Hello!
We’ve got a nice little chat with Billy Bragg about his new box set The Roaring Forty to get your week motoring along. As it is every Monday, this is a free edition, the paywall doesn’t work on Mondays, just point blank refuses. If you like it, then please share it. If you don’t like it, no-one wants to hear from you mate, no-one asked, who are you, what did you just say about my mum?
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg marked 40 years as one of the most formidable forces in British music with the release of a huge box set last month. The Roaring Forty is a celebration of the singer-songwriter and activist from Barking’s wide-ranging career and, whilst it’s also available in a single-disc 13-song version and 40-track triple vinyl edition, the one that tells the story best is a mammoth 14CD set containing over 300 songs with a load of goodies inside guiding you through Billy’s career. You might have to take the week off work to get through that one. Tomorrow, Billy embarks on a UK tour to celebrate the release (it’s mostly sold out but there are some tickets remaining here) but before he did, he hopped on the phone with Niall to talk through what it entails putting together a box set that comprehensively covers four decades in music and more. Have a listen to the 40-song edition whilst you read:
Hello Billy. The Roaring Forty is a monster box set. Where do you start with something this massive?
Well, you have to look over all your career and bring in everything. Previously, I regarded Mermaid Avenue [Billy’s 1998 project with Wilco that saw them put previously unused Woody Guthrie lyrics to new music] as a separate thing completely. There is a divide in Mermaid Avenue that you can’t really see - and that’s what’s great about it because you shouldn’t really see it because it should be seamless - and that divide is the songs I wrote and the songs that Jeff Tweedy and Wilco wrote the music for. I’ve got the ones I play in my set and the Wilco guys play their ones in their set, it’s a sort of proprietorial vibe, so that’s reflected in the box set. But also there’s things over the years that never got used. There are three tracks that I recorded with three different members of R.E.M., Mike Mills, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck. I was in Athens, Georgia, in the early 90s recording You Woke Up My Neighbourhood and we were knocking around at Peter Buck’s house and he had a quarter inch tape there and we’d done a few tracks with each other and I’ve always thought they should really be heard.
I love that version of My Youngest Son Came Home Today with Michael Stipe.
That, for instance, that’s so beautiful, isn’t it? It had never been heard so I dropped them a line and said, ‘Look, I’m putting out a box set, you alright with me including that stuff?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, great, that’d be brilliant, haven’t heard them for years, I’d love to hear it’. I did some beautiful live things with KT Tunstall around 2010 that I’ve always really loved. We wrote a song together and we did a version of The Drugs Don’t Work that was really, really good. It’s those things where you go back and comb through everything that you’ve done and try and work out what’s not been released and needs re-thinking and refocusing on and you start there.
Weren’t you and Michael Stipe roommates at one point?
We were! We were roommates in Czechoslovakia. That was an interesting experience for both of us. I’d been behind the Iron Curtain but I’d never been to Czechoslovakia and we were there while the Velvet Revolution was coming to its zenith so the place was just absolutely alive and both of us were really excited. After one gig, we went to a restaurant somewhere and me and Stipey stepped outside and walked about 200 yards to this square where there was a plinth that previously had, I assume, some dignitary on it and was now tied with about 100 balloons gently swaying in the breeze. We stood there looking at it thinking, ‘This is history in the making here, you don’t ever get to see that’. I mean, imagine what it’s like for Michael, where they go in and out of the football stadium in a convoy with the police, for him to get to be able to have that. He said to me one time as we walked down the Unter den Linden in East Berlin, ‘This is great’. I said, ‘Yeah, you don’t often get to see this,’ and he said ‘No, to go this far and no-one come up to me to say hello or recognize me, it’s really amazing.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, I guess that is an amazing experience for him,’ so the whole thing was just brilliant.
What was the most surprising thing you came across when it was all laid out in front you? Anything you’d forgotten about?
Yeah. I had to go over to Vermont, an old friend of mine, [record producer] Gary Smith, passed away. It was sad and I wanted to go and pay my respects, so I had this long flight and then a two-hour journey, and then a six-hour train ride down to Connecticut and then the flight home and in that context, I listened to the whole thing. It was good, it was a lovely way to do it all in one go and it was great hearing all the people I’ve played with, not just the ones you know like Johnny Marr and Kirsty MacColl, but people Cara Tivey, whose contribution to my work is so great, David Woodhead, great trumpet playing, all the times I had working with Wiggy. Some of my favourite moments of Billy Bragg recording are with Cara and Wiggs playing together.
That’s interesting that you did it on an American trip, I was going to ask about your memories of your first US tour with Echo & The Bunnymen.
You never forget your first trip to the US, and my first trip to the US went everywhere in the US and bits of Canada. We literally went north, south, east and west. It just was amazing. When I first set out, three things I wanted to do was make an album, be on the cover of NME and tour America. And touring America was the last one so everything since then has really been icing on the cake. I’d never done an American tour like that before and I never will have that first experience again but it stays with you. And the fact that Wiggy came along on it as well was really great too, because we used to sit in my mum’s back room and dream about touring America. It wouldn’t have been the same without him. If it ended there, I would’ve been satisfied with that, I could’ve looked back and said ‘I’ve done some amazing things’. The fact that I’m still doing it 40 years later and I’m still going back to some of those towns and cities in America and there’s an audience to listen to my music, I never take that for granted. I feel so privileged to be able to be doing this.
Given you realized all those early ambitions so quickly, did it take a little bit of recalibration at that point like ‘OK, I’ve done what I set out to do, how am I going to move forward?’
Not really. Then you get into focusing on trying to upgrade what you do, you’ve made that album, where do you go next and the next one is up there and it’s like, ‘Where can I push this?’. On Don’t Try This At Home, for example, Johnny Marr does an amazing production on Sexuality and then me and Grant Showbiz are left with the rest of the album trying to make an album that lives up to that, that bar is set really high for us and we made a big pop album and got on Top Of The Pops and everyone was like ‘oooh, pop star!’ but that really wasn’t who I was, I couldn’t carry on down that route. Fortunately what happened in the intervening period was that I became someone’s dad, then the Soviet Union disappeared and Margaret Thatcher resigned so all those things together, I would’ve been having to change the way I work anyway. Then I was just making music on my own terms, without having to worry about what we did last time or whether or not we got on Top of the Pops.
Which period of your career have you learned the most from?
I think probably from those first years learning my craft, and getting myself together. I went through the miners’ strike and that was such a deep learning curve about politics. I really didn’t have a strong grasp of ideological politics before that. It was a real education and I still riff off that, I still remain connected with that. But weirdly, songs that I wrote then, like There Is A Power In The Union, are absolutely key songs in my set today because there are people in my audience who weren’t even born when that song was written who stood on the picket line this year. Consequently, that song really resonates with them. I’m surprised, the audience is really riled up for that song. That’s the interesting thing about it, you write these songs that are of the moment, but they have some deep resonance with people that can be utilised. They’re not just songs - they have meaning, they bring people together.
OK Billy, so you’ve got this massive compilation. What one track would you pick to play someone who hasn’t heard Billy Bragg and wants to know what he’s all about?
I would probably go with Levi Stubbs Tears. It’s got the chop and clang in it, it’s about relationships, it’s about soul music, it comes from very much who I am. If that didn’t work out I’d play them Tank Park Salute, that’s exactly who I am as well, a song about the death of my father. Somewhere between those two.
ND