Billy Bragg gig, Vicar St. - June 3rd

Earlier this year, on June 3rd, I went to see Mr. Billy Bragg in concert for the first time. I was first introduced to his music by my girlfriend, who has been a Billy Bragg fan for many moons. She bought me one of CDs a couple of years ago, and I was immediately hooked by the first few lines of Sexuality:

I’ve had relations
With girls of many nations
I’ve made passes
At women of all classes
But just because you’re gay
I won’t turn you away
If you stick around
I’m sure that we can find some common ground

The guy is a protest singer really. In the 1980s he was involved in the collective of popular musicians called Red Wedge, which tried to get the young people of Britain to engage with politics in general and the Labour Party in particular. Red Wedge was formally disbanded in 1990, but Bragg stayed political. He has a catalogue of songs about love, life, war, and this kind of stuff - these days he seems to be mostly targeting fascism through his music with the rise of the British National Front, as well as war, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.


The Diggers song is a good example of the kind of stuff that he sings about, and it’s particularly close to my heart, because it’s about a load of activists in the 1600s who tried to reclaim land for communal ownership. It resonates with me because I’m involved with a network in Dublin City who have set up a couple of community gardens where we grow food and link in to the local community. Here’s some Digger lyrics (the song’s actually called World Turned Upside Down):

'We come in peace' they said
'To dig and sow
We come to work the land in common
And to make the waste land grow
…
The sin of property
We do disdain
No one has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain’

…
From the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers' claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed
But still the vision lingers on

Bragg’s music is guitar driven stuff. I think Bragg sees himself as a punk musician, and there’s certainly some spikiness in the guitar. But it’s pretty melodic - maybe power pop would be appropriate? Anyway, I’m not too hung up on categorisation of music. It’s too easy to get bogged down in that kind of stuff.

Bragg was joined on stage for some of the tracks on keyboards by Ian McLagan, formerly of the Small Faces and the Faces. They even had a Hammond Organ. The highlight of the night might just have been a rendition of the classic Booker T and the MGs track Green Onions. (To digress, two of the MGs were Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn and Steve Cropper, and these guys have serious credibility. They were part of Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi’s touring Blues Brothers band, and can be seen in The Blues Brothers movie. They had previously been session men at Stax Studios - Booker T and the MGs were the house band , and played on some of the classic records that came out of there. Cropper was a co-writer of some incredible songs, including Sitting on the Dock of the Bay with Otis Redding, Sailing with Rod Stewart, and In the Midnight Hour with Wilson Pickett.) Bragg said that Green Onions, though instrumental, was a major political statement, being recorded in a studio in the racially segregated south by a racially integrated band.

Booker T & the MGs - revolutionaries!?

This might have been the most interesting thing he said, but Mr. Bragg talks a lot in concert. In fact, he could fairly be described as an incorrigible spoofer. He was heckled a number of times for talking too much. I don’t think he played two songs in a row throughout the whole show (except in the encore). And he wasn’t even rallying the crowd with any kind of political stuff - he was just yapping about funny stories and this kind of thing. It would have been far better if he had played a few batches of songs and chattered in between these. But he let loose in the encore, and lashed through some of his early hits.

I really enjoyed the show, but I was only familiar with a handful of the tunes. It was one of those gigs which seemed to be full of die-hard fans who knew each and every lyric “like it was written in their soul”, to paraphrase Mr. Zimmerman. Anyway, that’s enough about that.