Death to Cynicism: Billy Bragg at the Bearsville Theater
An uplifting live show to suggest a New Optimism for the 2020s.
When Billy Bragg started his show at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock last Friday night (July 19) by going straight into a Leon Rosselson song about a group of British political idealists, the Diggers, whose attempt at autonomous equality in the Seventeeth Century was ruthlessly repressed by “the men of property,” there were several ways to take the choice:
The song’s title – “World Turned Upside Down” – seemed as good a place as any to start a night that would inevitably include Billy’s usual between-song banter about the state of the planet we live on and whether it will ever right itself to equanimity.
Billy wanted to commence with a song that referenced Britain’s history of political repression before pivoting, pretty much for the duration of the next two and a quarter hours, to the arguably more pressing matter of domestic American affairs – per the immediate follow-up with the equally voluminous but considerably more pointed “Help Save The Youth of America.”
He was looking to establish and confirm his political bona fides just in case the audience was uneducated about his back catalogue and had come along to hear him “play his hit,” which, apparently, in the USA, is “Sexuality.”
Billy Bragg has a double CD retrospective set out, The Roaring Forty – also the name of the current tour - that gathers up 40 of the best from his 40-year recording career (it was 40 then, but it’s 41 now), and given that “World Turned Upside Down” is included on that set, then why the hell not?
Regardless of whether it was any or all of the above, the one-two opening punch ensured that this show got off to a suitably roaring start. And while the tempo and volume would frequently rise and fall over the night, Billy himself did anything but. Always energetic in his commitment to entertain and educate in equal doses, and someone who draws extensively from an audience’s own enthusiasm, he took to the stage a little reserved, possibly still jet-lagged (this was only his second show on a USA run), but left it fully revved up/amped, and seemingly ready for more.
The audience, incidentally, was refreshingly varied in its demographics; I had a classic pony-tailed proper old Woodstock-era hippie to my left, a 40-ish American skinhead couple to my right, and a fist-punching political activist ahead of me; there were some genuine young people in the crowd who seemed to know the songs, and yet a couple of the old friends I saw – inveterate gig-goers both - confessed that it was their first time witnessing Billy in the flesh.
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As for me, it would be fair to say I go back further than, well, possibly anyone else in the room. I first met Billy when our bands shared support slots (twice over) for mod group The Directions in early 1980, at the good old Trafalgar in Shepherds Bush Shopping Centre. Once Billy got back from his post-Riff-Raff tour with Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and took to the support stages of London with just his cockney accent, his biting songs, his welcome banter, and his overdriven guitar, we crossed paths so often that it was only a matter of time before he was featured in Jamming! In fact, by late 1983 he was so bloody hip that I commissioned him to write a feature called “The Billy Bragg Guide to Being Hip.” The result was suitably caustic/ironic/sarcastic, unquestionably witty, perfectly erudite, and stands up well to this day.
Not quite four decades on, I asked if he would write the foreword to the compendium of that zine, and he obliged again. Between those commissions, we have had considerable contact – I interviewed him for a cover story of Jamming! later in 1984; was heavily involved in Red Wedge; attended his shows at multiple venues on both sides of the Continent; interviewed him for my Smiths biography; and reviewed one of his own books, the excellent Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World for the Wall Street Journal in 2017.
All that said, until last Friday I had not seen him in person or on stage in too many years to count. So while I am absolutely a fan of Billy’s music, I am not fanatical, and I’m not sure he would want anyone to be - because democracy, of which he sings regularly if not always citing it by name, is a messy business, one that requires debate, a constant back-and-forth of ideas and opinions, one in which Billy has been a prime proponent in musical, lyrical and literary form.
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The set at the Bearsville, on which Billy was occasionally accompanied by keyboardist/backing vocalist JJ Smith, rocked back and forth between activism and introspection, and drew from up and down his career, the first seven songs themselves hailing from six different releases. And unlike so many who tour their “greatest hits,” there was no attempt to lean too far back in the catalogue: four of the night’s 24 songs were drawn from his most recent studio album, 2021’s The Million Things That Never Happened.
Similarly, Billy’s commentary was suitably up to the minute, not that you would expect anything less from a man who gets off a transatlantic plane and immediately starts subjecting himself to the Republican National Convention on TV. As such, we got the usual winged introductions to songs like “The Buck Doesn’t Stop Here” (the lyric “never trust a man who would be King, who seeks all power to himself,” was written about Trump long before the highly recent Supreme Court decision giving him widespread immunity from prosecution); “Do Unto Others” (about better options for better living to be found in the Bible than the Ten Commandments); “King Tide and the Sunny Day Flood” (the title of this climate-change truth-telling a likely reference to the olde English King Canute, whose own megalomania allegedly had him attempting to turn back the sea’s tide); and “Why We Build The Wall.” This latter song seems so perfectly tailored to Trumpite attempts to “keep ourselves free” that it comes as a reality check to learn that it was written and originally recorded by American indie folk songstress Anaïs Mitchell back in 2010, not as a comment on contemporary resistance to immigration, but as part of her conceptual album Hadestown updating the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice! And lest the audience feared that Billy had only one thing on his mind, the first half of the show was also peppered with the love songs that resonate so widely, “She’s Got A New Song” and “the hit,” “Sexuality.”
“Sexuality,” released in 1991, was just one of several songs in which Billy updated his lyrics, in this case to reference the more modern choice around pronouns. In case the audience didn’t catch this, he followed with a lengthy explanation of that decision, quite rightly noting that the slurs that were used in 1980s UK against “our gay brothers and sisters” are exactly the same pathetic arguments thrown at the trans and LGBTQ+ communities of today, and that as an artist and activist, Bragg would not be true to himself if he didn’t acknowledge prior lyrical omissions via the process of an amendment. (He did the same later with “Greetings to the New Brunette,” appending “How can you lie there and think of England” with “When you don't even know there’s a women’s team?”)
Perhaps the best example of Bragg’s commitment to the folk tradition, by which songs are there to be adopted and adapted in equal measures, came with his discussion of Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and how, upon listening to the YouTube sensation in question for the first time, Billy’s initial sense of righteousness, as generated by the opening verse’s working-man’s-blues, turned to righteous anger at a second verse that “punches down,” in Billy’s words, to those on welfare. Explaining that Woody Guthrie, to whom some have dared compare Anthony, would never have stooped this low but always showed solidarity to those less fortunate than himself, Bragg played his own rewrite, the far more apt “Rich Men North of a Million.” It’s a song he uploaded to YouTube himself eleven months ago, for which he suffered the inevitable brickbats, but which, given that it was the only one at the Bearsville not to have been committed to a Bragg release somewhere down the line, you can hear for yourself as below.
“Rich Men North of a Million” came hot on the heels of Woody Guthrie’s own “All You Fascists Bound To Lose” and later in the show, concluding the pre-encore portion of the set, he expressed that while Woody’s guitar was famously emblazoned with the words “This guitar kills fascists,” his own motto would be “death to cynicism.” Careful not to conflate cynicism with skepticism, it was a call to belief: belief in the power to change things, belief in a better world, belief in the better instincts of our fellow humans, and belief in the beauty of our planet, which is disintegrating in its current form all around us. The song this led to, almost inevitably, was “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.”
Billy can occasionally over-labour-party a thought: I feel like I’ve been hearing his jokes about American football for decades; it didn’t seem fair to assert a “you” that embroiled this audience into collective responsibility for Louisiana’s new “Ten Commandments in the classroom” law, given that that the southern State in question is 1400 miles from New York; and although there is certainly reason for optimism in the UK after 14 consecutive years of Tory rule just ended at the ballot box, there is always room for a larger mirror upon which to reflect upon the UK’s own political sins. Still, while he can be one of its fiercest observers, Billy’s love for the USA is evident in his long relationship with its audiences, and his own admission that he is often filed under “Americana,” a result, no doubt, of him becoming melodicist for the treasure trove of Woody Guthrie lyrics passed his way by daughter Nora Guthrie, starting back in 1995.
That invitation gave way to the series of Mermaid Avenue albums recorded with Wilco, from which the night’s set drew upon “She Came Along To Me,” which Billy introduced with a rip-roaring condemnation of Republican machismo, and his belief that women would fend off the threat of fascism at the ballot box this November. As you can see above, this met with thunderous applause, though I admit to my own skepticism of the possibility, at least until Biden backed out of the Presidential race less than 48 hours later, giving women in the States another shot at coming out in force for a female President (and us males joining them). Woody also provided lyrics for the night’s true finale, “Way Over Yonder in The Minor Key,” for which Billy was joined onstage by Natalie Merchant.
If it’s safe to say that the audience left deliriously happy, it was probably in part because the set also included songs with which they could sing along. These appeared primarily in a run of late-set early classics that included “The Milkman of Human Kindness,” “A New England,” and “To Have and Have Not” with Billy able to lean back and let the audience vocalise the choruses to all (an example from the latter included below), thereby establishing that even if he has been heckled in the States to “play your hit,” his own audiences know that over a roaring forty years, Billy has turned out literally hundreds of gems.
It may be wishful thinking to assume that at 66 years of age, Billy is capable of writing hundreds more, but judging by the enthusiasm with which he continued political discussions after the show, and the fact that the man who penned his opening number, Leon Rosselson, is to be found onstage this very Sunday (July 28) in London, celebrating his ninetieth birthday with the likes of Boff Whalley and Reem Kelani, we are certainly far from done. Life would be a lot less of a riot without him.
I saw Billy in a small room in Emory University in Atlanta in the late 80's. It was a tiny crowd and I was probably the only Brit....Billy spent a long part of the show giving a diatribe on the evils of Thatcherism and the state of the UK. A lot of the politics were definitely questionable and of course the audience were none the wiser and were certainly not going to fact-check. I wish that he would have toned it down a bit but I guess that's what floats his boat. The music however was wonderful and the banter was certainly entertaining.
Yeahhhh Billy. I’ve grown up with him. Nice read Tony.