28:09And the Chart Buster albums were massive as well at the time. So that kind of brought me into the whole notion of the craft of songwriting, you know, I would take songs apart. I mean, you know, think about Tracks of My Tears. It's three chords. it's possibly the greatest three chord trick of all time you know it's funny you mentioned the sound of the boxer because when we did the project with him you know you wonder what is it is it the words that move you is it the music for him it's all the sound he obsesses over production yeah and even now if you listen if you've listened to that whole record it's a stunning sounding it is it's an incredible album to be obsessed with which i was for a long time i was obsessed with that record it kind of i mean the thing about i eventually ended up becoming obsessed with bob dylan subsequently kind of kind of paul simon led me into bob dylan and english folk music as well via scarborough fair in a rather ironic way because martin carthy who paul simon uh was inspired by hearing martin play scarborough fair to record his own version was playing in a folk club not a mile from my house around that time but it took these two guys from Brooklyn recording this old English folk song to turn me on to my own folk music, which is a weird, paradoxical way.

29:28What goes around comes around with saying folk music. So your musical inspirations were? Paul Simon. Paul Simon. Smokey Robinson. Smokey Robinson. Eddie Cochran. And your, what were your lyrical inspirations? Well, again, you know, I was trying to write, knock off, you know, sing a songwriter song. So a bit of Paul Simon to start with, a bit of Bob Dylan, a bit of Jackson Brown. I was big on Jackson Brown I still think he's a great songwriter and you know I think when you're learning your craft you're always writing songs that in some ways have their framework from music you like I always say to people they want to start writing songs take your favourite song take the words out of it and write your own words because it's your favourite song you'll know exactly how the words are supposed to fit and then you that's how you know make your own words make you know maybe keep the chorus and you know change the words to i will always love you to make give it a happy ending or something whatever you want to do that's how you start to do it that's what i did basically you know you just take a chuck berry song apart and that's my simplest thing and then put your own words on it um and then eventually when i was about uh 20 i suppose maybe 21 i wrote a billy brag song i wrote a song that didn't have what was the first billy brag song richard which ended up on the the first album because i was very proud of it because it didn't sound like anybody else i thought this is actually me in this song and once i'd worked out how to do that this was towards the end of the uh period when i was in a little band called riffraff which is kind of like a punky new wavy band in the 70s late 70s and i started writing songs that were more had more me in them i worked out how to get me into the songs i also read somewhere that you were bullied as a kid.

31:15Yeah, kind of, yeah. I was sort of, you know, it got a bit, towards the end of our school years, it all got a bit leery at school. So I tended to not go in so much. You know, it was too much, too much grief. It just made me, gave me a lot of anxiety around town. So, you know, the sort of things that other people, other kids my age did, like go out to the pubs and go out dancing and stuff, I just didn't, And it just gave me too much anxiety. So I was fortunate. I had a couple of mates who had a guitar and a drum kit. And we sat in my mom's back room and wrote songs and played music. It saved my life.

31:54Is that when you started guitar? Yeah. Did that give you some confidence? A lot, yeah. A lot. A huge amount. Self-expression, Bruce. You're writing it. You're putting it all out there. This is how I feel. Music is a form of therapy, whether you're listening to it or writing it or making it or playing it. it has a therapeutic effect because you're putting yourself into it. And I say this not just as a musician, but that can also be as a listener because I think the currency of music is fundamentally empathy. As a writer, you're asking the listener to listen to this person in this situation and feel something for them in a situation you might not have experienced as a person, but this person here, You know, listen to that.

32:40Or there's another way whereby the person who's written the song has somehow touched a nerve with you. And in that case, you draw empathy from the song. You're getting something yourself. You're feeling that you're not alone. This song, you know, is somehow articulating something you can't put into words. We all have songs like that, you know, and that's really, really valuable. because I think, you know, the sense of isolation that we have in society, which has always been there. It's not just a manifestation of the digital age. It's always been there. And when people come together to celebrate and to sing, whether it's in church, at soccer games, it happens people sing, you know, obviously at music concerts, you get a moment where you feel you're not alone.

33:30You're not the only person who cares about this thing, whatever this thing is. Did you need the feedback of an audience to feel that way about your own songs or did you feel that way in the back room of the house? I felt that way in the back room of the house. Really? Yeah, I did, yeah. You felt anxiety about being around other people and yet you could put your feelings out in a song? Yeah, I could, yeah. I don't think that would be hard. I could, no, no, I don't think so. I mean, you know, that's the trick of it, isn't it? You learn to put into song the things that you find yourself struggling with.

34:00you know they're a reflection of who you are and you think the song's about somebody else but actually it stands out to be about you actually when you be admit about it um and that you know when we started doing gigs when when punk happened and it became possible for you just to turn up and play it became much easier you didn't have to justify being in a band everyone was in a band uh then there was a there was a confidence in that as well because it was like our generation were coming to the fore now. This is who we are. You know, my political awakening was going to rock against racism. That's the first political thing I ever did.

34:37And that was an incredible experience because it gave me the courage of my convictions. That's interesting to me. I had always assumed that your politics informed you becoming a singer and a songwriter, that you're what we would call here a red diaper baby. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The town I grew up in, in East London, has always been Labour since my father was a kid. So there was no real politics around. It was just Labour. That was what it was. And everyone was Labour. My parents weren't particularly political. I got my sense of politics by osmosis from listening to predominantly American soul music from the Civil Rights period.

35:20You know, if you get them Motown Chartbusters albums, they're great pop albums and they're amazing. And then you get to volume five, I think, and all of a sudden things start, something's changed. You get a ball of confusion by The Temptations. You've got War by Edwin Starr. You know, and there's a change of tone. Something's happened and the clue is in the record. Marvin Gaye sings Abraham, Martin and John. And what has happened is Dr. King has been murdered. and along with the rest of african-american culture motown is reflecting that so i kind of picked up on on that politics the politics of of civil rights and i was also there in the singer songwriters i listened to as well you know the early dylan records you know my a huge record for me was the times they are changing that album right i swapped it with a mate of mine at school for his dad's copy of uh no i got it i got his dad's copy of the times are changing in exchange for my copy of the jackson five's greatest hits it was a brilliant deal and um i think you both won on that one but he wanted to give it to his sister as a birthday present so anyway we did it it was it was it just blew my mind it was so raw it was so visceral that album the times are changing and that bob dylan not the late a blonde on blonde type iowa 61 dylan but that early um you know blowing in the wind bob dylan was really inspiration to me as well i'm talking about when i'm like 14 15 now so i got my politics from that but you know my politics were broadly i suppose humanitarian but where i was you know when i went to rock against racism i was working in an office in london and the men that i worked with were you know casually racist casually sexist casually homophobic and I really you know didn't ever say anything or raise any questions but going to rock against racism I'd see the clash we're playing and that's kind of what got us to to go over the step but going there and getting to the the there's a park in Hackney called Victoria Park where it happened and seeing 80 ,000 kids just like me I kind of realized that that this issue is going to be what defines my generation like vietnam had defined the previous generation we were going to define ourselves in opposition of uh in opposition to discrimination of all kinds not just racism but homophobia and sexism and everything else we were going to be the generation of two-tone we were going to be the generation of artists against apartheid that's who we were going to be and and when i went back to work on monday and the world hadn't changed but my perception of it had and i knew why i was different from these arseholes at work you know and so i'd stop laughing when they made those comments you know i stopped joining him right with you know pestering the secretaries and stuff like that and i was like okay there's something different now you know and that and that informs how i understand how music works when i'm doing a gig now that's interesting to me because you of course are always called a political songwriter although the vast majority of your songs are about love and human relationships and other things does a song have to be explicitly political to be political no it really really doesn't i have a song called uh i keep faith and i can introduce that as a love song ostensibly it works as a love song but i can also introduce it by talking about my faith in the audience's ability to change the world.

38:53And if I do that, men cry. They come up to me at the end and say, I was really moved by that. And I'm like, good, mate. I was talking about empathy back there. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that empathy. You know, your mate Malcolm, I was listening to him on the radio one time, and he talked about the ability to make people, move people to tears without hurting them. You know, the ability to move people by emotion to tears is a very powerful thing. And then he played Levi Stubbs' Tears. That made my ears prick up, I tell you. And it was very insightful, Malcolm, to touch on that, because it gave me a sudden flash of how the process works.

39:43I would say a couple of things. First of all, I always felt that song was quite ironic. Not that you don't like Levi Stubbs, but that the comparison of her life with a sort of Motown fantasy was quite bleak. Well, yeah, but the thing is, the song is about the redemptive power of soul music. You know, the pain that Levi Stubbs has, the pain that he expresses, the tear in his voice, the sob in his voice, she draws from that a sense that someone understands where she's coming from. She draws some empathy from his pain. His pain somehow is her pain. She's got to pick herself up and put herself back together again now.

40:30Right. And Levi has obviously felt that as well because you can hear it in the way that he sings, you know, when he cries out for Bernadette. You know, when he talks about the seven rooms of gloom, you know, it's there, you know. They're very operatic, those songs, yeah. Just incredible voice, incredible voice. Are you the person who's jotting things down when a line occurs to you? Is it something you're very conscious of injecting into your records? I think if you're going to do politics, you have to leaven it up a little with some rye humour. You can't just go storming in there, prodding people in the chest all the way through a gig.

41:09I do a little bit of that sometimes. Talking about the election on this tour, I'll be doing a little bit of finger point in maybe. Of the British election? The American election in November. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. The British election I will talk about, but obviously what's coming in November is very contentious at the moment, so I'll doubtless be talking about that. I haven't been reading about it, so I have no idea what you're talking about. But I found, when I was, you know, my political crucible was the UK minor strike in 1984. And you played there? Yeah, loads of times, yeah, yeah. Can you tell me, what was that like?

41:48I was mad. I was absolutely mad. Did they know you were coming? You would just show up? Well, I used to go up to the coalfields because I was solo. So I literally would go around with a small amp, a little 60-watt amp and a guitar. What was your guitar back then? Oh, it was a copy of a Gibson Les Paul made by a company called Arbiter. It was my punk guitar. Right. You're not one of those guys with a lot of guitars, right? No, I'm not. No, I'm not really. Because Johnny Marr has endless something. I did a gig once with Steve Earl in Montreal, and he was opening for me. He had 12 guitars. He couldn't get on stage.

42:26I was like, I had a guitar shop in the wings. You're only doing eight songs. Yeah, exactly. It was. Anyway, so I'm not that guy. No, no. I do have a, I carry a couple of guitars. I've probably got home not more than half a dozen knocking around. And you, you know, when I would first see you play, you would play what are called cowboy chords. Yeah, yeah. But you'd strum the whole thing, which nobody does. Yeah, well, I'm basically a rhythm guitar player in a punk band. That's what I basically am. I'm not a lead guitar player. I never was a lead guitar player. I'm a rhythm guitar player. And I think I'm pretty good at that.

42:59But it's very percussive. You know, the guitar heroes that I have are people like Ry Cuda and Ronnie Wood. And they're John Lee Hooker. Their guitar style is pretty percussive. It's about the rhythm, you know. So that's where I get my licks from, get my ideas from. I don't know how we got in that. I was asking, what was it like to... In the minor strike, yeah. Well, first of all, it was amazing to see because the audiences would be my generation, but the people who were making the speeches at the gigs when they put around a bucket to raise a bit more money would often be the wives of the minors.

43:34So these were women who were perhaps 10 or 15 years older, sometimes 20 years older than the audience, working-class women who probably never spoke in public before talking to all these little punk rockers. It was an amazing thing to see because their husbands were either on a picket line or in prison. That in itself was amazing to watch. This is early 80s. Yeah, 1984. It's almost all coal mining. It's all coal mining, yeah. It's predominantly in the north of England, South Wales, some in Scotland, some in Kent, but predominantly the north of England and South Wales. Heavy, heavy working class areas.

44:06Villages where the pit is absolutely everything, the whole village. and they're like under siege from the police and the state and you would go up there and the audiences were really, really up for it and it was just incredibly invigorating and then you'd very often be kipping on their sofa or in their spare room. You know, you go back to their house and make you a cup of tea, maybe a bacon sandwich and then they'd sit down and talk politics because they wanted to know why a pop star from London was doing this. Is it just for the fame or do you actually walk the walk and talk the talk? So very quickly I had to sort of, because I left school when I was 16, so I didn't have a political education.

44:52I had to sort of learn the language of Marxism to be able to put across my ideas and define where I was coming from. And that was a real sharp learning curve. but you know it was a genuine radical situation it was class war it's my class against the the state really so i couldn't not take part and also i'd listen to all these solo singer songwriters from the 1960s trying to change the world through music and now i had opportunity to see if you can actually change the world does it actually work this can you go and sing songs and bring about social change because that's what the clash told me you could music would change the world and i kind of believed that now i had a chance to find out if that was true or not and turns out it's not was that a hard lesson initially maybe i suppose but but thinking about it you know logically music has no agency you know it's not going to win the election it has the ability to bring people together and that in and of itself is a positive thing because change happens, I think,

46:05is catalyzed by two events. Firstly, your realization that things are not right and then secondly, your realization that other people have already realized that things are not right. You realize you're not the only person who cares about this thing and music can bring you together into an audience where you suddenly realize that. You're like, ah, okay. Like, it's me, Rock Against Racism. I speak from experience here. That's what happened to me in Victoria Park in Hackney. I realized I wasn't the only person who cared about these things. You know, when I make my pitch for solidarity with the trans community when I sing sexuality on these shows, there will undoubtedly be people my age, because my audience is predominantly my age, and, you know, 60s, who probably haven't given the issue much thought.

46:55It's not that they're anti or pro or anything. It's just something like they're like, oh, it's too much trouble. But they see themselves in an audience who are expressing solidarity with this, who are responding positively to what I'm saying. And they look around them and they think, well, maybe I should get off the fence on this. Maybe have a think about what's going on here. You know, because clearly this is an important issue to these people who I have so much in common with. And that's how music can affect change. Not directly, not storm the barricades way, but just by planting ideas in people's minds, introducing them to different concepts, challenging their perceptions.

47:29Music, that's one of the things that music can do. It doesn't have to do it all the time. It's not the defining aspect of it but it's one of the many things it can do and I think coming from a 20th century music culture in which music was our social medium which had to articulate everything that my generation thought through music and we had three, four weekly music papers in the UK to thrash these ideas out. The idea that music should be something more than I'm great, you're shit, you're like my socks, to paraphrase Oasis, is still important to me. I don't know if young people feel that way. It's not something that I'm going to say, listen, this is the way it should be.

48:08It's not my job to do that. I hear young people writing songs about the pressure that they feel under. That's enough for me, that they are talking about that. They are using music to articulate their feelings about that. I'm not going to start leaning on them and say, why don't you write about trade unions? I'm not going to write that because they've not been through the minor strike. They've had a different cultural perception, cultural experience to the one I've had. After this last break, we'll be back with the rest of Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Billy Bragg. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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51:34Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Here's the rest of our conversation with Billy Bragg. The album with Trust, Tank Park Salute, Tank Park Salute, pardon me. Don't Try This At Home. It was, yeah, are you saying that about me trying to say Tank Park Salute? I thought that's what you're saying. Don't Try This At Home. It was much more, a bigger musical. palette yeah it was yeah did you like that because people are like oh finally you know billy bragg has discovered the 80s um well that was that was about being doctrinaire as well in some ways you know but there you know when i think of the song you know everywhere um cindy of a thousand lives very different sounds yeah well you got to progress haven't you one you know that's that's one thing but what happened was i wrote sexuality and it kind of sounded like louis Louis and Johnny Mar got hold of it and made that track that you now hear.

52:42And it was a shining pop monstrosity. And when it came back, me and my producer, Grant Showbiz, were like, oh, damn, you know, now we're going to have to make the album that sits on. But it was good. It was a challenge, you know. And coming as it did, I think if you're really, really lucky, you get 10 good years where people are interested in what you're doing. and you can feel that when you do something, the media will give you a front page and stuff like that. If you get 10 years, you're really, really lucky. And that comes at the end of kind of that period where I was able, you know, it got me on top of the pops.

53:19Everybody at home thinks it was a huge hit record, which actually only got to number 26 in the charts. But, you know, the perception of it is that's what it was. Yeah. If you're going to sell out, you've got to get to the top 10. Yeah, exactly. and consequently after that record I had a grumbly appendix I was off the road for a while and I got together with my partner and we you know we became parents and everything and everything changed so but it was also an aspect of that where I kind of painted myself into a corner because I can't really be a big production pop star that's not really who I am I can do it you want me to do it hey here we go I can do it check out the Sydney of a Thousand Lives this is a song about an American photographer that you've never heard of who does incredible images that are all of herself.

54:05Here it is. Check it out. Cindy Sherman. Yeah, Cindy Sherman, the great Cindy Sherman. And so, yeah, I was incredibly, and still am incredibly proud of that record. But I couldn't carry on a natural directory. You know, it was sort of like, it wasn't me. So fortunately, then I made William Bloke, which was a much more personal record, much more a post-Parenthood record, which I'm very proud of as well. I do want to ask you about Tank Park Salute, though. Sure. Tank Park Salute was... It had a very strange genesis. Let's start by saying that when I was 18, my father died of lung cancer. He was 52 years old.

54:51The hospital, when he got ill, told us the best way to deal with this would be not to talk about it. Not to talk about it in front of him and not to talk about it among ourselves. I have to stop you there because that is so English. I know. It's terrible, isn't it? But it's also so my father's generation. And looking back now, it was a mistake. My mother really regretted it. She really regretted it till the day she died when she got cancer. And I went to see her in the hospital. She said to me, we're going to talk about this. And I'm like, we are, Mum. Of course we are. We are. She hated it. My father had every opportunity to say to me, son, I think I'm dying.

55:34Look, I'm coughing up blood. Look, I'm dying. He never did. He never said it. So I don't know. My brother, who's five years younger than me, he was at school at the time, and I was there when my father died. My brother has never asked me about it. And I respect that. I'm not going to suddenly turn up and say to him, listen, I'm going to tell you what happened that day. If he doesn't want to know, he doesn't want to know. And I respect that. But I was in a very weird situation where I never spoke to it about anybody either. I spoke to what happened to anybody. And then one day I was writing a song and a line came out.

56:18I closed my eyes and when I looked, your name was in the memorial book. And now where my father's ashes are scattered, They have a book there on the anniversary of the day of his death, which opens on the page, and his name's there. And I used to go to it with my mum on the anniversary and look at the book and go and visit. That's what we did. And this line, I was like, ooh. Now, this is interesting. If I go down this path, I'm going to be in a situation where I have to talk to strangers about what happened. How do I feel about that? I wasn't really sure how I felt about that. But nonetheless, I wrote that song, and the next hour, it just came out.

56:59There it was, fully formed. I already had that guitar lick. That's why I was writing the other song to that guitar lick. So the next time I was rehearsing with my keyboard player, Cara Tivy, I taught her the piano part, played her the song. She said, oh, it's about your dad, isn't it? I was like, yeah, it is, Cara, yeah. So I thought, well, if she can get it like that, obviously it hits the mark. So I started playing it live and it had that effect. People would come and talk to me about someone that they had lost and still do. People write to me and say, your song really helped me to process things about how my father or whoever lost.

57:44And it's great to be able to write back to them and say, you know what, mate? It had exactly the same effect on me. it helped me to process how I felt about the loss of my father to the extent that I can now talk about it without being overcome with emotion and so I you know I'm really pleased to have a song about that my mum whenever I played in London or where she came to see me play she would always say beforehand you're gonna play that song aren't you I don't think she even knew what it was called You're going to play that song. And I would play the song. Of course I would play the song nervously while she was there, so self-consciously.

58:26And then my nephews would say to me, why do you keep playing that song that makes Nan cry every time we come and see you? And I'd be like, boys, ask your Nan. All right, your Nan will tell you. Ask your Nan. Yeah. I have to say, and this is inappropriate, but the comic version of the English We're Not Talking About It is, and it is my favorite line in Spinal Tap, when they're talking about one of the drummers dying, and the phrase he said, the police said, best left unsolved. It's the most English line in that whole thing. Is that how songs come to you, a phrase or two, and then that opens up the idea?

59:09You mentioned you wrote a song about, I had no idea Cindy of A Thousand Lives was about Cindy Sherman. Oh, yeah. Cindy Sherman was a big part of my realization of America on that first trip. I bought loads of postcards to send home, but then I just started buying postcards that just had images. You know, you get a postcard with James Brown on it. You get a postcard with, you know, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. And I found there's a famous Cindy Sherman photograph of like a child with a pig's head eating an apple. and it was so weird it was so weird i saw it and i bought it and i thought what the heck is this what madness what strange weirdness i mean america's a weird enough place if you've never been here before but that's to me summed up the weirdness of of america and i subsequently found out what it was and who she was and i bought uh you know coming to the u.s back and forth in the 80s I was able to find uh you know books about her um exhibitions and stuff and it always intrigued me what she was doing that you know putting herself in the in in the absolutely in the art as a songwriter that's something that you try and do you try and put yourself in there even subconsciously sometimes you don't realize you're doing it putting yourself in there so I was very much attracted to that and uh when i got those weird chords um the song kind of sort of developed out of that going back to those uh i think they call them a murder pictures uh kind of like weird scary period she went through which i think yeah it comes after the uh the original sort of like cinema scenes untitled pictures that i really i really there's something about the united states America that's very strange to people coming from my country is the vastness of it and the fact most of it isn't inhabited.

1:01:13What Springsteen referred to as the darkness on the edge of town. We don't have much of that in my country. You might have the darkness on the edge of town, but you can probably see another town just up the ways a bit. You don't have that bit where the town ends and there's the piney woods and the piney woods go on for miles and miles and miles you know when you're flying in over new jersey sometimes it's piney piney piney piney woods and then whoa there's new york it's that like it's like the moors around manchester you know they're coming they're kind of standing around and as a european you get that weird in the pines thing and some and that those cindy sherman postcards from that period of her her art really spoke to me about that that you know what's out there in the majority of on any given night the majority of the united states america is in complete and utter darkness that's a weird thing to someone coming from a little island off the coast of europe have you met her no no i've never met her but weirdly she was interviewed in the uh guardian last month and i was i was it's always great to read about what she's doing and see what she's up to.

1:02:25I don't know if she maybe shows an exhibition. And then the very last paragraph, the journalist asked her if she'd ever heard the song. And she said no. She was very flattered by it. She said, particularly as I've never met him, as if I'd need to meet her to be able to write a song like that. Because I don't really need... You're an artist. I mean, it's there. It's about how what she did moved me. And I'm responding to that. So it'd be lovely to meet her, but whether that would help me understand better anything that she's done? Probably not. You know, sometimes it's lovely to know that she's flattered by it because sometimes, you know, people don't want the attention.

1:03:06But I've huge respect for someone who can have a vision like that and communicate it so powerfully. Now, I should ask you, I've never heard you talk about Springsteen. You just mentioned him. Are you a fan of Springsteen? A huge fan. Huge fan. Okay, I didn't know that. huge fan he has that redemptive power as well uh like soul music you know uh whatever happens to the characters in his song there's always the possibility that they can ride to the sea and wash these sins off their hands you know as they're doing racing in the street i mean darkness on the edge of town we were just talking about about that um you know i i mean is there is there any greater opening line in pop music than they blew up the chicken man in philly last night i I mean, what a great line that is.

1:03:53That is a great line. It's such a great line. I saw him at Meadowlands on the Bourne USA tour. Blew my mind. He made it feel like a club. Just did my head in completely. It was like, I mean, the trouble is, I think maybe it's just, I don't know, it might just be me, maybe all performers are like this, but when you go and see a songwriter or, you know, someone who does a job similar to your job, you spend all your time analysing what they're doing, how they're doing that, why they're doing that, what's going on there, you know. It gets in the way of watching Elvis Costello. So it's impossible for me to enjoy a Bob Dylan gig.

1:04:23I'm trying to all the time think, you know, what's going on here? But Springsteen was just like. I think he's so connected to the audience. There's no, like, I was used to English bands or kind of nodding at each other somewhat ironically. There's none of that. No, no. He totally, he's all there in it. He doesn't leave anything. He doesn't leave anything backstage. It's all there out front. You get it every time. And he just gives and gives and gives. Yeah. Yeah. After you did William Bloke, you did the first Mermaid Avenue. And I think people know the sort of genesis of the project, that you got all these lyrics of Woody Guthrie.

1:05:04When you saw these archives, what surprised you? What jumped out? How much there was. 3 ,000 complete lyrics. Boxes and boxes. you start off pulling out the songs you think are good and you realise actually there's amazing songs in there and you pull out the amazing ones and you realise there are brilliant songs in there and you have to go back and put some back in the box they come out of and you realise that and then you get on a thread and then you realise there's a yeah you get a bit of paper and it's got written on the bit of paper you know there's a song here but at the top of the bit of paper Woody's written way over yonder in the minor key you're like what is that what does that mean and you go for a moment and you see it again you know way over yonder in the minor key and maybe a little bit more of a scribble lyric and eventually you come to a song that says let's go way over yonder in the minor key in the chorus and you realize it's he's left you a paper trail to kind of find somehow to find and connect with his song i think as a listener what surprised me the most was how modern the songs sounded because I'm not a Woody Guthrie aficionado.

1:06:11He, I think to many people, just seemed like a character from The Grapes of Wrath. He's this sort of sepia-toned hobo crossing the country. Of course. And so the songs were so funny, which surprised me, but not funny in the way that Christ for President or some of his kids' songs were, and Walt Whitman's niece. That's why we opened with it. So everyone knew where we were going. Don't think you're going to get the Dust Bowl Balladier, mate. Well, there's a couple of reasons for that. There's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, who was running the archive at the time, who asked me to come and look at the lyrics, she was concerned that this is like the late 90s.

1:06:56Her father was becoming a bit of a two-dimensional figure who was only up on a pedestal as the Dust Bowl Balladier. and she rightly pointed out that he actually lived half his life in New York City down on Coney Island at a time when New York City was perhaps the most exciting cultural city in the world you know from 1939 until he died in 1967 he was here in New York so she wanted that aspect of him to come out you know everyone had heard the dust ball there was one song early on um because woody often wrote this the tunes to traditional tunes there was one song called my 30 000 that was clearly because the lyrical the opening line was written to the tune of an old uh american folk song called jesse james jesse james was the man that had children they were brave that tune and i very proudly when i got my first stuff played it to her and said yeah look i've got the and she was like yeah we've got plenty of songs like that billy i was like oh okay you want me to and she was frying songs at me that were you know totally contrary to people's perception of woody guffrey and it was her uh generosity and encouragement that led me to choose songs like ingrid bergman where he talks about making love to the swedish film star on the slopes of the italian volcano my flying saucer where he goes for a ride on a flying saucer, not things you would think about Woody Guthrie.

1:08:26But to take Woody on board, I mean, you mentioned The Grapes of Wrath, the movie, Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. Perhaps in people's mind, they associate Woody with that sepia tone period. But yeah, he was there. He did write songs in there. But he also lived in New York in the 40s. So you also have to imagine him in the movie On the Town with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, the two sailors who are chasing women around New York City in 1940 in Technicolor and Full Color, which incidentally ends in Coney Island. They chase the girls to the Coney Island funfair. Woody lived in that world. He wrote many of those songs in that world.

1:09:09That's why Nora chose to call the album Mermaid Avenue, because to focus on that world. So we were out to challenge people's perceptions to, as Nora said, to reboot a father's image. And that's why we kicked off with Walt Whitman's niece. So nobody would have any preconceptions that we were going to be reverent with the little guy. That's not what Nora asked us to do. She asked us to shake him up. And with regard to it sounding modern, one of the, you know, there wasn't many templates for doing a project like that. But Jeff and I, I think at the time, Grail Marcus' book, Invisible Republic, had come out about the recording of the basement tapes.

1:09:47and I certainly read it. I know Jeff had read it as well. And I said to him, look, you know, this is a bit like the basement tapes in the sense that, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with, many of the songs in the basement tapes were old-timey songs. They weren't all Bob Dylan songs that Bob had written. A lot of the songs they played were old folk songs they were messing around with. And I said to Jeff, this is kind of what we're doing. We're kind of messing around with these old songs. But the thing about the basement tapes, you knew that although they were playing these old-timey songs, the people that were playing them had heard Little Richard.

1:10:24They'd heard rock and roll. They were in that vernacular. So we've got to make these records, and people have got to know that we have heard The Clash. People have got to know that we've heard Cheap Trick. The Wilkos were big Cheap Trick fans. I'm like, yeah, bring it on. Bring it on. We've got an opportunity here to take these songs and kind of like dress them up anyway. It's like going to the dressing up box every day. Who are we going to be today? Let's be Tom Waits today on Meanest Man. Let's be Vanilla Fudge. Let's just be weird. Let's just take these songs apart and put them back together again in a different way.

1:11:06And the freedom to do that is why we ended up recording 53 tracks, rather than 15 tracks, which we were contracted to do. Not least because we were in Dublin. We invited Nora over for a holiday for a week, and she bought another sheaf of songs, started the whole bloody process. Yeah, she suddenly turned up with, you know, Another Man's Done Gone. What an incredible song that is. And it was a joy to do. I mean, I really enjoyed the whole process, because hitherto I'd been the guy in the studio where everything had to go through me. We had every decision, what song's next. How do you want to record it?

1:11:42When are we having a tea break? What biscuits are we having? You know, everything. Whereas in that process, it was a two-hander, if not a three-hander, with Jay Bennett as well, between me, Jeff, and Jay, and the band. You know, we were taking it in turns. It was, what are we going to do next? Did it change your writing afterwards? It did, yeah. It did. Because one of the things I realized looking through Woody's work is that, and he said as much in his writings, that, you know, he never wrote a cynical song in his life. if he never wrote a song that put people down. I think that's where I kind of started to understand what a corrosive thing cynicism is.

1:12:19You know, Woody famously had on his guitar, This Machine Kills Fascists. If I had to have something written on my guitar, it would be Death to Cynicism. And by cynicism, I don't mean skepticism. I think that's healthy. It's helpful. I don't mean doubt. Never trust anyone who has no doubts. I'm talking about those people who have given up and they want you to give up as well. It makes them feel better about the decision they've made. I have no time for those people. To me, cynicism is what makes you think nothing will ever change. Cynicism is what makes you fear that nobody else cares about this stuff.

1:12:55It's what Fox News want you to believe. And I'm, like Woody, committed to destroying that feeling in people than kicking it to the curb as often as I can. Not to say that I'm not prone to my own cynicism. How could you not be the way politics have gone in the last 30 years? But you have to fight it all the time in order to recognize that their glass is half full and that if ordinary people are given the opportunity to pull the levers of power, we would live in a better world. You have to believe in people and what they do. I want to ask you about two projects you did because it was with one of our favorite people here.

1:13:35It was Joe Henry. Oh, yeah. And first of all, and this gets to the sense of place, the field recordings, you taped train songs from, where was the... Chicago to Los Angeles. Chicago to Los Angeles, and you taped, I don't know how many you taped, there's about 10 on the record. Yeah, I think there's a dozen. What was the, how did that come about? Well, it's a bit convoluted, but I'll try. While I was writing the skiffle book, I was in touch by Aperture, a photography magazine, and they wanted to send me out on the road, It was the anniversary of the Americans, the photo book by... Robert Frank.

1:14:18Thank you very much. Robert Frank. I'm so bad with names. I do apologize to everyone. Robert Frank's great book, The Americans, which is an amazing photography book. They wanted to send someone out on the road, a photographer out on the road with me. and so I had a chat with them and I said, you know, it's really boring being on the road, really. I'm just like, you know, I'm in the van and I'm at a gig. I said, can't we do a, you know, we'd be more interested to do a road trip somewhere where I've never been in America. And they said, well, where would you like to go in America that you've never been?

1:14:56I said, I'd like to go to Rock Island, where the Rock Island line comes from. And the guy said to me, where's that? I said, I don't know. It turns out it's in the far west of Illinois on the border with Iowa. It's the Mississippi. The Mississippi divides. And it's where they built the first bridge across the Mississippi. so we went there and we drove down to Arkansas where the song Rock Island Line comes from and when we went to the railway station there we wanted to get the midnight train to come in so we could do a photo with the midnight train and it come in and it sat there for 40 minutes just sat there and what's that about?

1:15:48and it turns out that there are so few passenger trains outside the northeast corner that But when a passenger train, like one a day, really, on that line through Little Rock, where we were, they have to stay in the railway station to let the freight trains through. They use the railway station almost like a siding. And it turned out, I got the schedule, and it turned out it stopped in every big city 40 minutes. And it occurred to me that you could use that time to record a song. You get off the train, go into the waiting room, find a suitably acoustic corner, play a train song, jump back on the train and keep going, play some on the train maybe, you know.

1:16:29And so Joe Henry had produced my album before that, Tooth and Nail, and he's a dear friend of mine, Joe. I love him to bits. And I came up with this cockamamie idea and he said, yeah, that would be brilliant. So over the course of three or four days we were on the train and it was a revelation because the train comes through the kind of, what was it Iggy Pop called, the ripped back sides of the city because you're slowing down to go over roads. You're slowing down to go over roads and you're looking in someone's backyard in their parlor. You can see them all sitting there having a dinner. It's an America I certainly never seen and my compadres who were working with me, Joe and the guy who recorded it and the guys who took some photos and did some filming, I mean, they were blown away by this.

1:17:18They'd never been on a train before, I don't think. Oh, really? Yeah. It was really strange. They were like, wow, this is like a completely different, you know, it comes down from Chicago, it comes down to San Antonio, and then it kind of follows the Rio Grande, and then off across Arizona into Union Station in Los Angeles. And we had the best time. I mean, the trains, you know, they have a shower on there. We have a dining car, and they always sit, on a table with people that you haven't sat with before. So that's always someone new. And who's on the trains? The people on the trains are either tourists, people who worked on the railways or their father worked on the railways, and people who don't want to show their ID at an airport or on trains.

1:18:06So it's a really interesting trip when you sit down and talk to people at the table, you know, what you're doing and where you are. You learn, we learn a lot. Was it easy to find places in the train stations where you could get good acoustics? Yeah, generally, yeah. Obviously, we told the crew what we were doing. I had a guy, I had a contact at Amtrak who was a musician, really fortunate, and he set it up for me. We met him in Union Station in Chicago. So they have an all aboard. They have three all aboard. The first all aboard is a general all aboard. The second all aboard is better get aboard.

1:18:40And then the last all aboard is goodbye. So we just had to listen out for the second all aboard and make sure we were on our way back to the train. so we didn't get left behind. One of the things about Amtrak is their schedule is a bit hit and miss. Yeah. One of the guys, an English guy, said that they got in 24 hours late to Union, and it's only a 48-hour train journey. They got in a whole day late due to problems with freight trains on the line. and we were due to get into Union Station Los Angeles at kind of 7am and we got in at 4am and the one time ever they were early, we got in at 4am. But it was cool because we ended up finding nobody about, we found this lovely space to record our last song which was Early Morning Rain by Gordon Lightfoot which compares the jet plane to the railways.

1:19:37Brilliant, brilliant song. and where we sang it was behind us there was a little garden square and as we sang it the birds began to wake up they must have heard us and they started singing and you can hear them just in the background starting to sing in the bushes behind us as it's starting to get light it was a brilliant, brilliant experience and I encourage any of you out there who want to see a different kind of America to take a trip there's another route to Los Angeles to go through the Rockies the California Zephyr we went on the Texas Eagle but it really is an amazing experience. And given the grief you have to go through to go through airports to get around America, I don't know why there isn't a high-speed train link.

1:20:19You know, San Francisco or Los Angeles, a bullet train. You know, as the atmosphere gets more turbulent, the possibility of high-speed trains, I think you really should check it out because it's the trains that make America. America before the trains is a completely different place to America after the train. And before the train, it was only really feasible to build settlements inland on rivers because you just couldn't get the stuff. There was too many piney woods in the way. So all the big towns and the big cities are all on the great rivers. Once the railway comes, then it opens the whole continent up.

1:21:01And I don't think, doing the record and doing the research that went with it, I don't think there's ever been a more transformative technology for humankind than the railroad. The change it brings for thousands of years of nothing being able to go faster than a horse could gallop or a ship could sail, suddenly to have something that not could only go at a higher speed, but could connect you directly to anywhere in the continent. so that you could order something from Chicago and it would arrive two or three days later. It would physically be there. It's so much more, I think, so much more revolutionary than the internet, what we've experienced in our lifetimes, which is in itself revolutionary.

1:21:45But, you know, Amazon is nothing to the ability of people to order something from a catalogue out east and it end up in this tiny little town in wherever, you know, Nevada or whatever, something like that. And also, people could get on it. I mean, so many of those blues songs about the railroad, because that was another level of emancipation for African Americans, to get to the big cities up north, where you weren't constantly, you know, of course there was still racism, and of course there was still discrimination, but it wasn't the Jim Crow type up there. You know, that emancipatory nature of the railroads in America was, that's why we wanted to take them songs back there.

1:22:26It was also the way people told time back then. Yeah. You knew that was the 304. In my country, that's when they had to synchronize all the clocks in the country. Because beforehand, they just did it when it got dark and when it got light. But once the railroad come, everything had to run on a scheduled timetable. And it's like, it's interesting, you know, if you go back to the story that made Charles Dickens, the Pickwick Papers, it's about the pre-industrial age. You know, it's why we Brits are all obsessed with Jane Austen. It's all going back to that prelapsarian period before the Industrial Revolution, before the railroad came.

1:23:05There was this kind of, you know, dizzying kind of Garden of Eden vibe with the aristocracy and all that kind of stuff. It's very interesting how the railroad comes to symbolize modernity and energy and dynamicism. and particularly in this continent, it changes everything. Well, you woke up the birds in Los Angeles. It's a very Woody Guthrie image. I think we should end there. Thank you so much for coming in. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been great chatting with you, man. Thanks so much to Billy Bragg for stopping off during his tour to chat with Bruce Hedlum. To hear a playlist of some of our favorite Billy Bragg songs, visit the link in our show notes or at brokenrecordpodcast.com.

1:23:49And be sure to follow us on Instagram at TheBrokenRecordPod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Toleday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.

1:24:27Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

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