For nearly 30 years, Englishman Billy Bragg has kept the faith as one of the most outspokenly political songwriters of his time. From anthems like "There Is Power In A Union," which Bragg wrote in support of striking mine workers in Thatcher-era Britain, to bringing forgotten Woody Guthrie lyrics to life in his collaboration with Wilco on the two Mermaid Avenue discs, Bragg has made a career of mixing leftist humanist sentiments with punk energy, memorable melodies, and emotionally vulnerable love songs. He's just released Billy Bragg Volume 1, a nine-CD box set comprising his 1983 debut, Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy, 1984's Brewing Up With Billy Bragg, 1986's Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, and the 1990 EP The Internationale, along with other rarities of the era, including video of live performances behind the Iron Curtain. Bragg plays Austin, Texas' SXSW Festival March 17 before heading out on a tour of the eastern U.S. through the end of the month. The A.V. Club tracked Bragg down at his home in Dorset, England, to chat about pop and politics.
The A.V. Club: The box set and the Must I Paint You A Picture best-of from a couple of years ago have given you an opportunity to look back. Are you generally happy with the way your career has turned out?
Billy Bragg: I think so. I can't imagine going back and looking at the other artists that were knocking around at the time. A lot of them are no longer with us, and those who are seem to be more or less doing their own thing, people like Paul Weller and Elvis Costello. So I carry on doing my own thing, and, I guess, rely on people to get it. One of the reasons I wanted to put some of that back catalog out there was because I think some of the context of what I was doing in the 1980s, the politics of the '80s, are perhaps not so obvious to the 20-year-old of today. Writing the songs made a lot of sense to me then. But to put it into context, that's been the real reason behind putting the box set together.
AVC: How would you try to explain what you were doing in those days to someone who's young now?
BB: Well, if you can imagine what it's like in England trying to explain to people that you did gigs for the Labour Party—they find that very difficult to grasp, given the Labour government that we have at the moment. I think the politics that we had in the 1980s in America and in the UK were a lot more ideological than they are now. Reaganomics and the essence of what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do was a lot more aimed at pushing back at what had been achieved in the 1960s. So today, rather than talk in terms of ideology or ideas like socialism, I think more important issues [to discuss] are things like compassion and accountability. That's what we were trying to achieve then. We were trying to hold people who had power in account. Not just the government of Margaret Thatcher, but also the multinational corporations. I think there are echoes of what we were trying to do in the anti-globalization movement.
AVC: How is the government of George W. Bush less ideological than the government of Margaret Thatcher?
BB: When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she set out to reverse the consensus that had built up in Britain over the welfare state, over the idea of the individual having a responsibility over the community. As far as she was concerned, it was only the individual that was important. In some ways, everything that George Bush stood for and set out to do has been warped by September 11 and what has come since then. Certainly, the international image of the United States today is a lot less positive than 10 years ago. And that really shouldn't be, because you have been the victims of this awful terrorist attack, and I think America deserves the sympathy of the world. But unfortunately, the choices that the Bush administration has made since then have in some ways turned the things that we thought America stood for inside-out. The most obvious would be what's happening in Guantanamo Bay.
AVC: Britain has had terrorist activity on its shores for a long time because of the Irish Troubles. It's something that other countries have had to deal with for a long time, and Americans are new to.
BB: I think so, and I think that you're making some of the mistakes we made. What we first sought to do with the Troubles in Ireland—imprisoning people, detaining people without trial—didn't work. It just made martyrs out of the prisoners. Obviously it was easier to make that connection, because the prisoners were being held in their own country, rather than the Bush administration's shameful use of Guantanamo Bay, which to me is a tacit admission that what they're doing is illegal. If you can't do it in the United States… You know, it's almost like where you let your dog foul. It's like an admission that this is wrong. I mean, we did our dirty little war against the IRA and not many people noticed, but because of the high profile of the United States, it's a running sore not just on the United States' record, but on all of us in the West. It's not often we all are judged by what a particular government does. Recently, it's been what the Danes have done that makes things difficult for everybody in the West.
AVC: With the cartoons?
BB: Yeah. But we need to be addressing the issue within our own laws. We have laws to deal with people who defame other people's religion, or we do in England, anyway. We have laws to deal with people who try to blow up our citizens. We have due process. We have laws to deal with people who we capture during combat and war, but somehow Guantanamo Bay seems to be outside all that. And perhaps it's being maintained with the view to what people are talking about now, this idea of the "long war," that this is going to go on and on, and perhaps Iran is going to be next.
AVC: Perhaps surprisingly, you weren't always so politically active—you didn't actually vote in the first election that you were eligible for. How did your political awareness develop?
BB: It was the inspiration of one person, whose name I should never forget—Margaret Thatcher. When Thatcher was elected in 1979, there was a sort of spurious feeling that having a woman as prime minister was a sign of how progressive we'd become. Everyone was pretty laid-back about it. That was when we realized what a genuine radical she was. And over the course of that first Thatcher government, when she began to start to chip away at the ideas that I've benefited from—free health care, free education, affordable housing—as well as the Falklands war… By 1983, I was wide awake, wide awake.
AVC: And you were also involved in the miners' strikes that were going on at the time.
BB: After the election of '83, which Thatcher won—as soon as she won the election, she turned on the National Union Of Mine Workers, and that for me was the definitive politicizing experience. I'd had politics before, but they'd just been purely humanitarian. The miners' strike forced me into more ideological expression—you know, it's the difference between something as humanistic as "just because you're better than me doesn't mean I'm lazy" [a lyric from Bragg's "To Have And Have Not"], to, within three records and 18 months, "There Is Power In A Union." That was really down to my experience going out and doing gigs in the marches in the miners' strike.
AVC: Around this time you also joined the Army briefly, right?
BB: Well, that was before. The army was '81. That was after I failed to vote. [Laughs.] After I failed to vote, after I failed to change the world by playing punk songs [in his first band, Riff Raff], and after I failed to make my way into the world and ended up back at my mom's house. I needed to press the eject button on my life up to that point, and that was how I did it.
AVC: But that only lasted about three months.
BB: I realized I'd made a bit of a mistake. Plus also, you should tell your readers, when you've driven one tank, you've driven them all, mate.
AVC: The box set also has video from several concerts that you did behind the Iron Curtain, in Germany and Lithuania. You were one of the first Westerners to do that.
BB: They assumed that because I was anti-Margaret Thatcher, I would be pro-them, but it actually wasn't quite as simple as that. I was anti-arbitrary power, so it put me in a difficult situation there. But the great thing about going to those places was to talk to ordinary people—to talk to people in the audience, to talk to the young people who came to the gigs—because the whole Cold War rhetoric that these people were going to take over our country really didn't seem to be borne out by their attitude and their concerns. They thought we were going to take over their country. So it was highly educational, particularly for someone like myself who believed in a more egalitarian society to see what a fuck-up East Germany was. That was pretty salutary. It didn't stop me being a socialist, but it certainly stopped me just sticking up for totalitarian regimes.
AVC: It's almost hard to remember now just what a radical concept it was at the time just to recognize that we're all human beings no matter what government we have. Back then, for many of us in the West, the Soviets were The Enemy.
BB: That's right. I can remember the East Berlin Political Song Festival in 1985 or 1986—I think it was the first time I went there—and Gorbachev for the first time had just mentioned the words "perestroika" and "glasnost." The Russian musicians were very, very excited about this, and to get to talk to them about the change that was possibly coming, I found it very, very exciting. And to actually get to go to Moscow, Leningrad, and Lithuania and those kind of places, I really learned a lot. History is different in them places, you know.
AVC: There's also a short clip in the box set of you in Nicaragua leading people in song.
BB: They were veterans, I think. I was singing "Nicaragua Nicaraguita," am I right? I went there a couple of times. I was very active in a group called the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, who were providing nurses and equipment for the Nicaraguan people. And they asked me if I would be interested to visit the country and see what they were doing. And we went down there and got to see a little bit of the sharp end of politics—what it really meant to a country that was trying very hard to struggle for its independence whilst being leaned on by its local superpower.
AVC: The shorthand, two-word description of Billy Bragg is that you're a quote-unquote—
BB: Big nose?
AVC: [Laughs.] Well, I guess I can't disagree with that. I meant—
BB: Lazy bastard?
AVC: "Political songwriter." But obviously you've got a lot of songs about love and relationships.
BB: I would say the majority of them.
AVC: Do you feel that people focus too much on your political side?
BB: I don't mind being labeled as a political songwriter. I've chosen to do that. What really annoys me is being dismissed as a political songwriter. That really pains me, because life isn't all about love; it's not all about politics, either. It's a beautiful mixture of events that absolutely baffle you, and you think, "Why can't I do something about that?", whether those events are in your bedroom, or out there in the wide world. In our daily lives we engage with them at different times, and I'm trying to write about the whole human experience, or my perspective on it anyway. And to ignore one or the other would be foolish. I've done gigs with bands who only write political songs; every single one of their songs is polemical. And you know, they just beat the audience into submission with these ideas. There's very little concession to entertainment. My experience has been, if I can entertain people and get them to open up a little bit, then they're much more conducive to any ideas I might have, whether they're about relationships or politics. The most interesting songs, I think, are the ones where the two overlap.
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