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Billy Bragg is a spunky Brit with an electric guitar, a 60-watt amp and a heart full of conviction. He snarls in the face of bourgeois complacency and challenges his audience to think beyond the basic rock 'n' roll themes of boys, girls, fast cars and party-party-party.
Bragg gave up bands a few years back and started performing on London street corners, where he gained a small but loyal following, along with some favorable coverage in the local rock press. Adopting a do-it-yourself attitude, Bragg released an EP in 1983 — the raw Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy — which has sold more than 150,000 copies to date in England. He followed that in 1984 with a full-length LP, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, which also went gold in England.
With his American major-label debut, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, the 28-year-old angry young man is looking to stir things up with the American audience. This album is a far more produced affair than his scrappy independent recordings — each of which was cut in a few days' time on a shoestring budget — but it pulls no punches politically.
"Signing this contract with Elektra hasn't changed anything," says the cocky Cockney. "Whenever I talk with any record company, it's about how much control I can have as well as how many records I can sell for them."
Some of the tunes on Taxman are bound to rub Yanks the wrong way. "Help Save the Youth of America" is an indictment of what Bragg sees as an inherently hedonistic society: "Help save them from themselves / Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys / And the California girls... A nation with their freezers full / Are dancing in their seats / While outside another nation / Is sleeping in the streets."
This folk protest song, done to a jumping Bo Diddley beat, concludes with the thought-provoking verse: "And the fate of the great United States / Is entwined with the fate of us all / And the incident at Chernobyl proves / The world we live in is very small."
Bragg delivers these lines with clenched jaw, Cockney yelp and thrashing power chords, like Bob Dylan-meets-The Clash. On the rousing workers' anthem, "There's Power in a Union," he hearkens back to the message of Pete Seeger, though his delivery is quite different. Instead of an acoustic guitar or banjo, Bragg assaults the senses with a piercing electric solid body guitar set on stun. And in contrast to Seeger's plaid shirts and grandfatherly gleam, Bragg comes across like a hard-boiled street fighter.
Taxman's political protest songs are balanced with more evocative sketches. In "Greetings to the New Brunette," a giddy ode to a girl named Shirley, he sings: "I'm celebrating my love for you / With a pint of beer and a new tattoo." In the melancholy "Levi Stubbs' Tears" he tells the tale of a lonely young girl living an ordinary life who finds solace in the songs of the Four Tops. And in "The Passion" he sings about an unhappy newlywed with a dilemma: "In the long empty passionless night / Many times to herself she has prayed / That the baby will love her much more / Than the big boy who stole her away." And his sentimental "Home Front" is full of nostalgic images of placid Brit-life and "the promise of jam tomorrow" — a lifestyle which he openly rejects: "The lonely child looks out and dreams of independence / From this family life sentence."
Billy Bragg grew up in London emulating such rockers as Rod Stewart and the Faces, Chuck Berry, and (of course) the Rolling Stones. He, his boyhood pal Wiggy, and a couple of other blokes put together a garage band, playing raunchy covers of "Brown Sugar" and "Johnny B. Goode."
Seeing The Clash in 1977 turned Bragg's life around. "It made me realize that to express some feeling is more important than to get it didactically right as a musical form," he explains. " So shortly after seeing The Clash in concert, we stopped wanting to be the Rolling Stones, because the gap between us and them was so huge and we had no idea how to get across that gap. But in The Clash we saw everything that we loved about the Rolling Stones — plus they were just an inch away from the street, from playing in their mums' back rooms, just like us. So we suddenly realized that nobody comes along and says to you, 'We're gonna make you famous, boy.' You have to do it yourself. And that was really one of the great lessons I had learned — the idea that anybody could do it."
He formed a punk band called Riff Raff, which played around London from 1977 to 1980. Then Bragg dissolved the band and took to the streets on his own with guerrilla abandon.
Though his first two recording projects were strictly one-man-and-one-guitar, Talking with the Taxman involves some accompaniment, including guitar work from The Smiths' Johnny Marr (on "Greetings to the New Brunette" and "The Passion"). "This album is certainly more accessible, because I wanted to progress from being just one man and his guitar to being one man and some more guitars and maybe a little bass here and there and a couple of overdubbed vocals," says Bragg. " Maybe the next album will progress to one man and his bank of synthesizers. I can't guarantee. I haven't sat down and thought about it yet. But for the moment, it serves me better to remain solo, at least in concert."
Bragg considers himself as much a musicologist as a musician. In the course of soaking up influences he's encountered the works of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker and countless other originals. "I think a sense of musical history is a very important thing," he says. "I grew up in the early ' 70s listening to Motown and to Simon & Garfunkel, and from there I went back on through old country-and-western music, black gospel, Delta blues and white folk music. You know, you get someone who inspires you and you want to find out who inspired them. I think that's a very important way to think about music, not just to look at your hero and stop there.
"There's a lot of kids these days who think that what I'm doing — playing guitar solo and singing — is brand new, that it's never been done before," he adds with a hint of contempt. "They've never heard the early Bob Dylan albums. They've never heard of Woody Guthrie or John Lee Hooker. And these are people who I think of when I think of the solo performer at his best."
Bragg was also influenced by another angry young Briton, Elvis Costello. "I had been listening to Dylan and other American singer-songwriters like Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, and suddenly there was Elvis Costello, saying all the things that the other singer-songwriters had been saying about love and emotion, but he was saying it with a gun pointed at your temple, alternately stuck in his mouth. And that really made me think that the singer-songwriter doesn't have to be reflective or introspective. You know — talking to yourself, and 'woe is me' and all that. Elvis Costello made me realize that it could be 'Woe is me, and you're gonna pay for it, motherfucker!' And that really impressed me. I was never the same after hearing that first Costello album.
"All songwriters hold a mirror up to society," Bragg continues. "Mine's a bit warped, like one of them funny mirrors you see at the fair, but Costello's was cracked — and it really left a big impression on me. He remains today the one person I've met in this industry who, in his presence I feel the fan again. Working with the English language, as I do, I think he's doing it the best.
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