Saturday, 28th November 2009.

The Boy Done Good

Billy Bragg. The name conjures up a lot of images to those who know him. If you were to brainstorm, you’d undoubtedly come up with the words ‘Essex’, ‘Socialist’, ‘New England’, ‘Left’ and probably ‘Hypocrite’. Certainly most of these are justified. Bragg’s distinctive Barking drawl has mellowed over the years (on his records, at any rate) but it saturates the early recordings, and it’s impossible to sing along to ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ without putting the ‘oiay’ in ‘say’. Bragg’s early output can be divided into two camps: the wistful, bittersweet love songs for single mothers and local tramps on one side, and on the other his penchant for hard-line socialist leanings. Bill Bailey was perhaps the first to truly summarise his work within the context of a single song, with his satirical ‘Unisex Chip Shop’:

“I used to buy my chips from an oppressive chip shop regime.
 The girl who worked there, she seemed happy,
 But I knew it was not what it seemed.
‘Do you want salt and vinegar’, was what they made her say,
 But in the language of the ghetto,
 That means ‘Help, I’m a woman in chains’
 I wanted to free her.
In my dreams I would see her.
Running naked through the woods round Rainham,
If I had some tigers I’d train them.
To protect her
From the sexual fascism that was lurking round the gherkins.”

And so on. Bill’s delivery is typically slurred, but buoyant – it’s an absolutely spot on impression, and official endorsement from the man himself has no doubt helped. It serves beautifully as a minute-long précis, but for those wishing to dig deeper, Bragg’s 2003 compilation Must I Paint You A Picture? gives perhaps the most complete introduction to his work – consisting as it does of two-minute post-punk masterpieces from Life’s A Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983), through the questionable lyrics of the cuts from 1991’s Don’t Try This At Home, and finally to the overtly political songs of England, Half-English (2002), performed ironically with a distinctly American twang. (The box set is worth seeking out, as the additional third disc opens with his memorably British answer to ‘Route 66’, the beautifully titled and quite essential ‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’.)

Personally, I’ve always preferred the earlier albums. There is something almost ethereal about that lone guitar: it’s a man recording in his bedroom at eleven thirty on a Friday night with a bottle of cheap cider, singing songs about the jilted girlfriends who by rights he should have been seeing. Almost every one of those early songs is a winner, from the unusual metaphor that is ‘Milkman of Human Kindness’ to the aching sense of loss that permeates ‘St Swithin’s Day’, where Billy drops in a frank metaphor for masturbation and still walks away with his dignity intact. He describes his education with a permanently raised eyebrow (“Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy / Just because I dress like this / Doesn’t mean I’m a communist”), and describes former lovers with tender affection that is nonetheless always firmly grounded, musing in ‘A Lover Sings’ about “Walking in the park, kissing on the carpet / And your tights around your ankles”.

Those accusations of hypocrisy, then. Garry Bushell – the same man who was successfully sued for libel after announcing that William Roache was as boring as his onscreen character, Ken Barlow – had harsh words for Bragg in 2006, when he accused him of “pontificating on a South London council estate when we all know he lives in a lovely big house in West Dorset”. Indeed, this appears to have been one of the biggest complaints about the man – remarks that his abhorrence of racism and xenophobia are unjustified, given that he lives in a predominantly white area that presumably – praise God! – has yet to be overrun by towel-heads, which thereby denies him the opportunity of seeing the Islamic, immigrant-filled cesspit that the BNP would believe us Britain has become. In other words, Billy’s singing for a lost world and has no frame of reference on the here and now. He’s outdated; needlessly nostalgic. He’s Stephen Green.

The first time I saw Billy was some three years before Bushell’s remark: August bank holiday in 2003, where he closed the Greenbelt festival. There are few artists who can follow The Polyphonic Spree, but Billy was one of them: a socially conscious, bittersweet and utterly grounded performance, a lament for love lost and the promise of new hope – a theme that rang particularly true with me after the year I’d had – and a timely reminder of what Greenbelt is all about, contrasting perfectly with the zany antics of DeLaughter’s merry band in the previous hour. Opening with the dreadful ‘Sexuality’ (a rare low spot in a canon of general excellence), he triumphantly declared “We can be what we want to be…well, unless you’re the Bishop of Reading”.

It was funny six years ago, but it more or less set the tone. I remember a friend of mine saying that she’d gone to see him back in 1997 – early 1997, when the political climate was just starting to hot up in time for the landslide at the beginning of May. I didn’t object to Jane’s attendance at one of Billy’s concerts, it’s just that she’s a rampant Conservative and I’m frankly a little curious as to why she went. “Yeah, he was good…but well, you know, he’s a socialist.”

That night at Greenbelt, Billy announced that “they’ve been trying to get me to come here for the last few years. Frankly, I haven’t felt like it before now, but I can see that for the first time in a long while the left’s starting to come together with – ”
“ – the right?” suggested a voice from the crowd.
“Nah, the church, actually, mate,” replied Billy. “Good heckle, though.”
Cheering.
“Seriously, though,” he went on. “I just came here from Reading and Leeds. Now, there’s two types of festival. There’s the sort that’s basically a hardcore rock gig that happens to be set in a field – that’s Reading. And then there’s this sort, where you want to come, and hang out with your mates all day, and be with people. It’s great.”

It was great, and it was a sentiment that Robert Fisher had echoed earlier when the Willard Grant Conspiracy were just starting their set: “I’ve got to say, we looked around a bit, and there’s lots of families, and people hanging out, and having fun, which is just what a festival should be”.

Back to Billy, who’s now reminiscing a bit more. “I was, y’know, at a hardcore folk festival a while back. One of the Morris dancers got hammered and carved something into his arm with the stick he was holding. Tripped over his bells in the end. I went to a couple of workshops. We were trying to splice the hyphen out of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and stick it so far up the arse of the BNP that they won’t feel like spouting any more of their racist shit.”

I think I agreed with most of what he said: the need for America to get back in touch with itself, and return to the barn-raising communal spirit for which it was once famous; the fact that we weren’t cross with the country but with the administration and the lunatic who ran it (and this was 2003, the year that Bush spilled blood over oil); the need for tolerance and fair trade. It was only when he sang “There is power in a union” that I started to get a little uncomfortable – unions serve their purpose but they also frighten me a little – and by the end of the set I’d realised that we weren’t at a concert, more a rally.

“Thing is,” Billy said, retuning his acoustic, “being part of the left brings with it all sorts of undertones. If you tell people you believe in a socialist society they assume you’re a Communist. Marxism served its purpose but I want to move away from the totalitarian ideology. Even that word, ‘ideology’, seems to have a lot of baggage. But if you tell people, as I do, that you want a compassionate society, they’ll understand what you’re saying almost immediately.”

You hear this, and then you think about that house, and you wonder. Is it hypocritical of an affluent, comfortable musician to sing about the angst of the common man, even if he’s been there himself? Is a failure to share everything you have a question of failing to practice what you preach? Is Billy in danger of becoming one of the hated lords that he sings about with such venom in his fantastic rendition of Leon Rosselson’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’? Are the walls in danger of rising up at his command?

You could argue, indeed, that any sort of materialist gains become a barrier to preaching about socialist ideals. We’ve seen it happen in the church: Jesus’ message of love and charity seems to have been all but lost in the slurry of designer-suit wearing fifty-somethings who appear on cable TV, stating that if you give them your money, God will heal your cancer. (It’s not even as if the cash is going to the people who need it; they’re spending it on satellite dishes to go on the roofs of mud huts in Polynesian villages, so that the natives can pay them even more money to hear the gospel.) I don’t want to advocate living in poverty at the expense of looking after your health: I have to think of my family, and in my experience money is a useful thing to have that enables us to do stuff. But where do you draw the line? Where does living comfortably become affluence become greed?

There’s one parable that makes us Western Christians particularly uncomfortable, and that’s the one about the rich man who approaches Jesus, asking what he should do to get into heaven. When told that he needs to sell everything he has, the man becomes downhearted and leaves, whereupon Jesus remarks that “it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven”. Some months ago, we examined this passage in a study group, and questioned whether we were showing sufficient compassion in our lives. The general consensus seemed to be that perhaps we weren’t doing enough, and that we didn’t even know what ‘enough’ was.

“I know what you mean,” said Anna – the pastor’s wife, a woman who in terms of giving her time is perhaps the most generous woman I know – who was leading the discussion. “But I think that in this case, Jesus’ message has to be looked at on an individual level. I think that in this instance the money had become a barrier. Jesus wasn’t saying it was wrong to have money. He was just saying that it was wrong to allow that money to intrude upon your relationship with God, and that’s what had happened to this man. So reading this parable doesn’t make me think that he wants us to sell everything we have. It just makes me think that we have to find our own particular barriers, whatever they are, and break them down.”

“I hope you’re right, Anna,” I said, “because that’s what I tell myself in the mirror every single morning. But the thing is, I know various atheists online who would argue that we’re diluting the message of the gospel to suit our own needs and lifestyles. And to be honest, I don’t have an answer for them.”

Having said all that, Billy’s one to put his money – or at least his time – where his mouth is, as is evidenced for example by his work supplying guitars to prisons. (“People are saying ‘What about the victims?’, which is fair enough,” he has apparently said. “I believe in punishment and the punishment should fit the crime. Twenty-five per cent of people, in my experience, in the U.K. should never be released again, but 75 per cent are going to be out again and they are possibly going to live next to you, so shouldn’t they be rehabilitated?”). When we saw him again at Greenbelt some years later, he’d been doing songwriters’ workshops with victims of terminal cancer. There are things going on, and perhaps there’s only so much you can do.

I mentioned all this to Emily some weeks back, and asked if Billy Bragg’s affluence made him a hypocrite.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But then, he’s no worse than a lot of the others. Look at Bono, for example.”

I'm not in the mood for trashing Bono today, much as he may deserve it, but she’s right. There’s such a thing as giving quietly, and for all we know Bono does exactly that: it’s wrong to misinterpret radio silence as a sign of general aloofness when it could just as easily indicate a desire to keep your good deeds away from the limelight. Jeremy Beadle, a man I detested for years, redeemed himself in my eyes upon his death when news emerged of his tireless charity work in the latter period of his life – work that stayed out of the headlines. But for all the good work that Bono might be doing, he’s still a pompous twat, and a tax exile to boot.

Some months ago I got involved in a discussion about gay musicians. The originator of the thread questioned whether it was hypocritical of gay singers to perform heterosexual love songs. This was wrong on so many levels that it was difficult to know where to begin, but let’s try and unpack it a little: in the first instance, love songs are love songs, and relatively few are unambiguously male-female. Even the ones that referred specifically to a member of a certain sex (and which were, typically, performed by a member of the opposite sex) could quite easily have had their genders reversed if necessary – in fact the field is more less narrowed down to male-female duets, specifically of the ‘Hey Paula’ variety. For the most part, the rest of them are pretty ambiguous: when I was ten or eleven and first discovering the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael and Erasure, I had no idea that any of them drove their cars on the other side of the street. It’s hard to say whether such knowledge would have made me like them less; I fear that it may have done. It’s not a very nice thing to admit, but I was prepubescent and didn’t know any better.

So I’d play songs like ‘Careless Whisper’ and imagined that George was singing to a girl; I experienced the same feelings when I first heard the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Domino Dancing’ and ‘Heart’ (in my defence, the video for the latter sees Neil Tennant wed Danijela Colic, who then cops off with a vampiric Ian McKellen). I even let the obvious camp of Freddie Mercury’s ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ pass me by, although God alone knows how this slipped under the radar. The same applied to anything by Erasure (although when we learned of Andy Bell’s sexuality, Ewan insisted that he’d known it all along, as Bell’s lament in the chorus of ‘Sometimes’ – “the truth is harder than the pain inside” – was “clearly”, in the eyes of my learned friend, “a metaphor for bumming”).

I suspect there are twenty-first century parallels, although I can’t imagine even the most innocent schoolboy watching Will Young prance his way through ‘Light My Fire’ and not know something was up. But does it matter? Readings of songs, you see, are two-fold: they’ll always mean something different to the singer than they will to the audience. When Paul McCartney sings that “in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me”, he’s talking about the spirit of the deceased Mary McCartney, who died when he was fourteen. Most other people, however, assume that he’s singing about Mary the Mother of Jesus. I daresay that there are a few people in Liverpool who can’t see any difference (although the Beatles were more popular) but in either case it doesn’t really matter that much, even though the pedant within me is screaming to correct them. Some people choose to interpret ‘Solsbury Hill’, a song so utterly perfect even Erasure couldn’t screw it up, as a metaphor for a man leaving a psychiatric hospital (an image that Peter Gabriel was to explore later, in 1980’s ‘Lead A Normal Life’). It’s actually about Gabriel’s decision to leave Genesis, but on some levels the misunderstanding actually works rather well.

The point is that once the song is out there you can only own it so far, and I can’t help thinking that when it comes to love songs, the sexuality of either composer or performer is completely immaterial. Everyone in the audience will hear the song in a different way – the builder, the paramedic, the artist, the accountant, the teacher, all with their own stories to tell. Some will feel as if it’s being sung directly to them. Some won’t be able to identify with it at all. Love songs are like that. But the singer doesn’t need to have experienced the events of the song in order to be able to perform it to a decent standard, although it helps – the fact that ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ was a career high point for Elton John was due, in no small part, to the fact that he was bleeding an artery dry on record.

There are exceptions. I actually believe some songs shouldn’t be touched. ‘Under The Bridge’ is one of them: the manifestation of Anthony Kiedis’ heroin addiction is so raw and unnerving and close to the knuckle that I don’t believe it’s right to do it. Another, coincidentally, is ‘Let It Be’, which occurred at a time of great turbulence for the Beatles, in the midst of a period of bickering and in-fighting from which they never truly recovered. But my list is entirely subjective and I am guilty of horrendous double standards. I haven’t forgiven All Saints for covering ‘Under the Bridge’, but I embraced with fervent vigour Johnny Cash’s take on ‘Hurt’, as well as his version of ‘In My Life’ – a song that Sean Connery ruined, but which Cash resurrected years later and which remains amongst my favourite Beatles songs. The been-there-done-that world-weary sentiment of his delivery has been done to death (do we really need any more comments that “Johnny Cash was the original gangster rapper?”), but when Cash sings ‘Some are dead and some are living / In my life, I’ve loved them all”, you know how much he means it.

Viewed from this perspective, the notion that a singer should only perform sexuality-appropriate material (music by gays, written for gays to sing about gays, with no gay left behind) is utterly ridiculous. Popular music doesn’t work that way: music is not unique to the performer, and the performance of your work by others ought to be seen as flattering rather than a burden, and if you don’t want your songs out there, don’t sing them to anyone. Taken to an extreme, you’d have to enforce the draconian principle that no one could sing any material that they hadn’t written themselves, which would mean we’d never have heard Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’, The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or Roxy Music’s ‘Jealous Guy’. (We’d also have been spared The Carpenters’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ and Duran Duran’s ‘911 is a Joke’, so every cloud has its silver lining.)

If you’re going to apply this principle to love songs, would it not be appropriate to extend it to songs of social responsibility? And with that in mind, should I renege on my assertion that ‘Imagine’ is inappropriate hypocrisy? Perhaps. Maybe the gravity of singing about the plight of the common man from the comfort of your Belgravia mansion is somehow more serious than singing about feelings you’ve never really experienced. Perhaps the gravity of songs about coal miners means it’s more important: perhaps Martyn Joseph’s ‘Please Sir’ is a more important song than ‘Have An Angel Walk With Her’. Perhaps.

I suppose that the question of my own hypocrisy, and the desire to sing from the viewpoint of the unfortunate when I myself have been very lucky, was with me that night at Greenbelt, as Billy led us in the last song of the night, an a cappella stomp through ‘Jerusalem’. Greenbelt’s not just about worship, it’s about awareness. The trade justice theme that ran through that weekend never seemed stronger than it did on the closing Monday, with constant references to the postcard petition that was due to be delivered to Tony Blair demanding fair trade laws, and a vibrant carnival on Monday afternoon.

I’ve long since been sceptical of the impact of such things – Live Aid was tremendous (the first. The second was shit) but, at the end of the day, barely scratched the famine’s surface – but as I said to a friend some time after the event, do you do nothing because you can’t do everything? Or do you do what you can? I’d have to add that this was pointed out to me during the carnival when I was having one of my more cynical moments. I probably don’t do enough; I try and avoid the bigger picture. But standing there, that night, part of the throng, I felt a curious mixture of elation and defiance, happiness and discontent, the determination to improve yourself and the world.

I slipped an arm round Emily’s waist and told her I loved her. And then the two of us joined the cry that appealed in one voice, however brief the sentiment, to change things for the better:

“I will not cease from mental fight
 nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
 ‘til we have built Jerusalem
 in England’s green and pleasant land.”

Whether you like Billy Bragg or hate him, it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment. Some contextual analysis is inevitable, but I can’t help thinking that we place too much emphasis on why a song is or is not appropriate to its performer, rather than listening to any message contained within it: it provides a convenient get-out clause, a way of easing our own consciences by maintaining that these would-be role models are no better than we are, all the time singing along to a rousing rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome’ before ignoring the retiring collection buckets on our way out. Perhaps we ought to be concentrating on the power of the songs themselves, rather than the baggage – or its notable absence – of the men who sing them.