Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. is Sam Duckworth, who grew up in Southend, Essex. More than just a folk singer, more than just a protest singer, Sam’s prescience defies his 20 years and is as inspiring as it is impassioned. His debut album, ‘The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager’, is as intelligent an introduction to shining talent we’ve heard in some time…
Billy Bragg is also Essex born and bred. Known affectionately as “the bard of Barking”, Billy has for over 20 years expertly married folk, punk, poetry and politics in his unrelenting and powerful music. Unafraid of courting controversy, Billy has sided with a number of grass roots political movements while being an unashamedly outspoken opponent of fascism, racism, bigotry, sexism and homophobia. He is also Sam Duckworth’s hero.
Bonding over food and drinks in Bridport Arts Centre, Billy’s West Dorset hang out, the pair spent a November Saturday discussing each other’s music, Billy’s school workshops, the BNP and what it means to be English. Here is an extract from their lengthy chinwag…
I want people to understand that I have deep roots and that those roots are what make me who I am.
Sam: Did you find it hard at first starting out when it was just you and the guitar?
Billy: Well, not really, because when you’re playing solo you have so much control over the way the gig goes. My job was, I spent a lot of time opening for bands in a boozer in South London called The Tunnel, and I would play Thursday, Friday and Saturday some weeks. One week it would be a goth band, then the next night it would be a punk band and the day after that would be a heavy metal band. I would just have to engage with their audience. It became part stand-up and part rock ‘n’ roll; I didn’t have any room to be sensitive and thoughtful. Some nights they didn’t even turn the fucking video jukebox off, so I took my cue from that, took the piss out of that and played louder. I’d get in people’s faces so they couldn’t ignore me. I used to stand on the amps sometimes – fucking mad! I think if I’d been in a band I would have been stuck in the confines of the band and wouldn’t have been able to do that. But being solo, you have no excuse for not grabbing an audience by the short and curlies, because you can go wherever they are.
S: That’s definitely the one thing that I’ve found when I started out. If there’s one person there they can identify with you instantly, but if there’s a band there’s a group mentality. So when you’re on your own if you don’t engage with an audience you’re very much lost.
B: Everyone’s focused on you, you’ve just gotta make ’em feel that you’re talking just to them, even though they’re in the back row.
S: Having seen you a few times in different environments, that’s definitely one of the things that I personally admire. From seeing you at the Barbican right the way through to seeing you in a tent at Reading, and still feeling as personal even when the audience were completely different sizes.
B: Oh thank you. Well, that Reading show a couple of years ago, that was a typical example of not really knowing what to expect and just having to suss it out. Just going out there and thinking, ‘OK I’ve seen who’s played before, I’ve seen what this audience are doing, that fucking DJ next door is playing too loud… I’m just gonna have to go out there and grab them by the scruff of the neck’. And I think you have to do that sometimes; you’ve got to suss your audience out in the first couple of songs and see what they’ll take. Festivals are always an opportunity to engage with new people. Festivals are where you get a chance to show what’s different about you. Maybe not what your best set is or how great you look, but why you’re different from what went before and what’s after so that people will either love ya or hate ya. Because for everyone who hates ya there’ll be enough people that love you to go away and be blown away by it. I mean I still know people who saw me the very first time I came to open for Echo and the Bunnymen in America in 1984. I just walked on, white shirt, jeans, DMs, guitar, playing in your face. And they still remember that. They weren’t expecting it. No one had done it. And I still have that ability to do that if necessary. I don’t do it every night; it would just be too intense. I’ve even been known to play the acoustic guitar occasionally! I think it’s being able to do that, to have it in your back pocket, to be able to pull it out. And usually at festivals. Either it starts raining or people are drifting away or the band on the next stage are too loud and you’ve just gotta go for it.
S: Having seen you in all these different environments it seemed to me that you’d researched or had a lot of knowledge about what you’re talking about and I think that that’s something that really connects with people. Did you spend a lot of time studying people like Woody Guthrie or was it something that just interested you?
B: It’s just something you pick up. When I was approached to do the ‘Mermaid Avenue’ stuff [Billy put music to unreleased Guthrie lyrics with the help of Wilco], of course I knew who Woody Guthrie was and I knew why he was so important and all that, but I didn’t really know in any depth his full biography, his full context; where he come from, what he did, how it worked… And I had to do a bit of reading up on it, but that’s probably handy, because if I’d have known too much about Woody, if I’d been a Woody obsessive, I wouldn’t have been able to do the job. I would have been too close. I needed to try and see in a much grander perspective than just the lefty singer songwriter, because he was so much more than that. Other than that, I’ve always been an opinionated bastard and not afraid to talk about things. You have to remember, in the Eighties, during the miners’ strike particularly, you had to know your context, you had to know why you were doing it, I felt anyway. Because I was going up literally into the mining areas to do gigs with people there who were a bit suspicious as to why someone who was a rock star from London would come up there. So if you didn’t know your shit you were very soon out of your depth. I didn’t do politics at school – I didn’t stay on past 16 so I missed out on all that – so I had to learn the language of Marxism, I had to understand what they were talking about, and then I had to articulate the ideas I had in that language. So you ended up writing songs about ‘There Is Power In A Union’, which is nothing more than basic sloganeering, but it seems to hit the spot. There’s lots of left-wing choirs that sing that song now. They sing that song and they don’t sing the more complex songs like ‘Days Like These’, which were much more specific and much more focused. So obviously it done the right thing then. But how and why who knows?
S: Is that what led you to write the book [The Progressive Patriot: A Search For Belonging, Billy’s part-autobiographical venture into national consciousness], a desire to communicate in a different way?
I’d get in people’s faces so they couldn’t ignore me.
B: It’s all communication, Sam. Isn’t it all communication? Whether we’re doing gigs or talking here for Clash or writing a book or doing the telly, it’s all about communication. What have you got to say? What have you got to tell me that I don’t know. I know you’re a great song writer, but what have you got to tell me that I don’t know? That to me is the great challenge to all of us, to get up and perform. What can we offer the audience that they haven’t already read or seen? Either stylistically or culturally, or in my case politically. What other perspective of the world can I offer my audience so they can take away back into their environment and make use of; their college or their home or their school… I might be giving them the power to take on their racist colleagues at work, or their grumpy old man or something like that. That’s what I’m trying to do with the book, with the gigs…
S: Was it a hard challenge writing a book in comparison to writing a song?
B: Yes. It’s a completely different discipline, mate. When I was a kid, my old man built an extension on the back of our house and he was just at it for what seemed like years. He was always at it, every hour. He was just covered in brick dust and paint, and he was just out there slogging away on his own. That’s what I took on. I laughed actually when I thought about it. I mean, he’s been dead thirty years, but I thought I’ve done exactly the same thing as him. I’ve fallen into the pit and I’m gonna have to climb out of here at the end of it.
S: How long was it in the making?
B: Well I was kicking these ideas around in 2002 around the time of ‘England, Half English’, but sort of realising I was going to need to write a book, there was 18 months of me telling people I was gonna do it and trying to start and not getting anywhere, and then 18 months when I was actually building it, writing it and putting it together. So it was 3 years but really only the last 18 months was I writing every day.
S: It must be quite satisfying to see it out in print?
B: Relief! (Both laugh) It’s good. What is satisfying is that people read it and it makes sense to them. Because some of the arguments are a bit convoluted, some of them I skip across subjects a bit – I’m not really interested in writing an academic essay…
S: From a lot of reviews I’ve read it says that it’s quite academic in the way that it’s all based on complete historical subjects, but at the same time you’ve written it in the Billy Bragg fashion.
B: I think it’s a mixture of the personal and the political. There’s a lot of autobiography in it, because I’m trying to explain to people where my sense of Englishness came from, which weirdly enough came from Simon and Garfunkel. It came from listening to ‘Scarborough Fair’ when I was 12 and getting ideas. So there’s a whole chapter talking about how two Jewish guys from Queens playing with Bob Dylan’s backing band can make me feel more English. How the fucking hell does that work? So there is that autobiography in it, but obviously, being a Billy Bragg book – like a Billy Bragg album – it’s bound to have a lot of content over style. So the history is the history of my background, because I want people to understand that I have deep roots and that those roots are what make me who I am, and I’m not prepared to give them up just because the British National Party have taken over my town. But at the same time I wanna entertain people. I wanna draw people in. I don’t wanna just bang people on the head. I don’t wanna come across as shrill and totally in your face, so I’m trying to strike a balance. And like all albums you begin to think, ‘Maybe I should have tweaked that bit there…’ I’ll leave it for a year and I’ll read it again and I’m sure it will be fine.
