Billy Bragg, 66, is a singer, songwriter and political activist born in Essex. After curtailing his early music career for a short stint in the army, he returned to busking before releasing his debut album, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy, in 1983. He reached No 1 with a cover of She’s Leaving Home, originally by the Beatles, which was released in aid of Childline. He now lives in Dorset with his wife, Juliet.
Socialism and left-wing politics have always existed alongside my life in music. I grew up with Margaret Thatcher and the miners’ strike. In 1986 I got the chance to experience socialism first-hand when I was invited to the Festival of Political Songs in East Germany. This was around the time that Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, started talking about perestroika (restructuring the Soviet Union’s political and economic system) and during that trip I ended up staying to play gigs all the way through Poland, Hungary and on to Moscow.
One of my strongest memories of that time was how similar the Soviet Union was to the United States — ironic when you consider they were bitter Cold War enemies. To a fella from a small island off the coast of Europe, they both appeared to be full of big roads, big trucks, big men, huge expanses of land and massive skyscrapers. Most foreigners stayed at the Hotel Ukraina in Moscow, which is a towering pointy thing that could have come straight out of 1930s New York.
The United States had a huge influence on my music. I went there in 1984, on tour with Echo & the Bunnymen, and played shows as their support act. New York was loud and busy — it felt like daily life on steroids — and I remember thinking, “If the rest of America’s like this, I won’t be able to cope”. It was only when we started heading west to places like Chicago, Salt Lake City and California that I realised that New York is not what the rest of the country is like at all.
The Bunnymen got fed up with travelling in the tour bus so they went to each gig by plane. I stayed on the bus because I loved sitting next to our driver, asking him questions as this vast country slid by the window. When he told me that we’d be driving close to Memphis, I asked if we could stop off at Graceland. He didn’t want to do it because there’d be too much traffic. Traffic? We’re talking about Elvis Presley! In the end, the rest of the crew and I had to chip in ten dollars each to persuade him to stop, but it was worth it. This was Elvis’s home: gaudy, yes, but also strangely spiritual. You could feel all that wonderful music … it was in the air.
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Getting to the west coast was a magical moment too. Like so many teenagers from my generation, I spent a lot of time dreaming about California and the Pacific. It played such a crucial role in popular culture. And there it was … stretching out as far as I could see, under a different kind of sunshine to the sort I grew up with in Barking. Ironically, when we decided to stop for a beer in Santa Monica, the first place we saw was an English pub.
That feeling of being a long way from home has hit me many times over the years, but there isn’t much that can compare to the Altiplano in Bolivia. I went there in 1989 with the DJ Andy Kershaw, retracing the old silver routes that the Spanish colonists used for transporting their stolen booty in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of the time in the Altiplano you’re at 5,000 metres. Planes fly at about 10,660 metres, so we were halfway there. The air was so thin that walking up a flight of stairs left you breathless and one beer knocked you spark out.
I’ll never forget the beautiful pueblo villages surrounding Potosi, which is where the Spanish had set up their mint for processing silver. Apart from the occasional baseball cap, a mountain bike or two and a couple of radios, we could have been looking at life from 150 years ago. Even the light and the colours of the sky felt like they were from another time.
During the summer holidays my parents would take me to the Essex coast to stay with an aunt who had a chalet in Jaywick, near Clacton-on-Sea. After the First World War, plots of land were made available for Londoners to build their own holiday homes, which is how Jaywick started out. There was no electricity or running water or anything like that at my aunt’s, just a chemical loo out the back, and my mum and dad, my aunt and about 13 cousins would share a couple of rooms. We’d goof around, swim in the sea and go cockling when the tide went out. Standing on the sea wall, breathing in that salty tang of sea air, I thought I was in heaven.
The Roaring Forty, a compilation of Billy Bragg’s recordings from 1983-2023, is out now (from £15; billybragg.co.uk)
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