Billy Bragg by Jill Furmanovsky
Billy Bragg played Bristol on December 5th.
It seems appropriate that, in a city with such a progressive outlook, the Bard Of Barking is among the first to perform at the Beacon (latterly Colston Hall), a £150m project that will welcome the likes of Paul Weller and Richard Hawley in 2024.
Of course, being the nation’s favourite troubadour, Billy Bragg has previous with the same space, regaling the audience about supporting The Clash in the mid-1980s – one of many stories and anecdotes that pepper the set.
That’s always been Bragg’s style, but seems ever more fitting on this tour, celebrating 40 years since the release of his first album Life’s A Riot with Spy v Spy, all 17 minutes of which is played (if not in order) to close the set. The preceding nearly 2 hours are a whistlestop tour of the last 4 decades.
For a political songwriter – which, by definition, should age much of his work – there is a depressing topicality to the material performed tonight, even if some lyrics are updated. Opening with a solemn The Wolf Covers Its Tracks, lines such as, ‘Jet planes that fly that drop bombs on civilians to even the score. Where’s the God of the children? In the rubble of war’, eerily reference the current atrocities in Gaza.
Likewise, his cover of Rich Men Earning North Of A Million, with updated lyrics covering the ongoing strikes in the UK, and a song only recently added to the set. Or Sexuality, originally discussing same-gender attraction but now broadened to incorporate the rights of trans and non-binary people, a topic Bragg talks about for several minutes. He has taken some abuse on social media for wading into what some regard as a contentious discussion but, as ever, Bragg is resolute about human rights. More amusingly, Morrissey is taken to task in the same song, with a suggestion that panto may have been the best career move for the erstwhile outspoken Smith.
Similarly, Bragg is rightly concerned with the climate emergency, and in the 10 years since King Tide and the Sunny Day Flood (‘now people have to understand we’re going to feel it far inland, it’s going to shift the seasons and super-charge the storms’) was recorded, things have not improved.
It is, frankly, all quite depressing, but Billy Bragg is an eternal optimist and, as he once observed, There Is Power In A Union, a song which gets one of the biggest cheers of the evening. Ditto his rebel-rousing cover of Willie Guthrie’s All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose, delivered with ferocity on record but with empathy tonight.
It’s a sparse set-up onstage, with Bragg supported by 2 multi-instrumentalists: JJ and CC (surnames sadly inaudible to your reviewer) who add depth to the songs by adding (but not limited to) keyboards to a haunting and moving I Will Be Your Shield (the only song where Bragg is guitar-less), slide guitar on a spellbinding She’s Got A New Spell and mandolin for added winsomeness.
As great as the music is however, Bragg’s appeal lies in his charm. When he’s not comparing himself – tongue firmly planted in cheek – to Taylor Swift (they are both singer-songwriters, after all), he’s recalling a recent phone call with Paul Weller over his outfit (resplendent as he is in ‘shacket’). Between songs he’s tuning his guitar whilst chatting, explaining that collaborating with musicians propels him to believe he should act like one himself.
Joking or not, Bragg does himself a disservice. Despite the occasional contributions from his band, most of the set consists solely of Bragg and guitar. For the encore he rattles through his debut album (on the guitar it was recorded with, no less) with gusto, culminating in (of course) A New England which – with no encouragement – gets the entire auditorium to its feet.
As the man himself sang earlier in the evening: ‘There ain’t nobody that can sing like me.’ Too true, Mr Bragg.