Punk's Not Dead

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H: Accent is such a class marker, such a distinctive way to sort people into categories. You've really turned your accent into a signature. Was there ever a time you tried to hide it?

B: No, but I've gotten a lot of complaints about it, all of them, exclusively from my mother.

H: What does she say?

B: The first time I ever let her come to a Billy Bragg gig there was a guy there from one of the English music papers, and he said, "Who's that old woman in the back?" I said, "That's me mother." "You don't mind if I talk to her, do you?" "No that's fine, I'll introduce you to her, you can have a chat." I said to him afterwards, "What'd she say." "Oh, she was indignant. When you were playing and talking she was saying, 'He doesn't have to talk like that. He's much better brought up than that.'"

I've got a better one for you than that. God bless her, I love her. But when we were making the Woody Guthrie documentary, they went out to film my hometown. They sat me and my mother on the sofa, and the director said to my mom, "What do you think of your son's music?" And straight out, she said, "Oh, I've never liked his music." She said, "The school led us to believe he was capable of much better." The director flipped the camera straight to me, and I said, "What kind of punk rocker would I be if I made music that made my mum happy?" People who see that film say only one of two things. They say, "I love that scene where your mum says what she thinks," or, "I love that scene where your son totally upstages you." So, I don't know. In the end, there's only one way to be authentic and that's to be who you are. If you're being someone else, you're not being authentic are you?

H: You came out of the punk milieu, and punk is many things, but it has a strong strain of nihilism. But your music is affirming, even when you're angry.

B: Nihilism is a very potent artistic impulse, but one of the things I came out of punk with was a belief that rock and roll can change the world. I was naïve about that 'cause it can't, and I know that. But I was 19 and I saw The Clash. What could I do? My entire career has been trying to prove that even if you can't change the world that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least have a go. To push it as far as you can to see what it can actually do. It is very powerful to stand up there and say these things and sing these songs, or to be in the audience. It's very powerful. And it can't just be about selling records -- there's got to be something more to it than that. I've tried to put those things together, and my conclusion is, although you can't change the world, you can change the perspective of people in your audience, so that they look at the world in a different way. That's the absolute most you can do. That's what I try to do every night. I try to bring something to what I'm doing that they won't have read in the paper, won't have seen on TV, won't have heard on the radio. And hopefully something that takes them completely by surprise, like talking about Englishness to my left-wing audience is pretty tough on them, because they are internationalists, and so am I. But I'm also a patriot, as was Woody Guthrie. Sometimes the surprises I bring to them can be shocking to my audience. But it's very exciting to try and do it, and I would be betraying myself if I didn't try to.

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