Billy Bragg is known as much for his songs about love and loss as his protest songs; nonetheless, over three decades his songs have resonated with the times we are living in, the rise of Thatcherism, the Miner’s strike, immigration, the Iraq war, AIDS and so forth.
With the relative ease of getting a song out these days, through MP3s and Internet streaming, Bragg has recently lamented about the dearth of new protest songs coming out. Bragg sees himself as part of a tradition stretching back to Wood Guthrie and Leadbelly, through Bob Dylan, and more modern musicians like Ani DiFranco, Frank Turner and the Manic Street Preachers.
Bragg recently curated the Left Field event at the Glastonbury Festival, partly to give new socially active artists a platform. Discussing the current music scene with ABC’s TV interview series, Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery, Bragg expanded on how he sees the state of music today. Here he said: “I don’t think it’s because young people aren’t political. My sense of it is that when I was 19, if I wanted to get my views about the world out there, there was only really one platform open to me and that was to learn to play the guitar, write songs and do gigs.”
He notes that instead of strumming a guitar, young people more readily take to social media: “Now if you’re 19 and want to know what your generation is thinking, you can look on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram… if you’re angry about the world you can write a blog.”
This works to an extent, although he adds with wry humour: “More people can engage in that way, but the downside to that is nobody is ever going to invite you to Sydney to read out your tweets.”
Billy Bragg is an English songwriter, noted for his eclectic mix of folk, punk and roots music. Bragg’s first album was the intriguingly titled album Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy, and to add to this was Talking To The Taxman About Poetry. Bragg came to wider international acclaim through his collaborations with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue trilogy of recordings and in 2013 his most recent album ‘Tooth And Nail‘ gave him his most successful record in a decade.
