THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.207 - BILLY BRAGG

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Adam talks with English musician Billy Bragg about the time they met in Glastonbury when Billy was keeping some unexpected company, why manners matter on social media, the challenge of being a progressive patriot, what posters Billy had on his wall as a boy, Dial-A-Disc and other ways we listened to music in the olden days, why Neil Young and Stanley Kubrick made their way to Barking, the fondness that Billy and I share for a certain brand of pudding, how Billy's approach to politics has evolved over the years, the fascinating place that Skiffle holds in music history and close encounters with Bob Dylan and David Bowie.CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGEThis conversation was recorded face to face in London on August 1st, 2023Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSBILLY BRAGG WEBSITEADAM AND JOE INTERVIEW BILLY BRAGG AT GLASTONBURY - 2000 (YOUTUBE)BILLY BRAGG'S SKIFFLE PLAYLIST (SPOTIFY)JIMMY PAGE (AGED 13) & BAND - 'MAMA DON'T WANT TO SKIFFLE ANYMORE', 'COTTONFIELDS' - 1957 (YOUTUBE)BILLY BRAGG - TANK PARK SALUTE (LIVE IN MILWAUKEE) - 2010 (YOUTUBE)MAVIS NICHOLSON INTERVIEW WITH BILLY BRAGG - 1986 (YOUTUBE)BILLY BRAGG - FULL ENGLISH BREXIT (LIVE PERFORMANCE) - 2017 (YOUTUBE)NEIL YOUNG - HARVEST TIME (CLIP) - (YOUTUBE)DELANEY AND BONNIE - GROUPIE (SUPERSTAR) - 1972 (YOUTUBE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan. Hey.

How are you doing, listeners? I'm just doing a quiet hey there because Rose doesn't like it. And I don't want her to stop walking, as she has now done. Come on, Rosie. Come on, sweetie. Let's go. There you go. It's nice out here, Rosie, honestly. Look, I mean, we're pretty lucky.

What are you eating? You... Oh, Rosie. You hound. Don't eat that. That is literally the plops of another creature. We can get you some stuff that's at least half as good as that when we get home. Come on, sweetie. Don't eat plops. Don't tell me what to do.

I didn't want to come for this walk. And the very least you can do is allow me to enjoy some of these little Maltesers of Plops. Have you finished? I have. Oh, man. It's a lot of negotiation to be done with dog legs these days. It's really quite a lovely morning out here in the Norfolk countryside in the early part of October 2023. I wanted to put up this podcast on the weekend, but it wasn't possible because we were hosting a big birthday party for my daughter, who was 15, and so she had quite a few of her pals from school and her various sport teams over on the weekend. And you can imagine what that was like, podcasts, especially if you have children of your own and you have

hosted a teen party. Or maybe if you don't have children, you can remember what those parties were like. Fifteen as well. I think maybe they're the gnarliest ones, because you are, in so many ways, still very much a child. And yet it feels as though all the most exciting, verboten parts of adulthood are within your grasp. And one way for you to express that is to just drink too much booze. And the phrase pre-drinking is one that I hear from a lot of teens.

So they turn up to the party, already pretty well oiled, and then it's puking time. No serious casualties, I'm happy to say and i think a good time was had by nearly all but it certainly didn't make me miss those days i have to be honest i mean yes it would be lovely to be 15 again in some ways but those leery parties are not the part that I really miss. OK, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 207, which features an enjoyable and rambling conversation with English writer and musician Billy Bragg.

Bragg Facts. Stephen William Bragg was born in 1957 in Barking. That's in the county of Essex, which hovers above the east of London. Billy has been described by the Daily Mail newspaper as a left-wing, rabble-rousing singer-songwriter, which, given that he must have roused a rabble or two in his time, is true.

Billy learned to play guitar in his teens with the help of his friend and next-door neighbour Philip Wigg aka Wiggy with whom in 1977 he formed a punky pub rock band called Riff Raff that recorded a few singles but split a few years later. Odd jobs and even a short stint in the army followed but Billy's frustration with the kind of music clogging up the charts in the early 80s, that to his ears wasn't really saying anything. I imagine he was talking about quite a lot of the music that I absolutely loved at the time, encouraged him to start playing again and making the sort of music he wanted to hear.

This time it was just him and his electric guitar under the name Spy vs Spy, a nod to a strip in Mad magazine. Billy's demo tape caught the attention of A&R man and sometime Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner, who, fun fact, went to the same posh school that I did, Westminster, although a bit before I was there. And in July 1983, Billy's first album, Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy, was released. That record featured music that blended elements of folk and punk in the service of songs like New England, later a hit for Kirstie McCall, which were less polemical and more personal but his next album brewing up with billy bragg in 1984 reflected the anger he felt at the thatcher government's handling of the miners strike that year and 1985's between the wars ep cemented his profile

as an explicitly political songwriter oh i just stung my calves on some very bitey nettles. Spicy. In the mid-1990s, Billy was given the chance to engage with his love of traditional American music when Nora Guthrie, the daughter of folk legend Woody Guthrie, asked Billy to set some of her father's unrecorded lyrics to music. And with the help of the band Wilco, Billie recorded the album Mermaid Avenue, released in 1998, featuring original music by Wilco and Billie, with lyrics written years before by Woody Guthrie.

The record, which includes the Wilco-slash-Bragg favourite California Stars, was a hit, and two more volumes of Bragg-Wilco-Guthry songs followed. In addition to music and Billy's ongoing political activism, obviously usually in support of the Labour Party, occasional boosting of the Greens, smattering of sympathy for the Liberal Democrats, but so far nothing solid for the Tories, smattering of sympathy for the Liberal Democrats, but so far nothing solid for the Tories. Billy has written several books, including The Progressive Patriot, published in 2006, in which Billy considers what it means to be English,

his book on skiffle, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, How Skiffle Changed the World, which came out in 2017, and in 2019, The Three Dimensions of Freedom, about how freedom of speech has become a battleground in an era of growing authoritarianism. music across the UK and Ireland in support of the Roaring 40, a career retrospective collection released later this month, October. And you can find tour dates on Billy's website. There's a link in the description of today's podcast. My conversation with Billy took place in London at the beginning of August this year, and he arrived before me. I was late that day. Bad organisation, as per. But I found Billy in a buoyant mood watching the Women's World Cup game against China on an iPad.

We had a good chat about things including manners in social media, the challenge of being a progressive patriot, what posters Billy had on his wall as a boy, a couple that you might not expect, why Neil Young and Stanley Kubrick made their way to barking, the fondness that Billy and I share for a certain brand of pudding, how Billy's approach to politics has evolved over the years, the fascinating place that Skiffle holds in music history.

That's a great little overview of that from Billy at one point. That's like a kind of feverish conspiracy theory, but real. And Billy tells me about close encounters with Bob Dylan and David Bowie. But I began by reminding the barking bard of the only other time that we met. A long, a long time ago. When Billy was keeping some surprising company. Back at the end with a small waffle slice. But right now, with Billy Bragg. Here we go.

Ramble chat, that's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Yes, yes, yes. Do you remember the first time that we met? Maybe the only other time that we have met. Was it when you were in Brixton Prison? I brought some guitars in.

That was it. But before then, it was Glastonbury. Oh, mate, what happens at Glastonbury stays at Glastonbury. Do you know how many Glastonburys I've done since 2000? Yeah, I know. Probably 23, I would imagine. Well, if there had been 23, yeah, but there haven't. There have only been 18, and I've done since 2000? Yeah, I know. Probably 23, I would imagine. Well, if there had been 23, yeah, but there haven't.

There have only been 18, and I have done all of them. Okay, good. So, yeah, forgive me if I don't. No, that's okay. Me and Joe Cornish were there, and we were doing coverage for BBC Three, and you were there with your pal, Boris Johnson. Oh, I do remember that. That's one thing I can't forget, unfortunately.

What was the deal? Someone had hooked you up to do some kind of wacky opposites attract kind of TV show. Yeah. Let me just rewind a bit. Firstly, I want to assure your listeners, at the time, he was merely the editor of The Spectator. He was a harmless buffoon. Harmless buffoon who had appeared on Have I Got News For You and got himself some notoriety off the back of that. Exactly.

In many ways, Adam, he was in the same constellation as you. Quite right. You're very certain, you know, you and Joe. Although we were more harmless, I would venture. Just because you didn't go to Eton. But anyway, let me just – he was making a program for Radio 4 called Why People Hate the Tories. So obviously I was a prime interviewee for that.

And in the course of that conversation, I said to him, you know, arguing that you don't live in the real world, you people, I said, you've probably never even been to Glastonbury, have you? He said, no, no, I haven't, no. I said, well, how old are you? You've not been to Glastonbury. Anyway, the producer said to me, oh, you know what? We should get him down to Glastonbury. So I thought that was a jolly joke as well.

I thought it would be a laugh. So the next glass, though, they got him down there, and it began awfully. He forgot to get off the train at Castle Kerry. That was the start of it all. There is a video on YouTube. Unfortunately. I think there's a couple of videos. There's one that I will post a link to in the description of today's episode

where you can see me and Joe interviewing you, and then it cuts to some footage of you and Boris meeting at Castle Kerry and then wandering around a little bit. And then you play a song for me and Joe. You played some Lewis Carroll lyrics. Oh, yeah, yeah. We went to the poetry tent.

Right. And I sort of blagged us a five-minute spot. I can sing the Jabberwocky. The whole thing? Yeah, it's like a country song. Twas brilliant and the slithy tools Did Guyron Gimble in the way Like Johnny Cash, you know, like that.

It's easy. And he did some of the Iliad in the original Demotic Greek which just sounded like a man growling. It was most off-putting. But at the time, because he had his kind of uh of i've got news for you fame people were like pleased to see him i mean imagine if you went there now you know they'd be they'd put him in the wicker man wouldn't they well would they this is the question about boris johnson because i mean you felt the warmth of his personal charm

right i did and because me and jo Joe, Joe dressed up as Boris Johnson, I forgot he had a silly sort of blonde wig on and we made some big goofy teeth out of cardboard. And so that's how we started our conversation with you with Joe pretending to be Boris Johnson. And then I think we were anxious not to be too buffoonish ourselves. So we kind of pivoted to asking slightly more serious questions about what are you doing with Boris Johnson? Is he, is Joe's grotesque parody of Boris Johnson accurate or not? And you were saying, no, it's not really, don't underestimate the guy, which was the thrust of what you were saying.

Scary, huh? Yeah. Yeah. The things we do at Glastonbury, see, this is the thing, this is why what happens at Glastonbury should stay at Glastonbury. You know, we've all we do at Glastonbury, see, this is the thing. This is why what happens at Glastonbury should stay at Glastonbury. You know, we've all done things at Glastonbury we've been somewhat ashamed of, even if it's just pooing in the hedge. Not that I've done that, I should add.

But, you know, the stain on my Glastonbury experience is I took Boris around. But you did have an insight into… And some bastard filmed it. Several bastards. That's right. You had an insight into his most powerful weapon. I did. And the thing that has enabled him to do what he's done, really,

which is to come across as a kind of likable guy. But there was something that did happen. It was more telling about him, really, and who he is. All the time we were there, we were under real pressure to get him back on the train for a certain time. And he was constantly giving me the watch, saying, I've got to be on that train, whatever happens. And I'd organized there to be a Jeep,

come and get him, to get him to the castle, all the way through, all the way through. He's like, you've got to get me, I've got to get back, blah, blah, blah, blah.

As it happened, where we were when we finished filming, I said to him, you know, Boris, it will be quicker if we walk back from here. You know, it'd be about a 10 minute walk.

We'd probably have to wait 10 minutes for the Jeep to get, if that, might be 15. Why don't we just walk? So he's like, yeah, fine. We we went to stone circle we swept down through the stone circle we were coming down through the i think we're coming down through the markets and there was a guy a greenpeace guy or something like that one of those guys handing out flyers who

boris went to school with went to eat some with and he's he was like oh wow mate and he's talking i'm standing there talking i'm talking and and talking. And I'm like, Boris, mate. Tapping the watch. Tapping the watch. Yeah, it's time, mate. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be a minute. And I'm like, look, Boris, I'm really sorry, but I've got to go now because I've got something to do. So I'm going to have to leave you here on your own to make your own way back to the pre-event stage.

And he's like, yeah. And that says more about him that he's only in the minute. Whatever responsibility he has to anybody else outside of that minute is overridden by the minute that he's in. And that is a kind of annoying trait in a mate, but it's a really dangerous trait in a prime minister. And I think having, you know, seen what he went through with Partygate, clearly when he was in that moment, that's all he was thinking. He wasn't thinking about any of the ramifications,

about what it means to anybody else, because he certainly wasn't thinking about his PA who was pestering me all the time to get him on the train when he was talking to his mate. And that, to me, was the thing most strongly that at the time I thought that was a bit out of order. You're supposed to be somewhere else at a certain time. You do your best to get there.

I felt irresponsible leaving him there, frankly. He didn't feel irresponsible at all. He's not a big-picture thinker. He's not very accountable. And I think accountability is one of the things that are starting to seep away from our discourse, our political life, you know, Trump, Boris, people breaking the rules and not caring what the consequences are. I find that really, really troubling, you know, and that was in a microcosm. That's what he kind of did to whoever it was that he was supposed to be with at that particular time i saw you i actually didn't

see the tweet because i am no longer on twitter but i read about you retweeting a talk that graham norton had done yeah at the cheltenham literary festival this year, 2023, and Graham was talking about reframing cancel culture as accountability culture and just taking the emphasis off the whole cancellation thing. I'm big on that. I think cancel culture is a form of accountability. There has to be a balance, Adam. There has to be a balance between free speech and accountability.

Free speech, express your opinion, but if you can't express your opinion without being abusive, then that's when accountability comes in. So it speech, express your opinion. But if you can't express your opinion without being abusive, then that's when accountability comes in. So it needs to be a balance. You can have too much accountability. You know, revenge is too much accountability. And the thing it pivots on is equality. Equality in the middle so that you get a balance. And it's treating the person you're talking to with mutual respect. Then you have an opportunity then to disagree with each other without it all falling apart and I think there's not enough of that

especially not on Twitter but throughout our social discourse and it's a real problem going forward I think because it's you know it keeps people you know particularly women women put up with a huge amount of abuse online for nothing more than expressing an opinion and it's just not acceptable

and another talk that happened this year, which you were part of, was at the Light Gets In Music and Philosophy Festival. And the talk was called Manners Maketh the Man. Yes. And what was your position then? So it was presumably that we need more of those kinds of manners. Yeah.

More respect, I think think a little bit more responsibility and but really i think the real problem is accountability because i think responsibility and accountability are two different things we say you know i take responsibility for that and by saying that you're articulating that it's you that's got to change your views right but when you say you hold someone to account the the implication is there's another person involved saying this is not acceptable. You're, you know, in that sense. So I think accountability is more important

because if it's always you taking responsibility, you end up in the Boris Johnson situation where you can mess around with it and you can get away with a, you know, kind of like a sheepish grin and a fluff of your hair and you can get away with it. Whereas if it's accountability that is the red line, then there's always someone to say, I'm sorry, that's not acceptable.

And I think we just need a little bit more of that in our discourse, in our political life, just to balance things back up again so that we get back onto a playing field that's kind of based on, in fact, based in, you know, broadly accepted truth. Because truth is obviously, you know, it's all to do with perspective. But trying to get in an area where we agree with each other, that's what we're talking about. Or if not agree, at least be able to talk about it.

I don't mean agree on the issue. I mean agree on the framework. One of the things about socialism in the old days when things were ideological is it gave you a framework to discuss things. You know, we live in a post-ideological world now. Whether that's better or worse, I don't really know. But at least it gave you a framework to have a discussion around. If you don't have some parameters, if you don't have, you know, liberty, equality, accountability as the framework, three-dimensional space in which to have a discussion, then you're all over the

place, aren't you? You know, if you think that the definition of freedom is being able to say whatever you want to say to whoever you want to say, whenever you want to say it, and no comeback, that's not really freedom, is it? That's just Donald Trump's Twitter feed, and we all know where that leads to. So consequently, things have to be balanced up with a bit of accountability. How do you think we got to that point? I mean, do you think that really the internet and particularly social media just blew it all up? Or were we heading that way anyway? I think every time there's a new medium, people have to find out where the parameters of that is. You know, when newspapers came in, and there were newspapers everywhere, you know, people were

getting liable, you know, they had to bring in libel laws. They had to bring in limits to freedom. You know, one of the great things about liberty is it doesn't work for everybody unless there are hard, fast rules. If you don't have any rules whatsoever, then you're really in trouble. And if you're a free speech absolutist, then whoever's got the loudest voice and the most money and is called Elon Musk is going to dominate the discussion, you know. Whereas if we really want to have a discussion,

then there has to be a space where we can speak without being shouted down. It's hard to do that online, you know. I mean, you talk about that Graham Norton. Yeah. Yeah. I retweeted that. What he also said in there is that perhaps if you want to learn about trans rights, it might be better to listen to the parents of trans kids and trans kids

rather than author of a book about wizards, words to that effect, which I retweeted that as well because I actually happen to agree with that. And J.K. Rowling, the wizard writer, came back and accused me and Norton of being in favour of rape and death threats, which I'm absolutely the opposite of that. I mean, you know, nobody, nobody, definitely not JK Rowling, definitely not. As a woman, you know, just as a woman, she should not have to face that kind of stuff online. And I would never, ever endorse that. But that's what she accused me of. And it's

that escalation. Rather than accept and reasonably say, well, you know, she could come back and say, well, it's not just about trans kids. It's also about, you know, young cis girls. You know, she could have engaged in that way. She went straight in and, you know, didn't play the ball, played the player. Yeah. And it's that. I mean, she's been forced into an impossible position now. She's kind of dealing with a kind of mania that has been.

Yeah. That she's found herself in. Nobody should have to face the kind of abuse that she faces yeah it's totally totally unacceptable by the same token you do look at some of the things she says and you just think what are you what are you doing yeah yeah yeah so you have to i mean i really you know we're all we're all capable of doing it you know firing something off that you think is absolutely fair and someone else has a different perspective on it and you actually realise you've inadvertently offended them. Now, if I do that, I do my best to respond and apologise.

That's not my intent. I didn't really mean to, you know, that's not what I was getting at. And if people keep coming back at me, I just keep apologising. There's not much else I can do. But if I see someone make, you know, a racist statement or something and rather than apologising or trying to correct it, they double down, then I think you have to think to yourself,

well, hang on a minute, there is something wrong here. If someone apologises and puts their hands up and says, look, you know, I mean, on my Twitter feed it says, you know, beware all you enter here, you know, on Twitter, it's always going to be that perception trumps intention. Because when I have people talking about cancel culture and say, you know, you're not allowed to say these things anymore, it's such tosh. Of course you're allowed to say them, but you have to think about it. You have to think about these things. And as someone who's been writing for a long time about English identity,

that's a dynamite thing. That's a really, you mess around with that and it blows up in your face. Yes. Particularly if you've got left-wing followers like I have. So you've got to be really, really careful how you're articulating it, how you're putting out those ideas. You know, because I'm trying to put them out there. I believed in the, around the turn

of the century, that the failure of the left to talk about identity, particularly the English identity, had left a vacuum which the British National Party had filled. And it left them with the ability to be able to kind of dictate who does and who doesn't belong. And it left them with the ability to be able to kind of dictate who does and who doesn't belong. And we need, you know, we have the more progressive politics.

We need to be articulating a sense of Englishness that people can feel that they belong to that. And if we don't, if we just say, I'm not talking about that, you know, I don't want to go there. There's loads of different types of socialism. Anyone on the left recognize that. And there's different types of patriotism. Yeah.

People have different reasons why they love the country. And it's only when you have to adhere to someone's narrow idea of what that is, because I think the traditional patriot, the things that they love are in many ways immutable. You know, their institutions, their monarchy, their flag. Yes, it's more a fear of change and it's... Well, it's just a stability thing, isn't it? And hierarchy. I think hierarchy plays a big thing in it as well.

Whereas for myself, it's values. You know, the values that we're supposed to uphold, which are the ones that they ask people who are getting British citizenship to understand, which is, you know, the rule of law. Nobody is above the law. Tolerant society, you know. All these things are positive

things you know respect for people's freedom all these positive things they're the things that i think are best about our country that don't mean they only belong to our country there's other countries got them as well but you know if we're going to try and uphold those values when we fail to that's when i get angry and that's because i'm a patriot because i love my country and i hate to see it failing to live up to those ideals that I believe that we, you know, we all of us should be trying to live up to. Yeah, and yet in a glib way,

it's very easy for the internet to kind of recast that as like, oh, it's a certain type of lefty nationalism. Yikes. Yeah, yeah, it's the whole woke thing, isn't it? Yeah. I think there's a fear among some people on the right of, and I don't wish to put this question in a pejorative way, but I think that they perceive things like empathy

as not the sort of thing that a man should express. They're kind of un-male things, you know. Empathy, compassion, not owning a gun, these kind of things. They see them as, if not feminine traits, because I don't think they are feminine traits, I think they're universal traits, but they see them as not the sort of thing that makes what they define as a man.

Yeah, I guess a certain type of... Yeah, yeah. Well, these are the guys who are always banging on about woke. These are the guys who are always trying to, you know, because when you look at what it is that is woke, in inverted commas, it's always things that are based in empathy, feeling for other people, compassion for other people. policy, they're trying to push back the progress we've made in individual rights over the last 60 years, you know, if because I think it's, it's clear to most people that if anti trans campaigners do manage to make it impossible for transgender people, non binary people to live their lives, they will then move on to gay marriage, they'll move on to trying to push gays and lesbians back in the closet. And if they win that they'll move on to gay marriage they'll move on to trying to push gays and lesbians back in the closet

and if they win that they'll move on to abortion rights like they have done in the United States of America they're just moving wherever they can to push back against any kind of idea or expression that is not what they consider to be heteronormative so that's the extreme on the right but then I was thinking of like

people on the left who look at you and go, oh, I don't know about this. I smell nationalism. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They definitely it definitely is some of that. There are some people who still can't can't be dealing with that won't be doing with that. And that's why I say when you talk about it, you have to be very careful the language you use. You know, you can talk about it, you can address these things, but you have to make sure that what you're talking about is in a way that takes on board the fact that you can both be a nationalist and an internationalist. You know, I totally reject this idea that people are either people from somewhere or people from nowhere. You know, I'm a classic cosmopolitan me. I work all over world i go everywhere and i'm i feel a citizen of the world you come and see me play live and at the end of the night i say thank you very much ladies and gentlemen my name is biddy bragg i'm from barkin essex all right because i know where i belong i know where i'm from and those two things are not you know the opposite ends of a scale you can be both for those things you know i spent the entire lockdown putting together a huge one of my photo

books about our family history because my nephew's my brother's oldest boy lives in the house we grew up in now my mum passed away and he's moved in there and he was asking me who lived in the house before and a bit of the history and I thought I must I must put all the old photos in a book for him and then I thought well I could actually write everything I know about the family history in there as well and put it into a narrative and explain to him, you know, what his granddad did in India in the war and what his great-granddad did in the First World War and, you know, what I know about where they're living in Barking and East Ham

and why his great-great-grandfather come out of Essex and, you know, what everyone knew about family history. So I sort of put that together and knocked up a few of those for the family. That's great. Yeah. You could almost say it's my hobby, I suppose. That sort of, I just kind of get into that family history thing. Did your parents talk about their history a lot?

Did you know about it when you were a teenager? Well, I did this project. We had calligraphy lessons. And I thought, well, our family tree will look nice. So I sat down with my dad, and he sent me around to see my great or his aunt my great aunt so that would be my grandfather's sister who's the last of her generation or the only one of her generation i ever knew she was born in 1888 and she lived around the corner from our house in a house it was exactly the same as ours built at the same time top two down but she

was in the upstairs and she still had gas light right so this So this is like, this would be 71, 72. So just going to see her was like going back into Victorian times. And if you took the photos, what she could remember, who was who and all that stuff. I mean, she died in 73. My dad died in 76. So just before it all disappeared, I managed to make notes, the basics, you know, so I kind of know who's who in the photos.

Your dad was a milliner, is that right? No, he wasn't. Where did he get that? He did make hats, yeah, he worked for a hat company. But most of the time I knew him, he was a warehouseman. But when I was growing up, he worked For Amazon? Not quite, no. Where I grew up in Barking, everybody worked for Ford's,

or one of the ancillary companies. So yeah, he worked in a warehouse, that one of the ancillary companies. So yeah, he worked in a warehouse, that's what he did. Did your mum have a job? Yep, yep. When I was in my school days, she was in charge of a gang of women who put leaflets through doors. A girl gang? Yeah, they were, yeah. She'd go around and make a chalk mark on the corner where she'd been and off there.

What kind of leaflets? It wasn't always leaflets. Sometimes it was samples of things. Okay. So the leaflets were just a standard. She wasn't rabble-rousing. No, no, no, no. It was like, you know, five pence off of Daz.

Yeah, okay. Things like that. But sometimes it was physical samples. So one time we had, you know, tuck biscuits. Sure. When they first come out, we had just boxes and boxes. These crackers, yeah. We lived on them for a while out, we had just boxes and boxes of these crackers. Yeah.

We lived on them for a while. They were great. And – TUC, I always – Yeah, TUC. But yeah, how you will put that through someone's letterbox, I don't know. Without crushing it, I don't know. Did you all talk and stuff? And did you have supper together and chat about the world and politics?

No, we didn't talk about politics at all. Ah, did you not? Right. No. In Barking, the Labour Party get in whatever. I mean, Barking's been, you know,

Labour since 1935 when it was invented. It was chopped out of Essex as a constituency, which is not unusual. I mean, where I live in West Dorset, it's been Tory since 1886, so it's not a weird thing.

Yeah. But everything was Labour where I lived, you know. What kind of things would you chat about, do you remember? Yeah, I would talk to my dad about what he did in India during the war. I'd talk to him about that.

I'd talk to my mum sometimes about her Italian ancestors. Her grandfather came from a place called Minori, and he'd talk to her about her upbringing, these kind of things. And just generally family chit-chat. My nan as well, I had a conversation with her and three of her sisters once in which they had a fabulous argument about whether this event we were talking happened in the First World War or the Second World War. And she was like, no, no, no, that was the First World War.

And it was resolved by Aunt Lil saying, no, that's when Albert come home and he had that big black thing on his shoulder and when it burst, it was full of soot. Don't you remember? And they all went, oh, yeah, yeah. And I'm sitting there like, this is just gold this is just gold wow so those kind of i've always been into family history you know i've always been looking in boxes upstairs always looking in photos trying to work out who's who and all that kind of stuff so i have a really strong sense of belonging

for a cosmopolitan person like myself which is is why I feel totally at ease, evil way. I mean, my brother, as I say, my nephew lives in the house we grew up in. My brother's just been down with his grandkids come down for it because we live in Dorset now by the ocean. And the little one's got my old box room, poor little thing. I said to her, is the wall still damp? Where you used to have your Olivia Newton-John posters. Indeed, my Olivia Newton-John posters I had.

I had the Marx Brothers. I had the Easy Rider poster. Because I had a Saturday job in a hardware store, which had a record shop in the basement. So I'd go in and spend all my money down in the record shop. I'd get my lunch hour in the booth, sitting in the booth with the record on. And they sold posters as well, did they? Of course they did, yeah. Yeah, record shops always

sold posters. That's right. So I had Olivia Newton-John, I had Simon and Garfunkel. Posters were such a big deal in those days. They were a big deal, weren't they? Yeah, they were a really big deal. Me and Joe used to spend like whole afternoons in the West End in all the super nerdy film poster shops. Huge, yeah, yeah. And also, I would go out the back

of the record shop on Saturday, and the back there had like a skip there. And in the skip, they had the back of the record shop on Saturday, and the back there had a skip there. And in the skip, they had the promotional material for the record. Oh, sweet booty. So, yeah. So I would go in there, and I got a triangle thing that sort of hung and spun in the shop. Once I saw I'm in a garfunke, on the other side, Bob Dylan,

which if I had Smoky Robinson in there, that would be my entire life. I had that hanging in my bedroom for a while and i had a great sticky fingers kind of fold out thing that eventually rolling stones yeah yeah i framed it and gave it to wiggy for his four year for something wiggy's your best mate he is and do you still see i do i still see him he's around good yeah yeah he's around yeah in fact the last thing we did before the lockdown was Wiggy's 60th birthday. Yeah. We got together, Riff Raff, the old band, and we'd done a gig at Dingwall's.

This is your first band? Yeah. That you formed with Wiggy, who taught you how to play the guitar? He did, he did. Oh, this is terrible. Adam, oh God. Oh, time.

50 years ago next year, oh my God. Oh, you don't look the day over 30. Yeah, he did. He taught me. I wanted to play guitar so much and I couldn't master it. And then Wiggy, who's two years younger than me, he got hold of it. He got electric guitar.

I could hear him playing electric guitar through the wall. So I'm like, I've got to have a word with him. Rod Stewart songbook. That's what he got me. He got me to buy the Rod Stewart songbook. I said, look, we like these songs. We love these songs. Let's learn these songs rather than learn Do, Re, Mi and all that.

What was the first one you tackled, do you remember? Oh, probably something like Ooh La La. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Two or three chords, you know, those kind of songs. Nothing. And also the Rod Stewart songbook, because it was based on albums, had Dylan songs in it as well because he always covered a Dylan song. So I was kind of, that's what I was interested and then i got a dylan song book and dylan songs it

turned out were all g um f and uh c f and g7 difficult strumming though with dylan isn't it like really straightforward is it oh i guess like that but then sometimes his phrasing is weird though isn't it my phrasing is weird adam okay isn't it? My phrasing's weird, Adam. Okay. Shouldn't worry about it. Yeah. Basically what happened with me was I didn't have an older sibling to turn me on to music. So I had to rely on my mate's elder sisters. My parents didn't buy a record player. We never had a record player.

But they bought me a reel-to-reel tape machine. Big old thing it was. And I taped a lot of stuff off the radio, obviously. But... What, just with holding the mic in front of it? Yeah, sometimes with my mum saying things on it or, you know, someone ringing the doorbell or the phone going.

Have you still got any of those tapes? I have. I've got them all, sadly, yeah. I dread to think what they sound like. But more importantly than that, I had a mate round the corner, Paul Charman, whose sister Leslie had impeccable taste and she had Motown Chartbusters volume three, four and five.

I went round and recorded those. And then he came around one day with Bridge Over Trouble Water. And he knew I was obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel. And he had Bridge Over Trouble Water. And he just came around with it like that and went like that with it on the door. And I was like, oh, my God. He said, yeah, come around tomorrow. We'll go down.

He had like a lean-to at the bottom of his garden. And we went down there and recorded through the air as well, you know, the mic by the dance set. Yeah. Yeah. So you can, I always thought it was on the record, but actually it's me and Paul Charman talking in very high, squeaky voices quietly in the background.

It sounds like birds. And it was one of those things you could flip over, you know. And then a few other friends, elder sisters, had other Simon and Garfunkel records. So I was in pig heaven with those, just listening to those. That would be good to hear that version of Bridge Over Troubled Water with, like, extra production layer. That's right, yeah.

The young Billy Brown. Yeah. The remastered version. Yeah, yeah. With the birds as well, the Paul Charman's Garden, because it backed onto Barking Park, like all our houses backed onto the park, which was a boon when we were growing up.

So, yeah, so that was kind of my introduction to writing. So I was writing songs then before I learned how to play the guitar. Yeah. I was just obsessed with songwriting. You know,

I was one of those kids who wrote poetry at school like we all did but I just didn't stop. Like we all did. Yeah, everyone did, didn't they? They had to in English

but everyone else stopped but I didn't stop. I don't know why everyone else stopped but I didn't. Because poetry was always seen as the most cringy thing wasn't it like you've obviously you've obviously never given a girl a poem actually i have i have i do like

poems i gave my wife poems and she but they were sort of silly poems they were tongue in cheek oh mate don't be doing tongue in cheek with me i've done a whole life of tongue in cheek billy i'm trying to get out of it at this late stage. Too much tongue, not enough cheek, I would say. I want to clarify though, the sentiment was not

Tongue in Cheek. Okay. It was just, they were humorous and, you know, they were like, they weren't totally

heart on sleeve. No, no, I've written poems like that as well. Yeah. To my, in the old days

when we used to communicate over vast distances by fax, I would, on a flight, I would write her a poem or something like that and fax it to her. Of course, we've all just disappeared now. I know.

Well, just talking about all this stuff, to someone aged, you know, the age of my son, my eldest son is 20, none of that computes at all. The idea of sticking a microphone in front of some speakers to record a song, and that was going to be the only way you... I also explained to him about dial-a-disc as well. When you had a phone number, was it 176, 175? You could ring up and hear a particular song. That's right.

He was mad, and we did it. Why did we do that? That was so sad, isn't it? I told someone about that the other day, and maybe it was even my wife. My wife. And she just said what yeah that didn't exist she'd never done that she was like why would you do that i was like to hear the song and she's like and so how do you hear the song i was like down the phone she's like what just down

the earpiece of the phone i was like yeah yeah i remember listening to um souvenir by orchestral maneuvers in the dark i bought that Yeah. That's a great single. It's a peach, isn't it? Oh, what a riff. And even down the phone, I was like, yeah, this is doing the job. Because you couldn't just

call stuff up like you do now. You couldn't just put it in there and up it comes. Yeah, yeah. I guess lots of producers do this now is to have a little

shitty speaker in the middle of the mixing desk. Yeah. And famously, Phil Spector would do that. Yeah, yeah. So he had just a little shitty speaker in the middle of the mixing desk. And famously, Phil Spector would do that. Yeah, yeah. So he had just a tiny crap speaker,

so he'd be able to hear the mix through that. This is what I said to Jack. Jack, unless you've listened to something like Tumbling Dice or Jumping Jack Flash through a car radio speaker, you've not really heard what it was mixed for. And even then you've got the big speakers in the door now. Yeah. It's like that's not what they were mixed to do.

You need to get a darn set or something and plant on a darn set. That was the great thing about the reel-to-reel tape machine. I listened back to it about 10 years later. I probably haven't listened to it, as I say, for 40 years. But 10 years later I fixed it all up. It probably doesn't run now. The heads have probably died. But it was,

the Motown stuff was, the beats, it was so trebly. Yeah. But it was just straight in, you know, it got right into my head. It was just all,

I just loved that sound. Wow, if you listen back, that would be trippy. Yeah. That would be like a time machine. Really weird, because you know what else is on there?

Aunt Anna's voice is on there from when I was born in 1888 she speaks to me I haven't heard that for a long time my dad's voice is on there

I haven't heard that for a long time either that is weird isn't it to go back into that what would that do to you how do you deal with

things like that I get very sentimental yeah I am a very sentimental person I am a sentimental person but yeah it would be nice

to hear that again. You know, there's not many, there's no film clips of Aunt Anna. There's precious few film clips of my dad. So, yeah, you know, anything like that, I'm always up for a little bit of that. Yeah, you don't mind going back. That's not too painful. Your dad died when you were young. Yeah, he did.

I was 18. He had cancer for 18 months. Yeah, he died. Well, you know, it was terrible, absolutely terrible. And it kind of shattered our little family unit. But within about three or four months of my dad dying, punk come along. Like I was standing at a bus stop.

I got on the bus and it was a different life. I was a different person. I literally was a different person. Before I was Stephen Bragg, that Wally I went to school with, never had a proper haircut and couldn't afford to get a Ben Sherman and then I got on the punk bus

and all of a sudden I was Billy Bragg who was writing these songs in front of this band, a completely different person. So the remorse I felt for it all, I just boxed that away and I didn't really, I was in a strange situation where I didn't talk to anybody about it

until in the early 90s I accidentally wrote a song about it. I was writing a song about something else. And this line come through. I closed my eyes and when I looked, your name was in the memorial book. And I thought, oh, that's a bit weird. Because where my dad's ashes are cremated, there's a memorial book that is open on the day that he died and you can go and see his name.

And we always go with my mum. I would always go on that day. I'd go and see him. We'd go over there. And that line come through and I was like, oh, if I go down this one, if I go down this line, I'm going to have to go, not only am I going to have to go back and revisit all that,

I'm going to have to be able to talk to absolute strangers about it. Yeah, because you talk on stage, right? Well, not just that. You've sung a song and someone comes backstage. You've sung a song about how you felt about your old man dying. Yeah. It's one of those songs that I'm very, you know, I don't do intro. I don't intro.

I just play it. I just play it. It's called Tank Park Salute, by the way. And it was my mum's favourite song out of all my songs. I'm not sure she even knew many of them, but she would always come and see me if I was doing a show and she'd come along. She'd see me before, she'd,

you're going to play that song, aren't you? And I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to play that song. And then my nephews would be like, why do you always play that song that makes Nan cry? Ask your Nan, your Nan will tell you. Wow, that's heavy. It is. It's good, though.

It's good to have a song that allows you to do that. Yeah, I mean, it's heavy in a lovely way that your mum was able to appreciate it. Because I think my sense about what business I'm in is I'm in the business of empathy. Empathy is the currency of music. You know, whether you're listening to what the person's singing about and thinking about yourself being in that situation

and empathising with someone in that situation, whether it's political or a love song or whatever, or the other way around, the person who wrote the song has somehow touched on something very close to you, and you're drawing empathy from the song in the sense that you feel you're not alone, because that's the power that music has, the power to make you feel that you're not alone and you're the only person

who's ever felt this way and that's that again is another great part because it's not the power to change the world it's a strange job to be in a political songwriter where people think that music changes the world and i tell audiences that it don't and they like it's an audible sigh when i say it it's like you know don't It's like telling there's no Santa Claus. But it's the truth. If anybody, you know, generally, I'm the only person who's been trying to change the world through music for 40 years in a room when I say it.

So if anyone's got the authority to be able to say it and the perspective, it's me. But having said that, what I can tell them is that the power that music has is the power to make you believe the world can be changed. And that is itself a great, great power. It brings people together. It allows them to express their emotions about something,

their solidarity about something. And you're in a room, you know, you go and see your favorite band or your favorite artist and they're singing a song that you've invested so much into. And then, you know, you're singing along with them and they're singing it and a thousand other people singing it you've whatever it is that you feel is accepted whatever it is that you've put into that song feels like you're you're part of it it's the reason why they sing a football it's

the reason why they sing in church they're looking for a communal experience that makes them feel that they're not alone you know and that's why i was never worried during the lockdown that we would all come back to be able to play gigs again. Because people need that. People really need that experience in the dark together. How was your lockdown? Well, it's the thing, you see. The problem for me was I did a load of things that I'm not sure if it was the lockdown, if it was being in my 60s. It could have just been I'd have done these things anyway in my 60s.

Right, okay. So I happened to be that weird age. But, yeah, I got a lot of stuff done I emptied out the basement moved house did the family history thing and eventually when I run out of things to do and I was starting to think

I'm starting to wonder if this is ever going to come out I suddenly realised oh yeah make an album write some songs and make an album so I made an album while we were out so yeah I kind of respect it. It was a really, really tough time for a lot of people. But in my situation, I mean, I lived on a beach, which no one could come to,

apart from those of us who lived in the village. So I can't complain. Yeah. I can't complain, mate. We're halfway through the podcast. I think it's going really great. The conversation's flowing like it would between a geezer and his mate Alright mate, hello geezer, I'm pleased to see you There's so much chemistry, it's like a science lab of talking

I'm interested in what you said Thank you There's fun chat and there's deep chat It's like Chris Evans is meeting Stephen Hawking. I was at school with a guy called Ben Walden. He was one of our best mates, our little gang. And he loved your stuff. And we, the rest of us, were kind of into very different music.

We were into what I would, you know, there's two kinds of music fan, I think, at that age. Either you're a sort of fantasy music guy or you're a reality music guy, right? And I was more a kind of escapist type person. And that was reflected in the sort of movies that I liked as well, you know. And I like David Bowie, but I like Thomas Dolby and the Thompson twins and synthesizers and Gary Newman and Echo and the Bunnymen. Great band.

And in 1984, when I was listening to them, you were on tour with them. I was. I'll return to Ben Walden in a second, but what was that like briefly? Well, I'll tell you what that was like. It was my first time in America. Yeah.

So it was not just being out with the Bunnymen. They were a great bunch, particularly Will Sargent. Yeah. Really lovely guy, really bonded with Will. Smashing guy. But sitting on the back of their tour bus watching America go by. And we did go north, south, east, west. And we went everywhere on that tour, on that tour bus.

And you took Wiggy with you. Wiggy. Well, this is what happened. Yeah. Yeah. I got this gig literally, probably, I mean, I know, because I subsequently spoke to him, it was Bill Drummond. Right.

He wanted me on the, not the Bunnymen so much, but Bill Drummond. Because he really thought what I was doing was interesting, and it would be interesting to throw me in front of an American audience. So this is Bill Drummond, known to a lot of people from the KLF. KLF, but also. Who was then the manager of the Bunnymen. Yeah, a real mover and shaker. Lovely guy.

He thought it would be good to put me out there in front of him. And I was really cheap. It was just me on the back of the bus. You know, they paid my hotels. They paid me a wage. They gave me PDs. And they said I could bring a roadie. So I'm like, okay, this could be the only time I ever tour America, ever.

This could all just go tomorrow. I was still in that phase, you know. You released one album at that point or two one this is uh uh summer august 1984 this is still in my first flush so you never know it's just the ground's going to disappear in front of you i was still buying two copies of the enemy if i was in it in case i lost the first one it was that kind of time um i rang up where you said look wigs how many times did we sit in my mom's back room and dream about touring america this is it you've got to come with me mate you've got to come i was just going to be you know me writing to you and telling you about it come on we've got to do this mate so

we did so wiggy come with me and it was just the whole thing was super enhancing because i had someone to laugh about it with i had someone to you know walk around and say a fire hydrant oh my god you know the whole thing was that. And we kind of had a sort of spiritual moment where we sort of somehow connected with our teenage selves sitting in back rooms in Barking, dreaming about this. It was kind of like a really sort of, wow, you know, we've actually done this moment.

It wouldn't have been anything like the amazing experience it was if Wiggy hadn't have been there. I did a thing a couple of weeks ago in Barking Town all day. We were unveiling a plaque to Neil Young because he recorded one of the tracks from the Harvest album in Barking Assembly Halls in 1972 while I was in double physics. Yeah. A Man Needs a Maid was recorded. Was there? Yeah, was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra

in Barking Assembly Rooms, which is now the Broadway Theatre in Barking, yeah. Good fact. With the London Symphony Orchestra and Jack Nietzsche. Right. And Glyn Johns and the Rolling Stones mobile was parked outside for a week. Wow, I didn't know that.

Isn't that incredible? Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine Neil Young walking around barking, going to Pesky's Fish Bar and getting 74 cotton chips for the London Symphony Orchestra. It just blew my mind. Although I suppose you would probably have gone to Wimpy's

at the railway station to get something like a hamburger or something. It just does my head in. I mean, Neil Young filmed the making of Harvest. There's a movie that only got released just recently, and it's all in there. And they showed, we went, Wiggy and Bob, who was the drummer, we went to watch the film, and the whole process was just pretty mad. I mean, what else was recorded there? Apparently had the best acoustics for orchestras in London. I'll tell you what else was recorded there.

The orchestrated Tubular Bells was recorded there. But even weirder, the soundtrack for Psycho was recorded there. Wow. Barking Town Hall. Wow. Isn't that incredible? Yeah, that is amazing. That is really amazing. But yeah, Harvest, Neil Young, A Man Needs A Maid,

that whole orchestra, that was recorded in Barking. I want to see that film. That sounds great. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called now. You know Full Metal Jacket was filmed in Barking as well, didn't you?

It was the old Beckton Gasworks, which weirdly is where my great-grandfather came from Essex to work in the 1860s. And they were knocking it down. So it was kind of like

they'd blown up a few of the buildings and one of the buildings had kind of, they'd blown some of the legs away and it tilted that way. And so the battle scenes, all the battle scenes. Yeah, the sort of second half of the movie.

Yeah, where the sniper shoots a cowboy. All that was filmed there in those places. And I had a friend who was a... And to be fair, it does look like barking. Don't you think? The palm trees. There's a couple of palm trees that are stuck there. If you look closely, you can see in one scene, you can see Shooter's Hill in the background, just on the other side of the river. But that was pretty weird, wasn't it?

The idea of Kubrick. Yeah. Right at the end of the Dockless Light Railway. It is so weird, the thought of him being in the UK for all that time. Yeah. And being exposed to British culture on a daily basis. It is weird, isn't it? He used to apparently come down to West Bay.

They had a family place, which is near where I live, the next village along from where I live in Dorset. The family had a place at West Bay. He might have been on the beach when we first went down there, just sitting there, Kubricking away, you know. Right.

I used to arm wrestle with my boy when he was younger. He went to film school for a while, my boy. Oh, yeah. And he was a big Spielberg fan. And I'm like, Kubrick. Kubrick every time. Kubrick.

So after, now, now, now he's seen paths of glory now he's seen you know we watched that the other day what a great film holy shit yeah what an amazing film what a film and except our experience of watching paths of glory was somewhat affected by my wife's insistence at a certain point mean, it's complicated because we had friends, family friends staying with us and they'd been having a hard time. My wife said, let's all watch a movie together. I said, what about Paths of Glory? I mean, I gave them some options. I gave them some light comedy options plus Paths of Glory. And they said, yeah, let's do Paths of, you know, I said, it's pretty fucking good, Paths of Glory. They're like they said yeah let's do paths of you know i said it's pretty fucking good paths of glory they're like fine let's watch that so we watch that but then you

know this is for anyone who hasn't seen it one of the most intense powerful films ever made about war in general and the madness thereof yeah anyway my wife was just feeling how intense it was. And I think didn't like the idea of the friends that we had watching feeling uncomfortable or something. And so like at the absolute most tense part, firing squad scene. Yeah, the firing squad scene. Yeah, yeah. She goes, would anyone like a goo pudding or a magnum? I've got some in the fridge. Oh, tell you what. And I was thinking. I'll have the lime goo pudding. Well magnum? I've got some in the fridge. Oh, tell you what.

And I was thinking. I'll have the lime goo pudding. Well, you would have been sorted. I was just sitting there thinking, is this really happening? And then it took ages for everyone to go, no, I'm fine. Most people didn't want a couple of, yeah, I'll have a magnum. It's like, Jesus, it's the firing squad scene. Yeah.

I'll tell you, those goo puddings are really, the glass thing they come in, the glass receptacle. The ramekin. Yeah, the ramekin. Thank you. The ramekin. Wasn't that a movie by,

no. The ramekin. Yeah, Chris R. Is absolutely brilliant for catching spiders. I've got several of them around. My dear partner is absolutely terrified

of spiders. I often get a shout to come and catch a spider and throw it out. Yeah, yeah. And I find a postcard and a goo ramekin. So I constantly have to keep eating goo because they get used to other things. Someone takes me out of the cupboard and puts their trade union badges in it.

Sure, absolutely. Stuffed with trade union badges at our house. Plectrums, plectrums. Plectrums. You've got your cashew nuts. Piercings. For the smokers, it's a wonderful ashtray. Yeah, it is, it is.

They've served all those purposes at our house. They have. They never get recycled at our house. They don't go into recycling. They go in the cupboard, the ramekins. Yeah, I finally did recycle. Is that true? No.

I had a bit ages ago in my stand-up thing where I would show, I would talk about goo puddings and talk about how the experience of eating a goo pudding. One day it suddenly occurred to me when I was halfway through eating this goo pudding and trying to make it last. It suddenly occurred to me like, shit, this is like my life. And this is the age I'm at now in middle age. I'm halfway through my goo pudding, probably more than halfway through the goo pudding. And now I've really got to make these last few bites last.

What about if you're only halfway through and it's all base? Don't mind. No sweetness. Oh, well, no, because there's just deliciousness in the base as well. There is, you're right. You're true, it's true. And then, well, what you do is also you excavate the chocolatey bits under the rim.

Oh, yeah. As well. That's a whole other chapter. The rimming of it. To the goo experience. It is. The rimming of the goo. It is. It's a whole other chapter. The rimming of it. To the goo experience. The rimming of the goo. It is. It's an ice break.

I think it's pronounced gnu, isn't it? Now, there's another thing I had to stop buying because it was too sweet. Yeah, same here. But then again, I did,

I was looking, what did I have? Oh, I got a lovely thing from my mum's. It's absolutely hard to describe and I've no idea what it is. But it's like, it's almost like to describe and i've no idea what it is but it's like it's almost like a bowl that's melted it's uh pottery but it's a 90s it was on the living room

table in our house yeah so my mum passed away of all the things i thought i'm gonna put that out i have my office and just so i'll put back you know someone's giving me a badge or a pick or i've got a bit of change in my pocket it all goes in there and every now and then i have to empty it out and start again so that, I use the spider catch ramekin and I'm like, now I've got nothing to catch spiders in. So I was in Morrison's

the other day, I was like, oh, good excuse to get some goo. And now they're sitting in the park just looking at me like, goo in the fridge?

I'm sure you'll get spiders. You'll get roasted for that somehow. No, I'll catch bigger spiders. Although I went for one in the bar from yesterday. I'm really sorry to say this

and unfortunately, it's such a small spider and he was right up against the edge and as I was trying to cup him, you can't really squash someone a bit,

can you? I totally squashed him but he was, you know, I was trying to fry him out rather than squash him. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely. I accidentally trod on a frog once. Isn't that a euphemism for, I was trod on a frog once. Isn't that a euphemism for... I was trod on a duck. Sorry. What's trod on a duck? Oh, that's a fart.

No, trod on a frog. I was staying at a girlfriend's house, and I went downstairs for a pee in the garden. I guess someone was using the toilet or I don't know what. But I went out in bare feet. Oh, you frogged in bare feet. I tried on a frog and I felt it crunch. Oh.

It was awful, awful. I couldn't sleep. That is sad. Oh, I had a dream I was back at school Putting on a play with my friends It was the opening night But I did not know my lines We had spent months and months

Painting sets and making costumes And posters for the play But we had not rehearsed the play I didn't know what I was supposed to say and yet the rest of the cast knew all of their words and their moves and the songs

in the play and they were shaking their heads as the curtain went up and I was still asking what I should say. And suddenly I knew what to do. I sat on stage and did a pool. Now, I mentioned my friend Ben Walden.

You did, three days ago. Tantalizingly. Yeah. Yeah, he was such a good mate. And he's one of those people I don't see enough of now in later life. But I got in touch with him when I knew I was going to talk to you. And I said, guess who I'm going to talk to? And he's like, oh, man, I'm jealous.

He says, please thank Billy for speaking out for a lot of what I felt as a teenager, both emotionally and politically. And, you know, we were at a public school, myself and Ben. public school, myself and Ben, and we had been sent there by our parents who felt that, you know, they wanted to give us every advantage in life, having struggled their way up to the position where they could afford to send their children somewhere like that. Ben's dad was the political interviewer, Brian Walden. Oh, wow. I remember him on Sunday. Yeah, he was a big fan of Mrs. Thatcher, wasn't he't he well he was and he wasn't eventually like he

did he start Labour he started Labour yeah and then I can hear his voice in my head now yeah yeah very distinctive voice

yeah yeah and he was a great interviewer he was I mean he gave her a hard time a couple of times he did yeah

but yes I think he drifted over right in his later years it does happen to some people I don't know how but it does happen I've just drifted I've just drifted over right in his later years. It does happen to some people. I don't know how, but it does happen. I've just drifted to broad strokes. Whereas I used to talk ideologically now,

I find myself talking so much more about empathy and accountability. And, you know, if Woody Guthrie famously had this machine kills fascists on his guitar, if I had to paint a slogan on my guitar, it would be death to cynicism. I think cynicism undermines anyone who wants to make the world a better place. Their own cynicism is their biggest enemy

to that sense that nobody gives a shit about anything and nothing will ever change. That's what Rupert Murdoch wants you to believe. You've got to get over that. So, yeah, I haven't drifted off right wing, but I have drifted. My Marxist friends from the 80s who I knocked around with during the miners' strike would have scoffed if I'd have talked about those kind of things back in the day. Yeah, I was going to ask you how you feel different to the person who released Life's a Riot with Spy vs. Spy and then growing up.

I think politically, I think I'm a bit more pragmatic than I was. I mean, when you're younger, your radicalism is pretty sharp, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, you wrote, you know, a song called Which Side Are You On? I didn't. I adapted that. That was written by a woman named Florence Reese in the 1930s in the United States of America. But yeah, I did.

I, you know, and I still do use that song. Absolutely. I've seen you singing that on Picket Lines. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think it's stillet Lines. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think it's still a valid song. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's why I like you and find you intriguing because, one of the reasons, because you are able to have that political passion that's fairly fundamentalist in some ways but still be a big advocate for empathy and for talking to everyone.

Well, what is socialism about if it's not about empathy, Adam? What is socialism other than organized compassion? If it's not, then it doesn't look like socialism to me. If it's some other, you know, ideological thing, ultimately, it's got to be about, hasn't socialism got to be about holding capitalism to account? Hasn't socialism got to be about a society based on equality and liberty? So what's changed is the way I articulate my politics. That's changed. I was never someone who understood the Marxist way of talking about things because I didn't go to uni.

I didn't learn politics. They'd be using the language of Marxism, which at the time I didn't really think was relevant to what i was doing and i don't think it's relevant to what anyone's doing anymore the language of marxism doesn't mean shit to anyone anymore but unfortunately the things that marx was right about haven't been resolved so we're in a situation where we have to find other words and other means to articulate these ideas and as someone with a bent, I've tried my hardest to come up with other ways of talking about socialism.

For instance, I have a song called Upfield, which talks about socialism of the heart, which is compassion rather than socialism of the head, which would be ideology. You know, and I was trying to write, you know, I rewrote the lyrics of the Internationale to make them less ideological and more, you know, have a green dimension to them, you know,

to bring them into the post-ideological period. We needed to throw away and throw into the dustbin of history the totalitarianism that came with Soviet communism. But the fundamental ideals of fairness, of liberty and equality and accountability, we needed to find a new way to articulate them. We can't let them go into the, you know, throw the baby out with the bark for it. So I'm trying to make sense of shit, Adam.

That's all I'm trying to do. Whether I'm writing a book or whether I'm writing an article for something or writing a song, you know, I've got a perspective that I'm trying to put across and it's usually because I don't see that reflected somewhere else, you know. That's how I ended up writing a book about skiffle you know it was an area that I've something I felt really passionately about and I felt that the books that have been written about it were written by people

who were there at the time like Chas McDavid's book is brilliant and he tells you what happened to him while he was a skiffle you know while there but I felt it was uh in its context was much more important than that because it was really the music that introduced the guitar into British pop. It was the music of the first generation of British teenagers. It was a music made by African-American roots musicians in another country that wasn't on the radio, yet these kids were able to connect with it

and feel, some of them, more in common with an African-American sharecropper in Mississippi than they did with their own dad. You know, that's more than just, oh, I saw Lonnie Donegan and we've done some Lead Belly songs. No disrespect to Chaz and his book because it's really, really great. But in its context, Skiffle, in its context, is bigger than punk, more important than punk, greater than punk. And punk was everything to me.

Punk was like the, you know, year zero, be all and end and end all you know and i still live by those ideas of do it yourself and that but i always had this sneaking feeling that skiffle was somehow more important than that and where's the where's the insight and the book that puts it in its proper perspective so when my publishers asked me if i was interested in writing about something, it seemed to me it would be interesting to... Skiffle time. Yeah. Have you done a Skiffle Spotify playlist? Of course I have.

Of course you have. Of course I have. All right, I'll put a link in the description. Yeah, of course I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That's good. I need to investigate Skiffle. Yeah.

What qualifies as Skiffle then? What do you need to be... Have you got to have a washboard? Have you got... You need a guitar. You need a T-chest bass. If you know what a T-chest bass is. You know what a T-chest is, don't you? Sure. Turn it upside down.

You put a hole in the middle. You put a bit of baler twine or a very strong string through the hole in the middle of a knot on it so it pulls. And you get a brum pole. You stick the brum pole on a hole in the corner of the T-chest and you put a bit of string to it and it makes a bit of a dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum noise

depending on how much string you hold down to the broom pole, like a rhythm. Then you get a washboard. And that's it, really. No drums, no brass instruments, no keyboards,

just those... All the percussion is coming from the washboard. Yeah. Well, if you think about Elvis Presley's Sun Session recordings, who played drums on the Sun Sessions? I don't know. Nobody. All the percussion is coming from the bass, from the slap bass. There's no drums on them at all.

Really? Yeah. It's just three guys. It's two guitarists. Mystery Train has got no drums. Yeah, Mystery Train's got no drums. Wow. It's all Bill Black playing the bass. Right. Right And in that sense

Rockabilly is the equivalent in America Not in the same sense culturally But in the same kind of As I say they're synonymous And they kind of come and go in the same period Between 56 and 59 They're gone And it's moved on to other bigger things

But Skiffle doesn't happen in the United States of America at all Because what Skiffle is It's basically It's a playground craze I mean you you know, when Lonnie Donegan has a hit in 56, early 56 with Rock Island Line. Yeah. And he goes on the road. He's playing. Was he a Brit then? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Born in Scotland, but he's lived most of his life in the East and the London. Hence the name. Lonnie Donegan. His

mum's Irish, his dad's Scottish. He's in a trad jazz band. Okay. With Chris Barber. He's the banjo player. And because they're learning these songs from the original recordings, there's no way to learn these songs other than listening close to the original recordings. Recordings made in the 1920s in America, it was all made on one microphone. So consequently, the musicians had to blow really hard to get on the recording. So these guys, 20, 30 years later in the UK, are listening and thinking, oh, that's how you do it, you blow really hard.

So they're doing the gigs, they're trying to shit out the instruments. Consequently, after about 30 minutes, their lips are so numb they can't play. So not to lose the audience, they put down their brass instruments, they pick up acoustic guitars, and they play Lead Belly songs.

And this is what becomes Skiffle, this so-called breakdown session, playing these Lead Belly songs. And this is what becomes Skiffle, this so-called breakdown session, playing these Lead Belly songs. So Donegan records Rock Island Line and a New Orleans jazz record with Chris Barber in 54. But when he goes out on tour, Donegan, after he's had a hit with it, because it doesn't sound like anything else on the radio,

he's playing variety halls. He's playing two shows, five nights, two shows a night. George Harrison is 13 he goes every night McCartney's 14 he goes on the Friday night and Lennon's 16

he doesn't go but he forms his skiffle band a week later and multiply that by a thousand and they're all in that age group they're all in that age group

and so consequently when Chuck Berry turns up six months later and all these songs are just free chords, the transition is seamless. Yeah. But what happens then is, in the United States of America,

white kids don't start picking up acoustic guitars and learning free chords until the folk revival, which doesn't happen until 59. Okay? So what you've got is you've got a load of British boys who are 18 months to two years ahead of their white American counterparts. So when the Beatles break the U.S. in 63, there's already a road-hardened cohort of bands who've been playing since they were 13, 14 years old to come in behind the Beatles. The whole of the British invasion of United States of America is based on nursery of skiffle.

There you go. Without skiffle, none of that. In fact, I would argue everything up to punk is its roots in skiffle because one of the guys in ABBA was in a skiffle band. Dr. Feelgood was made of an amalgamation of two skiffle bands. Jimmy Page, famously, there's a clip of him on TV, age 14, playing. Mum, I don't allow no skiffle playing around here. With Hugh Weldon interviewing him. Oh, yeah. I think I've seen that.

Yep, yep, yep. Wow. So skiffle is the… We can blame skiffle for everything. Everything, mate. Everything. Social media, skiffle. Vietnam War.

Brexit. Yep, skiffle. No, skiffle is the… And the reason they don't talk about it is because they were all 14. Yeah, okay. If you're Jimmy Page, right, and you go to America in 68, 69 with Led Zeppelin for the first time, and the Rolling Stones say, who inspired you to pick up a guitar? You ain't going to say Lonnie Donigan, are you?

You're going to say Muddy Waters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it is. And that story needed to be told. So in a nutshell, that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to

I'm trying to light on things that I think are important that aren't getting attention and try and whether I'm writing a song as I say or you know

might be the fact that I know all of the words to the original greatest hits of the Carpenters album which I was sorting out my lock up and I was driving back and forth

singing along you know what's your favourite track on that? Oh, Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down. What a great song that is. What a great song. Funny how I always wind up here with you, you know, come and find the one who loves me.

You know, it's just a great, great song. Great songwriting as well. Yeah. And beautifully sang by Karen Carpenter. What a voice. Do you know that song was originally called Groupie? Right. No, I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah oh yeah yeah yeah it's written by Leon Russell and I'm reading his book at the moment yeah he wrote it with come on

what was the woman that he had a scene with Rita Coolidge Rita Coolidge okay they wrote it and it's originally Groupie

yeah and there's a great version by Delaney and Bonnie if you've not heard it oh man you've got to hear it it's got Bronnie Brown when she's singing it like Aretha. I was in a record store in America somewhere, and it was on, and I'd only heard the Carpenters

version. She's singing, you know, What to Do to Make You Come Again. It's a completely different angle. It's actually called Groupie. I mean, Cameron Carpenters, beautiful version, but Bonnie Bramlett, it's one of those times where you have to, you know, tip your hat. Yeah. I'm checking my account at the memory bank.

The memory bank, the memory bank. We're thanking you for banking on your memories. I'd like to take out a happy memory thanks. The memory bank, the memory bank. Oh, sorry, but you're very overdrawn. I will repay with interest when I get back up on my happy feet. The memory bank, the memory bank. I'm very sorry, but we're closing your account. My what? Where am I? The memory bank, the memory bank. We're the nice bank. Would you like to bank with us? Can I ask you finally, though, about your opportunity to meet Bob Dylan that you ran away from?

I did. And explain how and why you felt you had to run from Bobbles. Bob Dylan is a giant in most of our lives, isn't he? He's kind of like too much. He might be too much. And I don't know. What would you say if you met Bob Dylan? Hi, Bob.

I like your records. What would you say to him? I've purposely not gone to see Dylan. I've done what's spoiled. You've never seen him live? Yeah, I have, yeah. But up to this point, I've not. Oh, I see.

So I get some tickets to go see him at Amersmith Odeon. And my drummer at the time was going out with Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie Hynde was there, right? She disappears off backstage. And she comes back before the show starts and she said, you know, you must come and see Bob after the show. I'm sure he'd love to meet you. So I spend the entire show thinking,

what am I going to say to Bob Dylan? Hi, I'm Billy Bragg. I'm the right song. Well, like, oh, no, to Bob Dylan? Hi, I'm Billy Bragg. Write a song. Well, like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. So at the end of the gig, I was just left like a rocket, just went out and just couldn't face it. And the funny thing is, while we were making Mermaid Avenue... This is the record you did with Wilco.

Wilco, yeah, in Chicago. We were supposed to be routine in it, but we ended up, I think we were called the California Stars that week. But while we were there, I think it might have been the first day we were in the studio that night, Dylan was playing at a club. I can't remember. I played there opposite Wrigley Field. And Dylan was playing, and I did manage to black tickets.

He was really good. I thought he was really great. He was waggling his leg like Elvis. And the Wilcos were saying to him, look, he's doing an Elvis thing. I'm like, no, no, no, he's not. He's trying to keep his circulation going. He's got a dead leg. I've done that.

But he was really good. And they were just bugging me to go backstage and ask Bob Dylan to come to the studio and play these Woody Guthrie songs with us. And I just said to him, we're in the studio with Woody Guthrie, okay? Isn't that enough? Isn't it enough? Isn't it enough? What would it be like if he come down? What would we do?

What would we do? And they were like, oh, yeah, what would we do? I'm like, yeah, okay. Let's just keep focused on what we're doing. We're in the studio with the little guy anyway, okay, with Woody. Let's just keep focused on the little guy. That's what our work is here. That was your nickname for him, was it? Yeah, that's what we referred to him. Yeah, the little guy. That's what our work is here. That was your nickname for him, was it?

Yeah, that's what we called him. We referred to him. Yeah, the little guy. Okay. Yeah. What would the little guy do? And have you thought, though, now what you would say?

At some point, you've got to meet Bobble. Surely, Bob Dylan has got to come and... Well, Adam, he mentioned me in his book. Have a little powwow. That's right.

You got a mention in Chronicles. I got a mention in Chronicles with regard to the Woody lyrics. So I'm satisfied with that, mate. That's right. You got a mention in Chronicles. I got a mention in Chronicles with regard to the Woody lyrics. So I'm satisfied with that, mate. That's pretty. You know one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me? What?

I know who you are, Bill. It's okay. You don't have to tell me. You know who said that to me? Who? David fucking Bowie. Wow. Yeah.

I was doing a DJ thing and he, I had this weird gig. I got this weird gig being a DJ in drive time on Radio 2 when Johnny Walker was suspended for, I think he was snorting coke on the cover of the News of the World. Johnny. Yeah, and he got suspended and I knew his production.

He said, could you come in for a week and play some records or something and lose my gig? I'm like, yeah, if you like. So I did that and eight months later I was still there and they were getting in depths when I went on and I'm like yeah if you like so I did that and eight months later I was still there and they were getting in depths when I

went on I'm like you can't get I am the depth you can't get but I did all these amazing met all these

amazing people and among them was Bowie he came in and we had a chat and and I thought I better explain

to him I'm not just a DJ I'm just a DJ I'm Billy Bragg I'm a singer he's like he sort of patted me

I know who you are, but I was like. Oh, good one. David Bowie knows who I am. I went home to the missus. And did you get to ask him things that you'd always wanted to ask or was it just a sort of

easygoing conversation? It was a relatively easygoing conversation for two reasons. One, it was Radio 2. Yes. And two, he was David Bowie. Yeah.

And I'm Billy Bragg. So I thought, I don't want to get all Billy Bragg on his ass. Okay. Okay. And what's the first thing he said to me when we finished? I thought we were going to talk about politics, but I've got a load of political answers for you.

I'm like, you should have said, mate. You should have said. Because he'd had a go at Blair at the time for supporting China against the Dalai Lama. Uh-huh. He'd had a bit of that.

There was that going on, and I thought, maybe I shouldn't. I don't want to spoil it for everyone. I don't want to fuck him off. So I kept... Because it's kind of a strange job. One week I'm doing him, and the next week I'm doing the Dixie Chicks.

Sure. Or some... The Mavericks. I ended up at the end of that year with more Mavericks CDs than you could shake a stick at, you know. I was the hero of our school Christmas fate.

People loved them CDs. Dance the Night Away. Oh, mate. Can't beat it. I interviewed them at the Albert Hall. It was massive. But in the end, I was like,

look, this really isn't my job. You know, I'm not a DJ. I'm only doing this to help you out. I've really missed my weekends up as well, West London Saturdays.

And I don't want to, you know, I'm a poacher, I'm not a gamekeeper. I'm really sorry. Yeah. And if there's any way we move to,

I said, look, I'm moving to Dorset next week, that's it, alright? And happily, they got Johnny back.

By that time, Johnny came back, picked up where he left off, all good. I bet you were good at it, though. I enjoyed it. I did enjoy it. There's always podcasting.

There is always podcasting. Again, I do have a line in Waiting for the Great Leap Forward at the end of that, or I mess around with the, you know, if no one out there understands, start your own bloody podcast and cut out the middleman. So there's always, you know, the possibility of it. But I'm writing. I like writing books. I kind of enjoy writing books. You know, when writing a skiffle book, I spent hours in the British Library going through old copies of Melody Maker and stuff like that and digging around

all that. And I kind of enjoyed all that. The archivist in me kind of enjoyed all that kind of stuff. So I don't know if i've got the the stamina to keep going on a podcast oh i don't know i think you'd be all right you think yeah wait this is an advert for squarespace every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional.

I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue.

As long as you don't make me sound like a cunt, I don't mind what you do. Wow. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Billy Bragg there. And I'm very grateful that he gave up his time to talk to me and be so friendly, especially as I really screwed up that day. You know, I say from time to time, I tell you, especially when I put episodes out years after they were recorded,

how disorganized I am. And maybe you think that I'm being disingenuous, but I'm not. I am disorganized. I'm not proud of the fact. Seamus does what he can, but he's in New York. So often it's down to me to keep the show on the road. And often I screw up. And that was one of those days that I did when I was supposed to be talking to Billy.

Had it down in my diary as 2 p.m. Got on the 11.30 train that would get me into London with just enough time to get over to King's Cross where we were recording for 2 p.m. over to Kings Cross where we were recording for 2 p.m. and as I got on the train I got a text from Ted Cummings who was wrangling Billy that day and Ted said looking forward to seeing you at midday and I had a little flash of kind of indignation like no what no it's 2 p.m. and then I had to go back and check my emails. Sure enough, it was midday. Texted back, explained the situation. And Ted was so nice about it, as was Billy. And I really appreciate it.

A few links in today's description. Firstly, to Billy's website, where you can find his tour dates and all sorts of other info about his releases. There is a link in the description to that interview that me and Joe did with Billy at Glastonbury in 2000. Whoa, I mean that really was another world. There is a link to Billy's Skiffle playlist on Spotify. There's a link to that amazing video of Jimmy Page, aged 13, with his skiffle band, playing Mama Don't Want to Skiffle Anymore,

as well as Cottonfields, and having a very engagingly stilted interview with Hugh Weldon. There is a link to a live version of Billy playing Tank Park Salute, the song he wrote about his dad, or the song that he realised was about his dad after he'd started writing it. Rosie,

shall I let you off the lead? There's no one around. Here, look. Rosie, what do you think? If I let you off the lead? There's no one around. Here, look. Rosie, what do you think? If I let you off, will you promise to continue walking? No? All right, well, I don't know. Do your best. clip from that Neil Young documentary, Harvest Time. Hours of home movie footage shot around the time that Neil Young was recording Harvest. I haven't yet managed to figure out where you can see the whole film, but I will keep searching because it looks terrific. If you're a Neil Young fan, I imagine it would be sweet, sweet music-flavoured goo pudding. How are you doing anyway, podcats? I didn't ask you at the very beginning.

I apologise. I hope you're doing well. Soldering on. Oh, it's noisy planes. Maybe lakenheath god that is a long way away in the sky so i'm gonna head back thank you very much once again to billy bragg and to ted thanks to seamus murphyamus Murphy Mitchell for conversation editing and his always invaluable production support. It's receding a little bit.

Thanks to Helen Green. She does the artwork for the podcast. Thank you, Helen. Thanks to ACAST for all their hard work keeping the show on the road with the sponsors. But thanks most of all to you. You listened right to the end. And yes, it isn't absolutely essential stuff.

But, you know, it strengthens our bond. And that's, at the end of the day, the main thing. And that's why I think it's time we had a hug. May I approach? Hey. Good to see you. Until next time, we share the same outer space. Take care. I love you.

Bye! Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a bite with me, thumbs up. Give me a smile and a thumbs up. Nice, take a bite with me, thumbs up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe.

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