Looking for a new England

To the best of my recollection, it’s been 17 years since I first saw Billy Bragg and about 14 years since I last saw him.  From the looks of the crowd that are in tonight I’m both something of a late comer and a casual fan.  While there are a few fresh faced students in the crowd, getting their first introduction to the Billy Bragg live experience, most people seem to be grizzled veterans of his shows and probably a protest or ten.  Many of the people here tonight look to march to the beat of their own drummer and you get the impression that they know all the words, perhaps better than Bill himself who has to be reminded once or twice.  It’s Billy, it’s early in the tour, no-one minds.

I’ve loved him since I bought ‘Workers Playtime’ in 1988 with no idea of who he was, following of all things a fine review in Q Magazine, that bastion of left wing thought and left field music.  I can’t remember too much about the review but one passage that has stayed with me said something like ‘This collection of personal love songs shows that while politics can disappoint you and make you angry, only love can break your heart.’  Since those young days he’s been a good companion when learning to live with, or try to live with, both.  One of the things that I love about Billy is that he’s still writing and singing about both with as much passion as when he started out.  He opens tonight with ‘To have and have not’, first written in the early 1980’s mourning a generation of school leavers on the scrap heap.  It’s full of Billy’s trademark mix of compassion, empathy and anger and sounds eerily up to date.  He finishes with ‘New England’, probably his best know song, even if it’s Kirsty MaColl’s cover that’s better remembered.  The crowd sing along from the first song to the last, Billy sometimes reduced to our accompanist.

I tend not to watch many established bands.  I much prefer groups and performers who are in their first couple of years of life.  I like not knowing quite what to expect from a band.  I like the energy, the optimism, the sense of possibility that young bands can have.  I like that they feel that they can take over the world.  I like it that they can pick you up and carry you along with them, at least for the duration of the set, before setting you down, a little sweatier, a little deafer and with your footsteps  a little lighter.  I can catch a reflection of a part of myself that I forget exists in their wide eyes.  And, more prosaically, usually a band’s best material is at the start of their career.  Maybe it’s the group dynamic within a band that changes and makes it hard for them to sustain their creativity.  Maybe they get complacent.  Maybe they just run out of things to say and things to care about.

Billy Bragg wasn’t my favourite singer when I was a teenager.  I loved the Pixies, Morrissey, The Stone Roses, The Wonder Stuff, The Pale Saints, The Boo Radleys and lots of others.  And where are they now?  Some have disappeared into the real world.  Some have disappeared into irrelevance, whatever spark used to animate them has gone out and left their creative peak receding into the distance along with their hairlines. 

Some tour their greatest hits, hoping for a new generation to take them to their bosom, for their old songs to find new life in young ears.  That doesn’t seem to happen very often though and I don’t want to watch overweight and balding men in sagging t-shirts playing to an audience of similarly timeworn punters.  The songs and the band mattered to us then because we all had the world at our feet.  We were all young and brilliant and beautiful then and we came together to celebrate our triumphs and losses.  Now it’s just a reminder of our vanished salad days and a surrender to getting old and to nostalgia.  The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words, the word ’nostros’ for ‘coming home’, and ‘algos’, meaning ‘ache’ or ‘pain’.  It’s a seductive emotion but we shouldn’t give into it.  We shouldn’t be looking forlornly over our shoulders, looking for a place that we’ve lost.  The best days are the ones to come and it’s up to us to make sure that’s the case. 

Billy Bragg is a great antidote to this.  He’s a performer and a man who’s remained fully engaged in the same causes and passions that animated him in his youth.  That most provincial of accents still conveys the most universal of truths about life and love.  That life was not better in the past and that it’s still difficult now, but that we can, should, must struggle to make it better.  And that love is still the only thing that can truly break your heart or make you feel at your most alive.  You owe it to everyone to never give up on trying to make the world a fairer and better place and you owe it to yourself to never give up on love, whether you’re still missing relationship or whether it’s making the relationship you’re in as full of sparking fire as when you first met.

It’s easy to be cynical Billy tells us and he’d have every right to be so.  He’s a man who campaigned and promoted tactical voting between Lib Dem and Labour to keep the Tories in opposition and we know how that turned out.  But he’s right.  If we can’t make the future better than the past then we’ve only ourselves to blame.  As we all sing along to the last song I realise where I’m going wrong.  “I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England, just looking for another girl”.  And for the first time in a long time I do want to change the world, to find a new England.  And I still am looking for another girl.

David Millington

December 2010/January 2011

Nottingham