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Liz Nicholls chats to singer songwriter and activist Billy Bragg who will star at the last ever Bucks highlight Towersey Festival – the 60th highlight – from 23rd to 26th August, and urges you to book your tickets
Q. Hi Billy, how are you?
“Not too bad thank you. I wish the weather was a bit better! As we’re into festival season and it’s a bit worrying. The likes of Glastonbury [where Billy helps curate the Leftfield stage] is always fine as they’re sort-of recession-proof but it’s the smaller festivals like Towersey which are hard hit. Near me where I live there’s the Tolpuddle Martrys festival in Dorset and it was cancelled because of torrential rain. The damage that does to the logistics of a small festival run by people who love music like Towersey is huge. I feel for the volunteers and audience too. I’ve been doing festivals for 40 years and it has to be climate change. The folk audience are generous, and the ones that have a tradition going, you’re coming together with people who maybe only see each other once a year. The nice thing about a folk festival is you can wander round, get a pasty and a beer and people are groovy about it. It’s not like some mad festival where people are charging around to the next mosh pit: the worst thing that can happen to you is you might get knocked over by some Morris dancers… but you generally hear them because they’ve got bells on. Let’s give Towersey a great send-off, shall we?!”
Q. What’s your first memory of music?
“We went to Blackpool for a holiday and stayed with a cousin of my dad’s, this has to be 1963/64 judging by the photos, as my brother was a baby. They had a record player which we didn’t have at home, and a record called The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen, which I was obsessed with, and played over and over again! It’s a dreadful old song but it kind of connected with me in some deep emotional place, and from then on I was really into music and my parents recognised this. When I was 12 they bought me a reel-to-reel tape machine for Christmas so I could tape stuff off the radio.”
Q. You read a poem out at school didn’t you?
“Yes, I read a poem out in English language and got called out of class by the teacher: they asked my parents if I’d copied it out of a book! So I wrote to a local radio station and it was the first time I thought ‘this is something I could actually do’.”
Q. What’s your favourite lyric…
“And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind, Down the foggy ruins of time, Far past the frozen leaves, The haunted frightened trees, Out to the windy beach, Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow, Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky, With one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, Circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate, Driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow... Yeah Mr Tambourine Man [by Bob Dylan] really brought me into the idea that poetry and songwriting was the same thing. That stayed with me for a long time.”
Q. You love Woody Guthrie too don’t you?
“Yeah, he was a massive influence on Bob Dylan. Until I was 14 or 15 you couldn’t really find Woody’s records… in Barking anyway. Eventually I picked up a cassette. It wasn’t until I went to America 40 years ago that I was finally able to really connect with Woody and hear his voice clearly, rather than second hand from people who covered his songs.”
Q. Do you have a big vinyl collection?
“I have loads of vinyl but no record player. It’s a terrible thing to admit but my son took the record player when he moved out which is fair enough. But if I get the urge to listen to a song I can usually find it online, on one of the streaming services. I’m never without music!”
Q. Do you and your son share any musical tastes?
“Yeah, he does turn me on to people like Jamie Webster. And he and I shared a lot of musical loves when he was younger. When we went to college in Yeovil and came back and said ‘Dad, tell me, why has nobody at college heard of The Skids?’ And I thought oh, damn, I wonder if I’ve given him a musical education that’s not quite age-specific for him, the poor lad! He’s a huge Ramones fan, and because he’s out on the circuit he sees a lot of brands and he does trip me up to some of that.”
Q. Who was your hero growing up?
“In those times it was music that had the ability to articulate the ideas that could bring about change. The people I was listening to were people like Marvin Gaye, the Clash, the Jam to some extent… That seemed to be a time when change was very much in the air. Are there bands like that now? I’m not sure but then again music is no longer the vanguard medium of youth culture. Back in the late 20th century music was the only medium available to us if we wanted to talk about the way the world was. It allowed us to talk to our parents’ generation as well, let the world know how you feel. Now, if you want to let the world know how you feel there are social media platforms, you can make a film with your phone. I don’t think people now immediately think of writing songs as the route to get their voice heard. I don’t think music has that dominant role any more. It still has a role to play but it doesn’t sum up the feelings of an entire generation the way it used to.”
Q. Do you have a favourite book?
“Yeah, I do: The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell. It was written during the second world war, and Orwell struggles to reconcile his left-wing beliefs and socialism with the patriotic necessity of winning the war. He has to come to terms with that and ask himself what he loves about England. The subtitle of the book is Socialism and the English Genius and I first read it in the 1980s and since then I’ve gone back to it many times. 1984 is another book that you can keep going back to. Every decade I have a run-in with it and realise it’s about something else. Is it really about spin rather than dictatorship? Is it about fake news? It is isn’t it!? The way that truth has become untethered from fact, which is what we’ve seen in the last few years, with the Johnson premiership and Trump in America. It resonated with me in a way it hadn’t before. A great novel can do that, it can change with the times.”
Q. If you had a magic wand what would you wish for?
“I’d like to see Arsenal relegated. I’d like to live long enough to see that, yeah! That would really cheer me up.”
Q. Haha! What would you do if you were education minister?
“Pay teachers more. They do a great job, teachers. For some reason I get a lot of them at my gigs. Young people, if they recognise me, which they seldom do, they say ‘oh my teacher says you’re great’. I much admire teachers. I think they have a much greater chance of changing the world than I will ever have as a musician. So investment in teachers is an investment in our future, in our young people. Teachers now are not only having to deal with education, they’re also having to deal with helping young people with their anxieties or mental health problems. They’re almost like glorified social workers. We need a much greater social care regime. The police the same, they spend so much time doing things that we as a society should undertake, looking after people who’ve fallen through the gaps of the system. The police should be able to be out chasing criminals instead of helping people who can no longer cope in our society. Those people have always been there but there are more now. I do a bit of work sometimes getting guitars into prisons. Prison is the last place that can’t say no. Hospitals can say no, schools can say no and expel you. Social care can say no. Prison can’t, that’s why they’re over-full. That’s not a society that’s healthy. It needs a lot of thought about how we do something about that to help.”
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