THIRD TIME LUCKY

Billy Bragg will be touring at last, unless we’ve jinxed him. Bernard Zuel has spoken to the Bard From Barking twice before in the past two years.

Today’s the third time we’ve spoken ahead of what was meant to be a unique spin on the usual tour for the folksong-writing activist, or pop music socialist: three shows in each town, split between songs drawn from albums in the first part of his career on night one, albums from the second part of his career the second night, and an all things to all people mixed show on the third. It’s a neat hook for someone who has been coming here since the 1980s – solo; with band; with buddy/sidekick Wiggy; but thankfully never with an orchestra! – and is on nickname terms with the current prime minister (“how is Albo doing, generally?” he asks. “And how’s he doing as a geezer?”), and audiences seemed keen to indulge in multi-night lock-ins with him. But it’s been delayed twice already in 2020 and 2021 by you know what, and since that first tour announcement the second half of his career has grown an extra limb: 2021’s musically rich, emotionally packed The Million Things That Never Happened, not to mention another book, The Three Dimensions Of Freedom, to add to The Progressive Patriot: A Search For Belonging and Roots, Radicals And Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World. In the enforced lull, did he feel like he lost momentum? And I don’t mean sales wise, but rather personal intent and inspiration. “Yeah, I did. The first lockdown was like an adventure: what can we do, how can we engage with the way the world is, what’s going on - all the different ideas that people are expressing. That was really interesting. Then the second lockdown came, and when the second lockdown came I really did think, fuck, I’m not really sure how long this is going to last, I can’t just keep churning stuff out,” Bragg says. “I wasn’t one of these people who got a great deal from doing online gigs, playing to your iPhone in your living room, not being able to get any response. It wasn’t really my idea of doing a gig, so that’s when I came up with the idea of focusing on doing a record.” The triple night idea, the new album, you could say these was all so 2021. What’s left to spark the interest of long-time fans? “There’s shadow puppetry. I can always do a little bit of that for you, on the back wall,” he says, demonstrating from the seaside home he and his more immunocompromised wife, Juliet, holed up in during the worst of the plague times. “I can do animals, I do this for my granddaughters. And lots of grandpa’s campfire songs, which we greatly enjoy.” The shadow puppetry admittedly is novel, but Grandpa Bill might be the telling bit. After all, Bragg has now written several children’s songs, initially for the granddaughters but then the rest of us. One was a singalong version of Bear Hunt (based on Michael Rosen’s 1989 book, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt), which was followed by the whole of Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came To Tea. “I really enjoyed doing them, it was a completely different headspace. And it was a good way of kicking off the songwriting, because I’m not writing songs all the time the way I used to. I do other things in between: I write books, I’m shitposting on social media and stuff like that, lots of other creative things to do.” The only thing that put the brakes on his burgeoning king of the kids career – and he reminds me that one of his heroes, Woody Guthrie, was not averse to writing children’s songs either – was the fact his “grown-up” record was coming along swimmingly, if a little slower. “The last probably 20 years, [songwriting] is something I’ve had to tune into when I’m making an album: to make it an intuitive thing, get into that headspace. What generally happens is going to the studio with half a dozen songs and write another half dozen while I’m there or finish another half dozen I’ve woodshedded. That’s basically my songwriting process.” As for the shitposting? Well, it’s hardly shitposting, unless you’re a transphobe. “I think the arc of history is long, but it bends towards inclusivity, doesn’t it? So many of the movements that we see out there are about inclusiveness now. I’m expressing my support for the trans and non-binary community, and I’m really amazed by the number of antitrans activists I run into there who are dissing inclusivity, who see inclusivity as a negative, as a problem, whereas in the World Cup they’re trying to wear armbands to promote inclusivity and make everybody feel part of the whole thing.” As well as a rabid anti-trans campaign worldwide and Space Karen taking over Twitter, there has been a bit on since Bragg first devised this triple night show. For a start, Britain’s had about seven or eight prime ministers which is, well, a bit excessive. Yes, I’m well aware of the brazenness of an Australian who lived through Rudd/ Gillard/Rudd/Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison making such a comment. But really, how’s a dedicated musical socialist meant to keep up with topical diatribes about another soul-sucking Conservative PM when they park it and cark it before a writer can get his bearings? “We’re flying through them, yep, flying. The whole thing is crazy,” Bragg chuckles in a socialist accent. “Trying to keep on top of that is really strange. Sometimes you just have to step back from it. The times when you could just write an incisive song, things need to move a bit slower to do that. It’s just not possible to keep up on that kind of change.” Was Liz Truss in the long enough for him to write a song about her? “She wasn’t in long enough for me to sneak her intoGreat Leap Forward, that’s where I usually put them. Anything topical I usually stick it in there, but before I’d even got my bearings on her, ffft, there she’s gone. There goes another one! So, no, sadly, she wasn’t. “But she lives on now as a kind of zombie prime minster. She was at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday with all the former Prime Ministers, and [I thought] my God, she is going to be there for the next 20 years, turning up to remind us what a terrible, terrible prime minister she was. At least Boris kind of bluffs it out, still thinks he’s Winston fucking Churchill but Liz Truss looks like a pot plant.” What a cultural tragedy that the pot plant didn’t make it into Great Leap Forward. “I’m glad because what she did was she kind of broke the idea of neoliberalism, her kind of cosplay Thatcherism is in the dumper now. They know now they can’t do that: not only did the public not want it but the market don’t want it. And as Thatcher famously said, you can’t buck the markets. Billy Bragg quoting Margaret Thatcher … what a time to be alive.

Full dates and tickets from handsometours.com/tours/billy-bragg