NO SLEEP TIL HACKNEY

Back in August 2006 I started to make plans to visit my family in England at Xmas. On the off-chance I sent Billy’s manager, Mushi Jenner, an email to see if Billy was doing any shows around that time and back came her reply that he'd be doing the ‘Hope Not Hate Part 2’ tour through December. I couldn't miss an opportunity like that so I rescheduled my flights and sat back to look forward to some Bragg on his home turf! Winding forward several months - I arrive at Heathrow airport at 6.30am after a 24 hour flight from Australia. Billy is playing Birmingham that night (13/12) but there’s no way I can drag myself there. However the following afternoon I’m on a train heading West out of London bound for The Concert Hall in Reading. Thanks to Mushi I have no worries about tickets – she’s kindly put me on the guest list for any gigs I can get to. The Reading gig is great – new songs, Billy gets furious with a heckler and plays a blistering guitar solo in ‘World Turned Upside Down’. He even sings The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’ which is the one cover version I was really hanging out to hear. After the gig I meet up with the infamous ‘security’ man Bren – he who has several Billy Bragg tattoos – along with Grant Showbiz (the soundman). Billy appears at the merch stall and there’s a very long queue for autographs and a chat. It gives me a chance to check my bootleg which is adequate but suffers from having sat near the back of a hall with an echoey wooden floor. After the last autograph is signed Billy has time for a chat (“you’ve come a long way mate”) and I tee things up for Brighton before rushing off to catch the midnight train back to London.

The jet lag has hit. After going to bed at 9pm Friday night I’m awake at 3am Saturday and can’t get back to sleep. I feel like a zombie – even more so after watching UK TV at 4am. However, I have to get to Brighton – Billy is playing at The Dome where I last saw him in 2004.

After the Brighton soundcheck Billy has a photo session, then he’s able to join me for an interview. We try to find our way out of the venue but end up wandering around endless corridors and flights of stairs. I remind him of the Spinal Tap incident we had when we met at The Metro in Sydney to which Billy replies “They’re all like Spinal Tap – that stuff is all true!”. Eventually we find our way out and head for a glass and chrome Italian restaurant just up the road from the venue. As we wait for our coffees and Billy’s lemon tart I have trouble with my mini-disc recorder until I realise I have the microphone plugged into the wrong socket. Suddenly the audio comes to life…

MW: The wrong hole. Now I've got the right hole.

BB: OK. Always best to have the right hole. Remember - the anus is an exit. Always remember that, Mark. It'll do you good in life. Uncle Mac told me that and he learned it from Ry Cooder, so it's good information.

MW: Now...where to start....I was thinking about what I read in the paper this morning; that Ahmet Ertegun (founder of Atlantic Records) died.

BB: Yeah, very sad. I was just reading his obituary on the way down here. What a great man.

MW: And what a way to go - he fell over at a Rolling Stones concert!

BB: Hopefully chasing a bird...

MW: Well, he had given up the vodka.

BB: That's right, he did the right thing. When you're too old for wine, women and song - give up singing. I can't remember who said that - might have been Arthur Askey.

MW: Let's talk about touring - thinking back to the mid- to late 80s you were playing all over the place - Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua.

BB: That's true, yeah.

MW: And I recall a quote from you that went, "It's me, a guitar and an amp - I can play anywhere", but in the past five to ten years you've only been playing the more regular venues.

BB: I've not gone far off the beaten track. I think I got that out of my system, back in the day. I mean, there was a year - and I think there's a t-shirt that goes with it - where I played a million different gigs in a million different places. If you want to do it you can still keep doing it.

MW: I see Dylan is still playing places like Eastern Europe.

BB: The simple truth in it, Mark, is I've got a life. Before Juliet and Jack were around it was exciting. Now, when you've got a family and you've got commitments and stuff like that, you're all the time trying to balance what you do. One of the great things about the book, timing wise, was it allowed me to be present at home most of the time, this time last year between September and Christmas, when Jack was having his first term at secondary school. It couldn't have been better timed that away. That was one of the things that made me think that not only am I getting the urge to do this but this IS the time to do it because I've not got to be out on the road earning money. I can be at home. I've got to make that commitment to Jack to be there, because he had a really difficult transition to Dorset. It took him a little while, you know. And wonderfully he took to it like a duck to water. I'd like to think that's because both Juliet and I were there to back him up. It's not that I wouldn't like to go again to Czechoslovakia or other places. Of course I was in the papers a lot in those days and a lot of people were asking me to go. My idea of a really exciting thing to go and do now is someone rings up and says "Do you want to play New Year's Eve in Tasmania?".

MW: Which you did a couple of years ago.

BB: So I can say to Juliet, "Look, I've been asked to do this really daft job. There's not much money in it but would you like to go to Australia for New Year's?". We had friends out there who we stayed with. It didn't really cost anything. The kids loved it. The kids would go to live in Australia. I remember catching Jamie looking at the house prices in Sydney. Now, that possibility is more attractive than going to do a gig in Kazakhstan on me own.

MW: Unless you were with Borat?

BB: Unless I was with Lou Edmonds. He knows everyone out there. He'd get me a gig. That's probably where is now. On the gigging front though - 2002, the year the last album came out, I did more gigs in that year than any time in the 90s. I did a shedload. I did more than a hundred gigs that year.

MW: I remember you did about 20 in-store appearances.

BB: I'm talking about proper gigs, never mind all that shit. In literal, proper pay-money-and-go gigs I did over a 100. Every year, at the end of the year I list of the gigs I did so I can look at how it is.

MW: So you keep your own records of that stuff?

BB: Yeah, just for my own interest. So I can tell you now that for however much England Half English didn't sell, it wasn't because we didn't work the shit out of it. I can look and think "Why didn't that sell?". Not that I worry about that. I made a record I wanted to make.

MW: Was that a disappointment that it didn't sell?

BB: No. No. The records kind of set the agenda, I wouldn't have written the book without the record. Why make a record? You make a record to say something you want to talk about. The record sets the agenda for the interviews. You get to talk about that issue. In the process of that I got invited to loads of discussions about the meaning of Englishness and Britishness. Which in turn made me realise that there's more to say and that kind of fed into the book. In terms of sales, the sales from my post-80s albums are much lower than they've been before that but that doesn't particularly worry me.

MW: How's the book going?

BB: Alright. For what it is. But it's doing better than Rio Ferdinand's so I'm pleased about that. (laughs) I'm into the second edition now. So that's 20 thousand - The first pressing was 20.

MW: That's just for the hardback.

BB: Yeah, a hardback about an issue that most people aren't sure about.

MW: At the soundcheck this afternoon you played 3 or 4 new songs. Have you written these over the past year or did they come in a rush.

BB: They came in a rush. I'll be perfectly honest with you; my song writing went into a kind of hibernation when I wrote the book. I couldn't do both. So I went into like an artistic sabbatical. When I went to Canada, before SXSW...that was March, which was the first proper tour for 18 months. At the show in Toronto, at the soundcheck, the first time I strapped on the acoustic guitar I wrote the riff, the whole tune but not the lyrics for ‘If You Ever Leave’ I'd got the tune and the high part but not the song. I was playing it with such conviction that the sound techie guy said,
"That's a great song man, what's it called?"
and I said, "I don't know, I just made it up"
"Whaddya mean?"
"I just made it up. When I walked on stage I didn't have it and now I've got it"
"Fuck" he said, "That's incredible. How do you do it?"
and that started something. When I got back to England I wrote the lyrics and ‘Clash Fan Fight Song’ come in and ‘I Keep Faith’ I already had, or I'd kind of half written. It was about the time of the 2005 election I started playing that. But that was more inspired by working on the ‘We Laughed’ project. I'd already written the first two verses but I didn't have a concluding verse and working with those women kind of helped me to finish it off. It was quite inspirational.

MW: When I heard ‘If You Ever Leave’ the first time it sounded somehow familiar.

BB: I'll tell you what we're aiming for - Fred Neil or Harry Nilsson - something around that.

MW: Harry Nilsson is more like ‘Take The Y For You’.

BB: ‘Take The M For Me’ it's called. I've been listening to a lot of Harry Nilsson and Fred Neil. What happened was when we did some shows last year; when I put The Blokes together I didn't have Mac and I said what we'll do is play acoustically, and I really liked it. Have you heard any of those shows - the Patti Smith Meltdown show ?

MW: Yeah, I have bootlegs of most of the Meltdown shows.

BB: Well, I really enjoyed doing that one, so when we did some demo-ing in the Summer. I said, "Look we're gonna go in with no electric instruments. Let's see what we can do like that". We were throwing everything into England Half English and I was really enjoying that...which was how we made Mermaid Avenue. But now I think it may be good just as a discipline to make it acoustic, or base it as acoustic; make that the core of it.

MW: As well as the new songs you've been doing some new covers - Jarama Valley and also...although you recorded it a long time ago... That's Entertainment.

BB: Well I really got into singing that. The way I recorded it is pretty straight. The way I'm playing it is not so straight.

MW: It's a hard song to remember.

BB: I am having a bit of trouble with that. You may have noticed I was using (written) lyrics in Reading. I've got most of it.

MW: Weller wrote it when he was drunk.

BB: Yeah, that's right and none of it rhymes, so you can't get into it like you can another song. It's a stream of consciousness and the bits don't always fit together for me right. And I've been playing ‘Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)’. And a bit of ‘Superstar’ - actually Leon Russell wrote it, not The Carpenters. It was originally recorded when he was playing with Delaney & Bonney. There's a Delaney & Bonney ‘Best Of’ which I picked up in L.A. which has the original version of ‘We've Got To Get Ourselves Together’ which we come on to (at the Hope Not Hate gigs). I was listening to that in the van and on came ‘Superstar’ and I thought "Wow! This is just brilliant". It's so soulful.

MW: This year, as well as the book, you've released two box sets and all the individual re-releases and then the cut down "clam shell" version of the box set. Is that overkill?

BB: I don't think so. I tell you what happened was Elektra Records, who had all my American stuff; they disappeared and all my albums reverted to me. So I was in the situation by about 2003 where none of my music was available over in America apart from on import and I needed to do something about that. Now my next album will be out over there on Anti, but they didn't want the back catalogue. So because we didn't know how long it would be until the next album came along we found a little label called Yep Roc. They were interested in doing it. They wanted all the extra stuff. So having sent Wiggy in to compile the box set it seemed churlish just to put it out in America. And because we don't how long this gap with the book would be we thought we might as well let them do that.

MW: But do you think it was too much to have all of that come out within 6 to 8 months?

BB: Not really. I think the book may be a bit of a punctuation mark on 20 odd years of playing. It seemed to make sense to me. Maybe if I knew we were going to do the box set we might not have done ‘Must I Paint You A Picture’. That's the thing that now seems weird, that we did that and the box set. We were trying to think of an excuse to put all that extra stuff out and I thought either we'll do it now or we'll never do it.

MW: Going back to what you were saying earlier about keeping a record of your gigs. Have you seen on Braggtopia! the Timeline?

BB: Yeah, I have seen that. That's pretty good that. If I want to find out what I was doing 20 years ago that night I take a peek ...

MW: It gets quite detailed.

BB: Yeah...like "wanking off in Canada with his mates" (laughs)

MW: There're still some gaps though, like in the early 90s.

BB: Well tell me what years and I send you what I've got, though in 1993 there wasn't much...Juliet was heavily pregnant then and I was working out how to deal with a "forthcoming event".

MW: Have you heard that Peter Garrett, from Midnight Oil, is now the opposition spokesman for the environment in Australia ?

BB: Wow....he obviously hasn't got a fuckin' life. (Billy assumes I'm going to ask him about entering politics and immediately dismisses the idea)

MW: Actually what I was going to ask you was which musician should be the Presidential candidate for the Democrats?

BB: Steve Earle!

MW: Good choice...and Springsteen seems to be getting more political. He was making speeches on the ‘Vote For Change’ tour.

BB: We all have to. There's a space that used to be taken up by politicians. They're ceding the land...retreating like the ice floes. They're moving back and leaving a lot of area not covered. So social commentators and the press and also people like ourselves cover it, and I'll be doing a bit more of that next year. You have to step up and butt in.

MW: You see a big gap there?

BB: There is. There's things I want to talk about that they're not talking about. (We're briefly interrupted by some Bragg fans who have spotted him in the restaurant and come over to chat)

MW: You’ve got all sorts of new merch on this tour - tea towels and tea mugs...why not go for a full tea set?

BB: We're working on that. Next year we'll have oven mitts with "Smash Fascism" on them! (he says as he pretends to punch the air wearing the mitts).

MW: You're not going to sell signed packs of Throat Coat tea bags?

BB: No it's very hard to find...and then you debate whether to get regular Throat Coat or echinacea Throat Coat....but the echinacea one's shit!

The Saturday night crowd at the Brighton Dome are treated to a similar set to Reading two nights before and my bootleg turns out well. Afterwards there’s a huge snaking queue for autographs; there must be a hundred people waiting for Billy. I’m really suffering from my jetlag induced lack of sleep and so for the first time ever I fail to use my backstage pass and head back to my room for sleep! By Sunday afternoon I’m in Camden Market catching up with an old friend when I spot the ideal birthday present for Billy – a t-shirt with the slogan “Let’s Hunt James Blunt”. The stallholder even gave me a 1 pound discount when I told him who it was for. It’s the final gig of the tour tonight and it’s at the recently restored Hackney Empire – the venue for many Bragg Xmas and New Year’s gigs in the 80s and 90s. My seat is way up in the gallery which has a great view of the top of Billy’s head…from altitude. The advantage is the gallery has its own bar and it is sparsely populated which means I can record my best ever Bragg bootleg with no unwanted audience noise. The gig itself is a cracker. The stage is still decorated with the set for the ongoing pantomime “Cinderella” and Billy makes plenty of gags about it. The warm-up DJ Pandit G (from Asian Dub Foundation) even appears on stage wearing a pantomime horse’s head! Billy makes a few variations on the tour setlist including a guest appearance from Dave Woodhead on trumpet during ‘The Saturday Boy’ and ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ and Wiggy comes on stage for the final encore of ‘A New England’ and ‘A13’.

Backstage after the show there’s a crowd of people in the green room. I chat with Wiggy, Dave Woodhead and Lu Edmonds, Juliet is there along with Jack Bragg (days before his 13th birthday) who is telling Grant Showbiz that he wants to be a film producer. I manage to take a few photos and persuade Billy to wear his new t-shirt. He loves it! In return I get my Red Star Belgrade football shirt (from the Sexuality video) signed by Billy, Grant and Wiggy.

And that was it…another tour over. Mushi Jenner has told me not to expect any touring for a while but Billy indicated he’ll be pretty busy later in the year. His first priority is completing some more new songs and then he heads to the studio with The Blokes in March, so hopefully we can expect a new album in 2007!

Mark Warner
January 2007