Me And Billy Bragg have a natter way back when.

HEARTS AND MINDS

You don’t so much interview Billy Bragg as have a conversation - with him asking as many question as you - as he prepares for one his semi-regular Australian tours.

His previous visit, a short hit-and-run for a music conference with a just couple of shows shoe-horned in came a few days after the 2013 election. ”I think a lot of you were in a state of shock,” he notes. “So how’s the Abbott thing working out for you?” We trade phrases suitable for song like ‘Inept arseholes’, and ‘All going down the pan’ of the situations both here and in England, before talk comes back to the music.

The death of folk music legend Pete Seeger is still a touchstone. For the music, the man, and what he represented. “He was taking on the world with just a wiry voice and a banjo,” Bragg explains. “I remember being at some ceremony for him, looking down and finding him doing cycling exercises on the floor – he must have been near 80. That’s 100% better than twerking.”

It was not just the physical vitality that impressed him. “Even in his nineties he still had work to do, things to achieve. And this was a man who had travelled with Woody Guthrie, wrestled the Klu Klux Klan as they tried to stop (legendary black singer) Paul Robeson performing. He actually walked alongside Martin Luther King. You were shaking hands with history.” Conversely, Bragg plays down moments from his own life. Being at the frontline of the Miners’ Strike in Thatcher’s England, visiting Russia as Communism collapsed, and the campaign to free Nelson Mandela among other things, just doesn’t seem to have the same currency to him.

“I don’t want to think about that yet. I want to live in the present - I still have plenty to do. History will judge us on what contribution we make, but that’s for history, not for now.”  For Bragg, it all comes back to the work: “Not all music, but some can carry a message - an idea that can just carry and take hold. You have to have a faith that sometimes that’s going to happen.”  

In another twist this most English of singers’ latest album, Tooth And Nail, has seen him embraced by America as never before. Getting labelled as ‘alt.country’ or even ‘Americana’.  “Americana is a quite broad word,” he says in that quite broad accent. “It can be Johnny Cash, it can be Booker T. - any music that has its roots in American roots music. Whatever that is.”  

“I was just trying to find my way back to Mermaid Avenue,” he recalls the celebrated - if slightly fractured - collaboration with Wilco of Woody Guthrie songs, which gave all the participants a wider audience. “I wanted to find more of that sound, that idea, that Wilco and I sometimes got in the studio. But I got sidetracked – that’s been known to happen before,” he muses.

Those thoughts dovetailed with his homeland’s view of the music. I throw one of his quotes back at him: ‘The English don’t get folk music - it’s what the Scots and Irish do when they’re drunk.’ He pauses. “Did I say that? I might have been drunk,” he adds with a laugh.  

He quickly and politely clarifies: “Maybe what I meant that our Celtic neighbours still use folk music as part of their identity, where in England it’s quite different – it’s much more marginalised.”

Does that mix in with the natural English reserve? “An embarrassment in letting go?,” he asks himself. “Like Morris dancing? Everybody tends to be embarrassed by Morris dancing - sometimes even those actually doing it. Then again, I have Scots friends who are mortified when they see some bad singer get up in a kilt.”

Mr Bragg can also see the upside: “The folk audience – wherever they’re from - still want to hear topical songs, and that’s died out a lot in much other contemporary music.  Do people not want to think? Sure, to switch off and relax - I’m fine with that. But don’t tell me that music’s only purpose - it can be more than that. It can be about any part of the human condition.”  

While knowing the past, Billy Bragg knows things have changed, via a keyboard and a screen. “When I was 19, I really only had one outlet – learn to play an instrument, write songs, do gigs. If you were really lucky, go into a cheap studio and make a record. A 19-year-old now has so many more options: Write a blog, make a film and stick it up on Youtube, tweet up a crowd.”

“Music has probably lost its vanguard role, where in the second half of the 20^th century music was our social media. It used to be three chords and a chorus - now it’s 140 characters.”