Blending folk, pop, and punk, Billy Bragg has sung about the plight of the working class as well as cynical love songs for over 40 years. He is as much of a social activist as he is a musician.
When he was an early teen, Bragg's parents gave him a reel-to-reel tape machine, which allowed him to create compilations from his sister's musical collections. It also opened his mind to the social-political zeitgeist of the late 1960s.
"There were American soul records like Motown Chartbusters. By Volume 5, the Civil Rights movement had pushed its way into Black America," Bragg says.
"Listening to those records, I got the sense that music should talk about the world, not just about love. Music can make you feel a sense of solidarity and draw you to a cause," he adds.
In the industrial East London of Bragg's youth, the Labor Party prevailed, and liberal, working class values were the norm. But it was the explosion of punk in 1977 that crystallized his political consciousness. "Rock Against Racism at Victoria Park in Hackney in East London was my first involvement. The Clash played, X-Ray Spex and Steel Pulse were also on the bill. It was a catalyst in my political sensibilities and the defining moment of our generation," Bragg says of the 1978 concert attended by 100,000 people.
He recalls Tom Robinson performing "(Sing If) You're Glad to Be Gay" when there was no Pride, and being "out" could get you beaten up.
"We'd marched under a banner that read 'Gays Against Nazis' and that made me realize that the issue at hand wasn't just racism but discrimination of all kinds. My perspective changed forever," Bragg says.
Having lived through the conservative Thatcher regime and its regressive policies and more recently Brexit, which he addresses with humor and heart in his song "Full English Brexit" on his 2017 Bridges Not Walls EP, Bragg knows about broken systems. "Ultimately, what the song says is that Brexitism isn't about immigrants, it's about us, not people from other countries," he says.
"Neoliberalism isn't working. The wealth gap between the top and the bottom has become ridiculously out of whack. The system is geared towards exploitation, and geopolitics is broken. We need an economic system that delivers. This young generation is gonna be poorer than we were. That's not the American Dream or what we were promised by the Welfare State in the UK. Things really need to change," Bragg adds.
Besides the possibility of England's men's soccer team winning it all at the Euros this summer, what keeps Bragg hopeful? "If you're gonna be a leftist you have to be a glass-half-full person," he says. "You can't give in to cynicism. Each generation has to find their way of dealing with challenges. I try to encourage the younger generation to engage by sharing the experiences I was involved in when I was their age. I recognize I'm an old geezer shouting at the clouds sometimes, but I still continue to speak up," says the 66-year-old.
As to concerns about the direction the US may take with upcoming elections, Bragg says, "You can always trust Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else. I think we're in the trying-everything-else phase at the moment. I have faith in the American people to engage in the election."
This year will be the 40th anniversary of Bragg's career, which he's commemorating with his aptly named Roaring 40s tour. Bearsville Theater will be the second stop of the tour, which continues across the US and Canada through the end of October.
