I learned to play guitar when I was sixteen, but I’d been stringing words together since I was twelve years old. Like most kids, I was encouraged to write poetry at school, but unlike the rest of my classmates, I never gave up. A poem I wrote for homework caught the eye of my English teacher, and when I was chosen to read it out on local radio, I got this crazy idea that I was a poet. Some of my early efforts were attempts at poetry, but soon I was thinking up tunes to go with my words, although the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument meant that I had to keep the melodies in my head.
Over the summer of 1974, my schooldays kind of petered out. Not expecting much joy from my exam results and unenthused about looking for a job, I was hoping something else might come along. Through the wall of our back room, I heard the kid next door playing his electric guitar. It was the sound of salvation. Wiggy was two years younger than me and obsessed with the Faces. Soon he was teaching me how to play my way through the Rod Stewart songbook he’d bought on mail order. There’s a great picture of the two of us from this period, strumming our guitars in his back garden. We’re both playing completely different chords, but we’re doing so with great intent.
Learning to play guitar gave a huge boost to my song-writing and I began to fill notebooks with page after page of lyrics that were mostly derived from whichever artist I was infatuated with at the time. I first started to really listen to the words of the songs on the radio after hearing ‘The Boxer’ by Simon and Garfunkel in 1970. I remember poring over Paul Simon’s lyrics on the back of the Bridge over Troubled Water LP sleeve. That album provided me with a gateway into the singer-songwriter genre, but the production values were so high, I was unable to figure out how the songs were constructed. Then, at age fifteen, somebody played me Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, a collection of songs from his first seven albums. I was immediately drawn to the starker, solo material, which, although less than a decade old when I first heard it, sounded like it came from a hundred years ago. Not only were songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ easy to deconstruct – most utilising no more than three chords – they also carried a message. It was this material that provided the template for my early song-writing.
My other obsession at the time was the pop soul of the Motown label. They regularly produced compilations of their hits, which I avidly sought out. Motown Chartbusters Volume 3 might just be the greatest pop album ever released. It contains, among other gems, ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, ‘Dancing in the Street’ and ‘Roadrunner’, and it climaxes – chronologically and emotionally – with ‘The Tracks of My Tears’. It was this last track that really caught my attention. Like Dylan, Smokey Robinson needed no more than three chords to create a masterpiece. I duly took note.
Although the household I grew up in was apolitical, the music that I listened to was full of opinions. Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan and the other singer-songwriters were always asking questions, but the politics of the ’60s ran deeply through soul music too. On Motown Chartbusters Volume 5, Smokey’s ‘Tears of a Clown’ is followed by Edwin Starr’s ‘War’. Next, a teen pop interlude with the Jackson 5 gives way to the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’ – an angry four minutes of funky WTF.
The starkest transition is from the infectious joy of the Supremes’ ‘Stoned Love’ to Marvin Gaye’s solemn, string-backed reading of ‘Abraham, Martin and John’. This latter song, reflecting on the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, could hardly qualify as a chartbuster, never having been released as a single prior to appearing on this album. It was presumably included in the collection by way of an explanation for the change of tone that had overcome Motown’s prodigious pop output since the last volume of Chartbusters. It was from these records that I began to first pick up my politics.
During this period, my songwriting technique was pretty rudimentary. I don’t know how others perfected their skills, but I did it by replacing the lyrics of my favourite songs with rhymes of my own. These were songs that I’d heard many times over, the nuanced phrasings and internal rhythms so familiar to me that, when I came to place my own words there, they fitted seamlessly into the tune.
In this way, I was able to become a songwriter without any knowledge of the principles of music. I had friends who could read the crotchets and quavers, but the five staff lines that they were hung from seemed to act like train tracks, taking them up and down the same lines every day, like commuters governed by a rigid timetable. Music is all about feel and you just can’t write that stuff down. To this day, I play by ear because I don’t want to have to think about anything but the words.
Soon, Wiggy and I had found other wayward souls willing to lug their drum kits, keyboards or bass cabinets round to our house and happily play along with tunes we’d written. It didn’t matter that our songs sounded similar to those whose records we incessantly played on our cheap turntables. These artists were our heroes and our imitation was not intended as flattery, but was instead an attempt to momentarily close the vast distances between us.
It took a revolutionary movement to shake me from my reliance on the music of the past. I was nineteen when punk rock happened, of the same generation as Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten, and this sudden shock of the now gave me the confidence to write in the style of my contemporaries. Punk rock injected my songwriting with urgency and attitude and helped me to find my voice, yet it would be another two years before I wrote what I considered to be my first Billy Bragg song.
To get to that place, I first had to expunge the influences that had shaped my writing: all those singer-songwriter albums had to go, as well as the Motown Chartbusters. I also had to bid farewell to the traditional English folk artists whose albums I had brought home many times from the public library – the Watersons, Shirley and Dolly Collins, Ewan MacColl. Punk rock was Year Zero and I was now under the influence of writers with attitude like Elvis Costello, Paul Weller and the Ramones.
By 1977, Wiggy and I had found a fellow traveller in drummer Robert Handley and, with an ever-rotating line-up of bass players, we had graduated from playing in back rooms to doing gigs under the name Riff Raff. I still had pages in my notebooks where ideas tailed off after a few rhyming couplets, but, more often than not, I was finishing songs and the band were immediately connecting with them. Riff Raff had a good-time, roustabout style, and I wrote songs that played to our strengths.
When the band ran out of steam in 1980, so did my songwriting. Without the regular stimulus of performance, the need to write new songs left me and I began to think I’d missed my chance to make a go of being a musician. Having run out of options, I attempted to press the eject button on my previous existence by joining the army, but perversely, the experience only inspired me to start writing songs again.
Extricating myself from the Royal Armoured Corps, I began formulating a plan whereby I would utilise the vulnerability of the singer-songwriter and mix it with the angry attitude of punk rock. To do this, I needed a new kind of material; short, sharp songs delivered in a choppy, percussive style that ran contrary to the traditional image of the solo singer-songwriter strumming an acoustic guitar and playing ballads.
By the early ’80s, punk rock had been superseded by the new romantics, and synthesiser duos were all the rage. My intention was to zig while the music scene was zagging and, in doing so, pick up some of those who, appalled by Spandau Ballet and their insistence on style over content, yearned for the fire of punk.
If I hoped to stand out in such a crowd, the dynamics of my new material would be almost as important as the melodies. I began building songs around guitar riffs – ‘The Milkman of Human Kindness’ relies on an alternating low/high attack; ‘To Have and to Have Not’ is all punchy chords; ‘Richard’, a favourite from the Riff Raff set, was retooled with the addition of some jarring open-string notes; and ‘A New England’ went from a tune played in ringing tones to a chugging bass-string pulse.
As I became more confident, my early influences began to seep back into my songwriting. A Paul Simon lyric would be referenced or a Bob Dylan tune borrowed, allowing the listener to see my back pages. Performing at benefit gigs during the 1984 miners’ strike, my love of folk music was reawakened when I found myself sharing the bill with traditional singers whose repertoire was far more radical than mine. And as the production of my albums became more elaborate, I enjoyed drawing on the sound of the soul records that I had loved as a teen. Having found my own voice, this was my way of owning up to the debt I owed to those whose tunes had inspired my earliest efforts.
I was fortunate in that my breakthrough in 1983–4 coincided with a resurgence in the art of songwriting. The emergence of first the Smiths and then the Pogues brought the focus sharply back onto lyrical content. Words began to matter again and pop had a moment akin to the ’60s boom in kitchen-sink dramas. For a while, songs of social realism featured regularly on Top of the Pops, in between all the usual light entertainment.
My reputation as a protest singer stems from this period. These were politically charged times, and my songwriting reflected the struggles that were going on, not only on the picket lines, but also in the bedroom. Yes, some of my material was purely polemical, but even in the most tender of my love songs, a character is likely to make a passing political reference. Back then it felt like our personal relationships were shaped by the politics of the time.
And while I’ve never shied away from the label ‘protest singer’, I like to think my personal songs are just as powerful as my polemics and long ago stopped worrying about striking a balance between the two. Whether you’re lovelorn or radical, I’m just trying to help you make sense of the world, because that’s what my favourite songs did for me.
Smokey Robinson made me feel like I wasn’t the only person who has ever had their heart broken and the Clash made me realise that I was not alone in my opposition to discrimination. Music has the ability to draw us out of isolation and connect us with a greater community where we feel that our troubles and concerns are recognised and shared. A song that is sympathetic to your mood can be therapeutic, the melody soothing while the words summon up feelings that you may not be able to easily articulate.
To be in a crowd of strangers at a concert, singing along to a favourite song, provides a collective experience rarely encountered in modern daily life. Individuality melts away and emotions become communal. For a few minutes, everyone in the space shares a common purpose – to sing the song at the top of their voice. If music has any real power, it lies in this moment, when we experience the solidarity of song, the cathartic realisation that you’re not the only person who shares the sentiments that are being so forcefully expressed.
In the early ’90s, I got together with my long-term partner, Juliet, and in 1993, my own perspective on everything was changed by the birth of our son, which gave me an unimpeachable reason to step back from ten years of being ‘Billy Bragg’. The songs on the first post-baby album, William Bloke, were more personal, less ideological, but so was the world that our son was born into. The Cold War had ended, Thatcher was gone and pop culture was in a celebratory mood. Politics was passé; it was time to dance.
I was wondering what protest singers did when they were no longer fashionable when I got a call from Woody Guthrie’s daughter. Would I be interested in writing some new music for Woody’s lost lyrics? The opportunity to collaborate with the original protest singer was too good to pass up. Before she allowed me to wade through the 2,000-plus lyrics in the archives, Nora Guthrie made it clear to me that she wanted a record that countered the image of her father as the saintly singer of worthy songs. Woody had been an iconoclast and Wilco and I were hired to help him down from the shiny pedestal that pop mythology had placed him on.
Wading through the boxes of manuscript lyrics in the archive gave me a fresh view of the role of the songwriter. Woody never wrote a cynical song in his life – he hated songs that made ordinary people feel they were worthless. Reading his words, I came to see cynicism as the true enemy of all of us who wish to create a fairer society and vowed to keep mine in check.
But the biggest lesson came from Nora. She felt that the deification of her father had robbed his work of its ability to challenge America’s image of itself. She was looking to cast out the myth of Woody Guthrie and force people to see the man as he really was: an ornery Okie, full of annoying contradictions and unexpected depths. When, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the neo-fascist British National Party began to win seats on local councils, Nora’s example gave me the courage to challenge the perceptions of my own audience.
I’ve long believed that the role of the artist is not to lead the people, but to be a signpost that points the way ahead. But what do you do if you believe that the people should be heading towards a territory they are unfamiliar with, one that makes them feel uncomfortable just talking about? Due to their commitment to internationalism, British leftists have traditionally avoided any discussion of identity politics. To talk about nationalism was taboo; to appear patriotic was heresy.
When the BNP began winning in Labour’s traditional strongholds in England, it became increasingly clear that this squeamishness was having a negative effect. By refusing to address the issue of Englishness, the left had created a vacuum which gave the BNP free rein to decide who did and who didn’t belong in England.
While I shared the left’s commitment to internationalism, I’d always had a strong sense of my own identity and being English played a part of that. The England that I loved was one of the most multicultural societies in Europe, and I saw that as a bulwark against the fascists, if only we could find the gumption to stick a St George’s flag onto it.
My first attempt to articulate that idea was the song ‘England, Half English’ which ends with me saying ‘Oh my country, what a beautiful country you are’. The first time I played it live, an old comrade asked, ‘You’re being ironic, right?’ His shocked reaction when I told him I was being serious convinced me that it is sometimes more constructive to challenge the beliefs of your audience than constantly reinforce them. I don’t accept accusations of ‘preaching to the converted’ – just like everyone else, activists need their spirits lifted by the solidarity of song – but I do relish those moments when I know my lyrics are taking the audience out of their comfort zone.
By far the biggest change since I began writing songs has been the digitisation of music. Where once it would take an age to get a topical song released – the miners’ strike had ended before ‘Between the Wars’ hit the shops – I can now write, record and post a song on the Internet, to be heard around the world in a matter of minutes.
That same technology allows teenagers to comment about the world without having to first learn to write songs, play guitar or do gigs as I had to. I’m glad about that, because it means more people are able to make a contribution, but songwriting is of a different stripe to posting your views online. It has taken me around the world and given me the chance to experience cultures other than my own, challenging me to raise my game to reach different audiences.
Performing my songs night after night while trying my best to engage with those people out there in the dark has taught me that, while music has power, it doesn’t have agency. Singing songs won’t change the world, no matter how much we might want it to. Music can bring us together in common cause, engage and inspire us, focus our anger, and raise funds and awareness, but ultimately the only people with the ability to bring about real change are in the audience, not on stage. Tomorrow, the singer will be gone, bringing his or her music to another town, but those who were in the audience will still be there, having to face up to the challenges of their environment.
If the singer has helped recharge their activism, if the songs that were sung have made them feel they are not alone in their struggle, then that is probably about as much as music can do. And although I fully recognise that it’s a small contribution in the overall scope of things, I keep faith in the ability of music to make a difference.
DORSET