Viva Brighton Issue #76 June 2019

MUSIC
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Billy Bragg
Anglo-Americana
It’s hard to think of a performer who is as quintessentially
English as Billy Bragg, that singer of
Jerusalem, and vociferous purveyor of ‘progressive
patriotism’. So what, I ask him down the
phone, is he doing performing at the Black Deer
Americana and Country Music Festival?
“Americana is country music for Smiths fans,”
he quips. “It’s what we used to call singer-songwriting.
But singer-songwriters in cowboy
boots, and shirts with pearl-snap buttons. I fit
in because I made an album of Woody Guthrie
songs, with [American band] Wilco, who had a
role in founding the alt.country thing. I qualify
as an in-law, if you like.”
He even changed his accent, for the part. “With
the Woody Guthrie songs I found it was impossible
to sing his songs in my accent, so I kind of
leaned over a little bit more to that mid-Atlantic
twang and I’ve found since then that I go in and
out of it depending on what song it is and what
the nature of it is.
“Americana isn’t something that is geo-specific,”
he adds. “You can be an Americana artist anywhere
if you were influenced by the roots music
of America. Think about the first Beatles album:
what would that have sounded like if they’d only
played English music and only worn English
clothes? It would have been pretty boring,
wouldn’t it? Everyone knew they were inspired
by the music of black America.”
Like Woody Guthrie, Bragg has been labelled
a ‘protest singer’, a term he’s not entirely
comfortable with, as he finds it ‘pigeon-holing’.
Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff
“I’d rather you put me down as a dissenter,” he
says. “In fact I would argue that dissent is the
tradition that defines the English.”
Tom Paine comes up in the conversation. Bragg
cites the 18th-century English activist in the
pamphlet he’s recently written for Faber &
Faber, The Three Dimensions of Freedom, describing
him as ‘the greatest revolutionary England
ever produced’. “I wish he’d been born 150 years
before so he could have written his pamphlet
and given it to the New Model Army at Naseby:
then we may have had a republic that lasted,” he
says. Instead, of course, he helped the United
States of America to become one.
Bragg’s sets have always been punctuated by
political diatribes, and he’s going to make no
exception to this practice, he says, at the Black
Deer Festival. He’ll not decide on his set until
the day of the performance. “When I arrive at a
festival I have a long walk around the site. I try
and suss out the audience… are they soaking
wet, are they pissed off, are they chilled out?
Then I decide how I pitch the set to them.”
So will he ‘countrify’ himself up, I wonder, to
fit in with the likes of Kris Kristofferson and
Hayseed Dixie, also on the line-up? “I won’t be
wearing cowboy boots,” he says, “but I will undoubtedly
have a shirt with pearl-snap buttons
on it.” Alex Leith
Black Deer Festival, Eridge Park, June 21-23
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