Simply Red
Billy Bragg
Le Rox

Billy Bragg is the busker who turned busker. He used to wander the streets performing with a fifty quid electric guitar and a 60 watt amp on his back. Now he tours the world and performs at Le Rox with a fifty quid guitar and his 60 watt amp on the ground. There is much to be pleased about with Billy Bragg. At a time when record production takes an expensive month of Sundays and -results in digitally impeccable piffle, Bragg goes into Chappell Music’s studio for three afternoons and records Life’s a Riot for, Spy vs Spy, which went gold, as they say, and along with his subsequent albums and EP’s,- has earned him accolades in the English music press since 1983.

Bragg’s records sound like they have been.recorded in a bucket but what you hear is what you get – anywhere. It is a riot of guaranteed minimum product and, like punk music, it is intended to shove it straight up all the woofing and tweetering aural pedants. Bragg is a musical Leveller. He sells his records for £3.99 or less and makes sure the price is etched into the artwork so no-one can put an adhesive – nice-price increase on it.

At Le Rox, where the sound crew took all night to get audible bass lines ‘out of the Every Brothers’ opening gig Billy Bragg, the electric Luddite was in his element. He stepped on stage vamping his raggedy guitar while his amp distorted like an early SO’s hearing aid. The Bragg sound is completed by his music hall vocal, one we’ve heard before in English pop with Mike Sarne, Freddy and the Dreamers, Ray Davies and, more recently, the remarkable Ian Dury. Observers will remark that it is simply a working class accent but there is a disturbing touch of parody to it – a kind of cloth cap Stepin Fetchitt.

This may be the Billy Bragg paradox. The more anti-pop he becomes in his unbelievably ordinary green polo shirt, unbelievably ordinary jeans and sneakers and his Tommy-at-the- Somme haircut, the more the New Wave fellow travellers at Le Rox bestowon him, if not radical, then at least Wobbly, chic. In a nearly two hour set BB went through the catalogue – opening with the rancid little mantra “Did you ever love someone you shouldn’t” repeated often enough to become downright sinister. “The Milkman of Human Kindness” and “Greetings to the New Brunette” followed and drew warm recognition from the full house crowd. Then with “World Turned Upside Down” we got, the first of a series of history lessons about the lessons of history. Despite his effortless stage presence and artful lack of art in his lyrics, Bragg seems sometimes not to realise his strengths. The chat begins to ramble and we are reminded of Billy Bragg’s association with the so-called Red Wedge bands of the Labor Party hustings calling on doleboys and girls to vote. All that’s fine but in commenting on the local scene he underestimated our disenchantment with ALP backsliding. ‘You are insulting us!’ someone snapped at Bragg, and while nothing was further from his mind, he was.

Bragg is best when his songs remain elliptical, haunting, sly and unadorned with explanation. He can turn out rock riffs with astonishing ease – his “l Heard it on the Grapevine” was a marvel. But it’s his vignettes of curdled romantic love in “The Saturday Boy” and “Myth of Trust” that actually delve the social and economic alienation that he so clearly perceives.

New songs like “Valentine’s Day is Over” showed Bragg is still more than able to extrude a lyric, but rallying choruses from “To Have and Have Not”, “The Man in the Iron Mask” and “Think Again” were the ones that hit the mark.

As he worked through three encores Billy Bragg really got brewing: “A New England” – “I don’t want to change the world/I’m not looking for a New England/I’m just looking for another girl” – was followed by the bitterly satiric “The Home Front” and the melancholy “Between the Wars’. With his mate Wiggsy on hand to tune guitars it was a disappointment that Bragg didn’t call on him earlier than the final encore for a few extra chords. Bragg can coax a sweet, almost folksy 12 string sound, as his recordings of “Walk Away Renee” and the Byrds-like “Ideology” attest, but his set was more thrash than shading for the most part.

It isn’t often that performers declare themselves as openly and intelligently as Billy Bragg. He is heroically at the confluence of punk, folk and rock and roll, a kind of Bo Diddley of the barricades, and he reflects the sort of political seriousness that only Margaret Hilda Thatcher could engender. lt may be hard to believe that “There is Power in a Union” after the British Miners got the icepick but there is no doubt that he is dinkum.

When he says that no-one changed the world from the concert stage he is probably being too modest. When he points to the audience and asks “which side are you on?” – from most performers it would seem an impertinence. From Billy Bragg it sounds like a fair question.

“Simply Red” The Adelaide Review, April, 1987. np.