Episode 391 - Billy Bragg
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck, nicks?
Marc:You know, look, sometimes I annoy myself, all right?
Marc:So don't think you're alone out there.
Marc:I am Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:I'm edgy.
Marc:I'm thrilled to be here, but I'm edgy.
Marc:I'm very excited that I have Billy Bragg in the garage today.
Marc:What a fucking saint that guy is, and what a true artist.
Marc:Yeah, I'll tell you, man, it is difficult...
Marc:To maintain a life of integrity politically and personally and artistically and have all those things operating at the same hum because it's in your heart.
Marc:That is a rare person.
Marc:And Billy Bragg is that person to find, you know, to talk to somebody whose politics come from sort of an earnest moment of revelation.
Marc:And then to sort of make a life out of that and understand where that comes from and why it happens and that that is your passion in your heart.
Marc:What an amazing treat it was to have him here.
Marc:And he plays some songs.
Marc:It's spectacular.
Marc:We'll get to that in just a second.
Marc:I got some business to do for myself and for others.
Marc:I also want to address...
Marc:The Michael Ian Black, Marc Maron, Twitter war brouhaha that may you may not know that it's a brouhaha, but certainly some people, the feeders, the content hungry outlets who are constantly.
Marc:Kind of bottom feeding the Internet for things they can make hay out of kind of made it a big deal.
Marc:And I got nothing against that.
Marc:I mean, most of you who listen to my show know my relationship with Michael.
Marc:I will tell you some backstory on that.
Marc:The other thing I want to say, you know, I was a little cranky on Monday.
Marc:But I'm so glad so many of you love the Pam Adlon, Pamela Adlon interview.
Marc:The feedback's been amazing.
Marc:It's very interesting to me that on the website, especially when I have women on, there's a lot of vocal dudes out there who are dicks and douchebags.
Marc:But you know what?
Marc:It seems that Pamela Adlon warms the cockles of even the most nerdy, aggravated heart.
Marc:People love her, and I love her, and I'm glad you enjoyed that episode.
Marc:Moving on.
Marc:The thing about Jessica that I was talking about in terms of like, look, you know, she wants to have kids.
Marc:She wants to have a house.
Marc:She wants to have a ring.
Marc:She wants all the things that a woman her age wants and rightfully wants.
Marc:And in sometimes with me and I don't know what your situation is and you can judge me however you want.
Marc:But, you know, I've been, you know, what is it?
Marc:I've been to the dance before.
Marc:Is that it?
Marc:So it's very I cannot be cynical in this situation.
Marc:And if I came across as cynical, you know, I don't want to misrepresent my relationship.
Marc:I love this woman and I want her to have a great first experience.
Marc:uh, of, uh, of marriage and children and everything else.
Marc:And if I'm the guy that's going to do that, I've, as you know, those of you who know me, I've got to go out of my way to not be a dick and to not be dismissive and did not be cynical just because I've, uh, I have fucked it up before.
Marc:And, uh, it seems like a old hat, which it isn't because I don't think I've ever been
Marc:The man I've been with her that I was with the other ones, I'd like to think I'm growing.
Marc:And obviously some of you who may have seen the Twitter argument between Michael Ian Black and myself, though we're not dating.
Marc:It did have a lover's quarrel element to it, or at least there's very it's a very weird and rare thing.
Marc:To have a dynamic with somebody where the sort of contempt is equal to the compassion.
Marc:And the weirdest thing about what happened on Twitter, did I make some weird, awkward shift from me and Jessica to me and Michael Ian Black?
Marc:Yeah, make of it what you want.
Marc:But what I wanted to...
Marc:share with you about the jessica situation is is is i love her she's not bullying me you know i'm just a you know an old guy set in my stupid old ways and in order for me to get out of my old ways you know i've got to let love in and and and you know and be present for stuff in a non-cynical way good luck with that hey how about being present with an open heart and not being a cynical fuck all right yeah i'll give that a try for a few minutes see how that goes
Marc:But as some of you know, on Twitter, I am volatile.
Marc:Is that the word?
Marc:I am a raw nerve.
Marc:And quite honestly, whenever I engage in a Twitter fight with Patton Oswalt or Dave Anthony or Michael Ian Black, as the case was day before yesterday, I don't fare well.
Marc:I don't generally win.
Marc:I usually end up getting my ass kicked and that hurts my feelings.
Marc:But I'm trying to learn how to frame it in a fun way.
Marc:Busting balls is busting balls.
Marc:Unfortunately, depending on who you are, busting balls is a very personal thing.
Marc:It's not a hobby.
Marc:It's not something that, you know, like I get joy out of figuring out how to insult people.
Marc:If I'm insulting somebody, I want it to hurt.
Marc:And if they're insulting me, no matter what, it's going to hurt me.
Marc:So, you know, generally I'm trying to just suck it up and realize that, you know, it's not life or death and it is fun.
Marc:But what I'm trying to tell you is this.
Marc:The Twitter thing is the Twitter thing.
Marc:You know, if two funny people, especially people that have a relationship are going at each other, there is some love there.
Marc:There is not this is not, you know, like, oh, my God, I hope their friendship lasts or they really hate each other.
Marc:No, if you're engaging with somebody, definitely you have feelings invested in it.
Marc:And I can say that about people I don't know at all who just call me an asshole with four followers.
Marc:But but that's different.
Marc:The interesting thing to me about the whole exchange on the Twitter with Michael is that, you know, we do that.
Marc:Him and I do that.
Marc:And the fact that, you know, all of a sudden I'm getting texts from Salon Magazine saying, you know, what's up with Michael Ian Black?
Marc:And I'm like, we do that sometimes.
Marc:What do you mean, what's up?
Marc:We're funny guys.
Marc:We both have an attitude.
Marc:We both, you know, are known to be somewhat, you know, cunty and bitchy and assholes.
Marc:And we engaged.
Marc:He started it, though.
Marc:I want to make it clear that,
Marc:that Michael Ian Black started that.
Marc:I was not looking for a fight.
Marc:I was actually just being thoughtful.
Marc:I made a thoughtful tweet about garbage.
Marc:I said, if everything is garbage, there's no point in having principles.
Marc:And then he said, have you been reading your book?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So then I engaged in, you know, look, it could have gone either way.
Marc:I think he might have edged me out a little bit, but I think I got some good ones in in my way.
Marc:And he definitely handed me my ass in that way.
Marc:But I don't like when you fuckers pile on.
Marc:Piling on is the it's just being a pussy.
Marc:Don't wedge into our fight.
Marc:I was fighting with Patton Oswalt and so many people started piling on that.
Marc:Like I got distracted and I wanted to attack them.
Marc:And the same thing yesterday is like Michael's got a billion followers.
Marc:So a lot of them are like, you suck.
Marc:Who are you?
Marc:What's good?
Marc:You know, you're nobody.
Marc:And, you know, it ruined the fun for me.
Marc:You know, just because me and an old friend who I have a contentious relationship with are having it out, you know, doesn't mean that that's an open door for you to shit in my yard.
Marc:And then people argue, but it's an open platform, man.
Marc:It's about interactivity.
Marc:Fine.
Marc:I understand.
Marc:It just ruins the fun for me.
Marc:Just enjoy the fact that me and Michael hate each other sometimes.
Marc:Just be an audience and then score it if you want to.
Marc:And then I just got an email from Michael Ian Black.
Marc:Good stuff, buddy.
Marc:And I wrote back, ha, you too.
Marc:So obviously we are, you know, friends.
Marc:Are we friends?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I think so.
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:Let me just give you a couple of dates and a little more business.
Marc:And then we'll move on.
Marc:I will be at Stand Up Live in Phoenix, Arizona on June 6th.
Marc:I will be doing a book event at Politics and Prose at 6 and I on June 11th in Washington, D.C.
Marc:On June 12th, I will be doing the Attempting Normal Book Tour at Barnes & Noble in Union Square in New York.
Marc:June 13th, I will be in New York as well for the Bryant Park Summer Reading Series.
Marc:June 14th, Friday, I will be at the Harvard Bookstore at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marc:Tuesday, June 18th, I'm doing a panel at the Paley Center in Los Angeles.
Marc:Just to make it clear, apparently I said New York for the Paley Center event last to show.
Marc:That's in Los Angeles.
Marc:And I do want to say that I am losing my memory.
Marc:I don't know if it's because so much is going on, but I can't fucking remember movies I saw a week ago.
Marc:Here's a little unfolding story.
Marc:My dad and I aren't speaking.
Marc:Because of the book, because of the TV show, because there was no negotiating, I made choices.
Marc:I don't know how that's going to end, but I did have a chat with David Sedaris about it, who likes my book.
Marc:I talked to David Sedaris, and he came in here with my book, and he had marked on his iPad parts he thought were funny.
Marc:I don't know if I can really explain
Marc:what an amazing thing it was to have david sedaris who i respect a lot as a writer telling me my book was funny so that was amazing now it's my honor to bring to you my conversation with the uh
Marc:The troubadour and activist and genuinely decent dude, Billy Bragg.
Guest:It was a what the fuck moment, you know.
Guest:Which year?
Guest:Just a couple of years ago.
Guest:The newer riots.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The more recent riots.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a part of a great tradition.
Guest:Well, thank God, right?
Guest:A guy got arrested and shot and it kicked off.
Guest:And the police in London were all in one place.
Guest:So elsewhere around the town, looting began.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And we had like two or three nights where there was spontaneous looting.
Guest:Shops were fired outside of London as well.
Guest:And it was basically all just people nicking stuff.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that's all it ever is.
Marc:It's like, those people are writing for a reason.
Marc:I'm going to get some free shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:There's always that aspect to it.
Guest:But it seemed to me, afterwards people were trying to make sense of it.
Guest:And it seemed to me that it was a WTF moment in which my generation, I'm 55.
Guest:Yeah, I'm 49.
Guest:And we just didn't understand it.
Guest:And there was a lot of writing about...
Guest:sort of middle-aged, middle-class, upper-middle-class journalists trying to explain it.
Guest:But nobody who's actually there coming forward in a band or something, in the way that would have happened in the 60s, in the way that people here wrote about what happened at Kent State.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:And I articulated it.
Marc:Four Dead in Ohio.
Guest:Yeah, explained WTF to the rest of America, to Middle America.
Marc:So this was the anti-capitalist World Trade Organization riots.
Guest:No, it wasn't really.
Guest:That's the whole thing.
Guest:It was nothing other than people stealing trainers.
Guest:But what WTF is going on, you know, and I don't want my rioters mediated by some commentator in the Times.
Guest:I want to hear from the kids.
Guest:What are you pissed off about?
Guest:WTF did they think was going on?
Guest:Because, you know, it may be that underneath it all, there is a sense of anger that is no longer possible.
Guest:They no longer feel it's possible to articulate through voting.
Yeah.
Marc:Or that they can't even communicate it in terms of what it actually is.
Marc:I mean, maybe they're not even politically educated or intuitive enough.
Guest:Maybe they don't believe politics can articulate it anymore.
Marc:And they just want to break some shit up.
Guest:You've got to remember that in our last election in the UK, nobody won.
Guest:We have a coalition government.
Guest:That's never happened in our country.
Marc:Was it apathy or just a... I think there wasn't an element of apathy in there.
Guest:I mean, obviously, the Labor Party had been in for a long time and were quite unpopular.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The economy was tanking.
Guest:But the three main parties offered the same sort of thing, cuts, but cuts over long term.
Guest:So people were like, you know, stick it.
Guest:Which is fair enough.
Guest:And I think the political class in my country has failed to recognize that and do something about it.
Guest:They will go into the next election offering austerity in different types of plaid.
Guest:What sort of austerity would you like?
Guest:Do you like big plaid austerity?
Guest:How about a hat?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's going to be, you know, you're going to get it up the wazoo, whichever way you vote for.
Guest:And who wants to vote for that?
Guest:No.
Guest:So, you know, this is a real problem.
Guest:I mean, you're probably aware in Europe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the.
Guest:They've got a financial problem.
Guest:A slight problem.
Guest:The problem is, no, it's not a financial problem.
Guest:I mean, if you look at Cyprus, the problem is the government is going to take 10% of your money in the bank.
Guest:It's a commission.
Guest:With no mandate.
Guest:Nobody voted for this.
Marc:And the guys who decided it were in Brussels.
Marc:With the bailout.
Marc:We had the same thing.
Marc:It's sort of like, what's happening?
Marc:The government's going to, we're just going to pay this?
Guest:These guys ripped off the world.
Guest:We're going to pay them.
Guest:Yeah, but governments have always done that.
Guest:They've always bailed out the rich people.
Guest:But coming in and taking out 10% of your bank account, that's no shit.
Guest:So that's really, they're going to do a... That was the plan in Cyprus, yeah.
Guest:How are we going to pay for the bailout from the European Union?
Marc:Tithing.
Marc:It's literally tithing.
Guest:A tithe, yeah.
Guest:That's what I thought, yeah.
Guest:But the first thing, before they said they were going to do it, they switched off all the ATM machines.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:That's scary.
Marc:Whose idea was this?
Guest:It wasn't the Cyprus government's idea.
Marc:It was the European Bank.
Marc:But then it all goes back up to who's really in control.
Marc:How much say does the people really have?
Marc:None, really, most of the time, unless you can get a nice sort of momentum going.
Guest:If you would believe them, they would say, the markets are in control.
Guest:In inverted commas, well, who are the markets?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they sold a lot of people on that.
Marc:What about the fucking people that decided that free global, unregulated free market capitalism on a global level will find its own level?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That in itself is crazy.
Guest:Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of capitalism.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you can have it feeling up your bank account.
Guest:You feel that invisible hand in your back pocket taking your wallet out and counting out your money and taking it away.
Marc:And when it gets real bad, you can feel it in your ass.
Guest:I mean, the thing about that fisting, the invisible fist of capitalism up your jacksie.
Guest:But the point is that the whole idea of that was that if a company didn't do the right thing and was not viable, it would collapse, right?
Guest:But when the government bails out a bank that is too big to collapse because it would trash the economy, then we're not in Kansas anymore.
Guest:This doesn't work anymore.
Guest:We've got to find another way to make capitalism work for the benefit of everybody rather than just let it bloat and bloat and bloat.
Marc:And that's through regulation, which these guys hate.
Guest:Don't talk about it a lot.
Guest:Don't use that phrase.
Guest:I think it's a better phrase, which is accountability.
Marc:Okay, okay, I'll use accountability.
Guest:Because this is crucial, this, because, you know, your country, you believe capital-left freedom.
Marc:Hey, don't point at me.
Guest:You know, Americans look at our attempt to regulate the free press through law and throw their arms up.
Guest:But it's not about trying to close down the free press.
Guest:It's about trying to hold that free press accountable for what they have said.
Guest:Not to tell them what they can write about, but once they've printed a story, to hold them accountable for the damage.
Marc:Be a journalist.
Marc:Be a journalist.
Guest:For the damage.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That may have caused an individual's life.
Guest:And I think unless you can hold the powerful to account, you're not really free.
Guest:You can make that argument that if you aren't able to hold the powerful to account, then you're free.
Guest:And not just through election, but through law.
Guest:Through law, yeah.
Marc:I mean, and that's where this country is really kind of dropped off is that, you know, it is completely not affordable for anybody to fight the power legally.
Marc:It's unaffordable.
Marc:And there's no way for people to for individuals to feel represented and corporations.
Marc:They can feel represented.
Marc:They've got plenty of money, but there's really no voice.
Guest:You know, it's ironic because it's in some ways it's a.
Guest:aspect of intense individualism that you should be able to, as an individual, you're so empowered, particularly in a country like America, the individual is so empowered that they can say, WTF, you know, I'm going to hold you to account.
Guest:And that's interesting because in the old days that was done by the collective.
Guest:And now the individual is lifted up there and they're so, you know, the individual believes so much that they are the centre of the universe that...
Marc:Yeah, but that usually goes the other way.
Marc:They're not worried about accountability.
Marc:It seems to me that the individual has elevated to the point where if it doesn't affect me directly, I don't give a fuck.
Guest:And if I'm okay- That's libertarianism.
Guest:That's something different.
Marc:That's a different type of freedom.
Marc:That's a different type of freedom.
Marc:But that's an ideological thing, libertarianism.
Marc:But I'm saying that in general, the sort of self-centeredness of what individualism means here now-
Marc:It's like, I'm concerned with me.
Marc:If it's out of my periphery, at a certain point, you have to be able to say, well, how does it affect all of us?
Marc:And if you're not really capable, if you're too selfish to say that because you're too preoccupied.
Guest:Well, you have to ask yourself that wages in the United States of America have been flatlining for the last 17 years.
Guest:Horrendous.
Guest:And that's basically because the unions were busted.
Guest:There's no one out there standing up for people getting paid proper wages.
Guest:And the corollary of that is that they have to live off credit, and they don't have credit.
Guest:So in order for capitalism to work, the banks have to give credit to people who can't afford it.
Guest:That's what created the subprime market.
Guest:And that's why the whole shit house has gone up in flames, because they won't pay for it.
Marc:And it's indentured servitude as well.
Marc:And they will not do proper wages.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:That's what it is.
Guest:It all comes down to that.
Guest:Because, I mean, I don't know what's happening in the U.S., but our economic problem, we're not actually in the European economic, in the Eurozone.
Guest:So the problems that France and Germany have are not the same problems that we have.
Guest:But we have a problem of demand.
Guest:There's no demand in the economy.
Guest:People are sitting on their money because they're not sure what's going to happen next year.
Guest:And once you lose confidence, it's very hard to get it back.
Guest:You know, it's putting money, the answer to our problems, in the UK anyway, it's putting money into the pockets of ordinary working people and giving them back the confidence to go and shop and buy shit.
Guest:So when did you actually, when did this activate in you?
Marc:I mean, when did this, like, because I actually went back and I listened to some of your first albums.
Marc:When did it start?
Marc:I mean, where'd you grow up?
Guest:Well, I grew up in East London.
Guest:I'm not familiar with it, so give me a character.
Guest:A London borough of 160,000 people, predominantly working class, North Bank of the River Thames, East End, that's the working class side of town, main employer, Ford Motor Company, 40,000 people building cars, probably that number again working for ancillary companies, which my dad worked for.
Guest:For which one?
Guest:Ancillary companies were providing shit for Ford.
Marc:For Ford.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So it was American automotive company.
Guest:Detroit was pretty important where we live.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I failed my exams at 11, which meant instead of going to grammar school and university, I went to technical school, which meant I was going to be trained to go and work in a car factory.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was just the way it went.
Guest:That's why everyone worked there.
Guest:And it was good wages.
Guest:It was good work because the unions were strong there.
Guest:It was good money.
Marc:You got health care.
Marc:You got a pension.
Guest:No, you don't have to worry about health care and pension.
Guest:The government gives you that anyway.
Guest:You just get good money.
Guest:That's already in place.
Guest:It's already there.
Guest:You forget about that.
Guest:You lucky bastards.
Guest:And also, there was a kind of community of respect of a skilled workforce.
Guest:Sure, we're making things.
Guest:Yeah, we're making important things that people like.
Guest:And there was that whole aspect going on there.
Guest:But when the careers officer took us to the main body plant, I thought to myself, you know what?
Guest:That's as close as Hades I've ever seen.
Guest:Just the mechanizing.
Guest:The sound, the heat, the faces of the men.
Guest:It's like going down the pit of Hades.
Guest:It was horrible.
Guest:So I started plotting, how am I going to get away from this?
Marc:Was it an assembly line?
Marc:It must have been, it's just like, you know, people doing that.
Guest:No, it was pieces of metal the size of this room coming out the roof and spanging a bit of metal into the shape of a Cortina front bonnet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:door you know so yeah I was like flipping heck so when I said I didn't want to do that the careers officer gave me a pamphlet and said well these are your choices the army the navy or the air force son good luck really seriously he actually said that he actually said army what did your old man say well my old man my old man wanted me to be a customs officer
Guest:Really?
Guest:Those are dubious people.
Guest:Well, this was on the River Thames, so there's a lot of that going on.
Guest:But they also had to police the specific gravity of the beer at the Iron Coop Brewery in Romford.
Guest:And that seemed to be a perk that my dad really thought was a good perk.
Guest:He didn't want me to work in a car factory.
Guest:Because he knew it was hard and soulless and horrendous.
Guest:It wasn't going, you wouldn't go nowhere.
Marc:But it's interesting to me that just, you know, in terms of, you know, what I understand about Britain, that like, you know, his idea of another secure position was a civil servant job.
Guest:Yeah, it was, yeah, of which there were quite a few.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And actually, you know, there was, you know, when I did leave, finally leave school, I bought myself a suit and got a job in a shipping company, of which there's a lot on the river, you know, they're bringing containers up the river.
Guest:You got a boat?
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:I was in the office of the shipping company.
Guest:They had shipping containers from all over the world.
Guest:The big things.
Guest:Yeah, I hated it.
Guest:I really hated it.
Guest:I thought, this isn't for me, so I'd,
Guest:When did you pick up the guitar?
Guest:Well, I picked up the guitar just around the time I was leaving school.
Guest:I was 16.
Guest:Kid next door had an electric guitar.
Guest:I could hear him playing through the wall.
Guest:He came in and taught me the Rod Stewart songbook.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and I was into Bob Dylan, and most Bob Dylan songs were only three chords.
Marc:Yeah, and Rod Stewart faces Rod Stewart?
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Yeah, faces.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:The faces, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I can definitely hear that.
Guest:Yeah, and so me and him kind of knocked around for a few years, and then- What kind of guitar?
Marc:guitar was that first one uh the first guitar i had was a pretend uh copy of a gibson 335 i was a big chuck berry fan oh chuck berry did john lennon play one of those was it red yeah of course oh yeah let me ask you a question when you learned that that chuck berry beginning wasn't that like you'd been given a key to the universe when you were kind of yeah i never that i'm not really that kind
Guest:of guitar player no but but you know i'm i'm basically a rhythm guitar player when i was in a band with a kid next door and a guy around the corner with the drums and the floating bass players yeah i was i was the guy in the band who you couldn't really tell what he was doing until he stopped playing right there was a hole oh my god there's holes everywhere then suddenly he plays against and i'm still that kind of guitar player i mean my son also plays the guitar he he recently um how old is he he's 19 and when he was about he learned when he was about six
Guest:15.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were in the car one day.
Guest:You guys started late?
Guest:He learned off of Guitar Hero 3, which is really weird, isn't it?
Guest:That's how he learned how to play.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever played Guitar Hero.
Guest:I have.
Guest:But there's a strum bar.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you have to strum in time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if you've done that for six months, you can naturally hear a record and strum in time.
Guest:And one of the hardest things, I think, learned to play guitar is to get your right hand to do something different from your left hand.
Guest:You don't know where to look.
Guest:But if you've already got the strum,
Guest:You just got to get your muscles together.
Guest:His mates came around and showed him how to play on the bass string of one of my electric guitars the three chords that make up most of Barber O'Reilly by The Who.
Guest:Dum, dum, dum.
Guest:And he played along with it.
Guest:And I thought, well, that's interesting.
Guest:So I showed him another place to put his second finger on the second string.
Guest:Yeah, he could have went right to you.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:He didn't want to do that.
Guest:But I just showed him how to put his second finger on and play Blitzkrieg by The Ramones.
Guest:Oh, that's important.
Guest:I never had to show him another...
Guest:so so that was that's a key to the universe too that yeah i mean that's it that's all you need really so you know he's better than i was yeah he's a proper guitar player this is the thing i was going to tell you about um we're in the car and uh another girl another planet came on and he said wow the only ones yeah yeah yeah he said wow
Guest:Can I play it?
Guest:Can I play that?
Guest:I said, yeah, it's four chords.
Guest:It's like a cowboy song by Finn Lizzy, but the other way around.
Guest:I'll show you when we get home.
Guest:So I show him how to play it, and he says, great.
Guest:This means he's like 15.
Guest:He says, show me the lead part.
Guest:I said, oh, I can't play the lead part.
Guest:You'd have to ask one of the guys in my band.
Guest:He looked at me and said, how do you mean?
Guest:I said, well, I don't play that.
Guest:He said, but you're a guitar player, Dad.
Guest:And I could see myself shrinking in his eyes.
Guest:So I said to him, look, Jack.
Guest:Have you ever heard Johnny Ramone play lead guitar?
Guest:And he said, no, I haven't.
Guest:He's a huge Ramones fan.
Guest:He said, no, I haven't.
Guest:Okay, he said, well, I'm that kind of guitar player.
Guest:I'm a rhythm guitar player.
Guest:Listen to my records.
Guest:I'm not Jimi Hendrix.
Guest:He was like... Had he listened to your records before?
Guest:Yeah, of course.
Guest:I mean, I've heard him trying to play them.
Guest:Oh, that's sweet.
Guest:Yeah, one night, his mum...
Guest:sent me upstairs to tell him to turn that shit down.
Guest:And I heard he was trying to play a New England of my songs.
Guest:And so I called her up and we stood on the land and listened to him.
Guest:But he couldn't get our last chord.
Guest:So it would always end with him cursing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To get right to the end of it.
Guest:And he'd be... It was great.
Guest:Did you step in?
Guest:No.
Guest:Didn't want to spoil it.
Guest:Because I don't, you know... I don't want to... Because, you know, he doesn't use... You know, when he plays in his band, he doesn't use our surname.
Guest:He uses his mum's surname.
Guest:He doesn't want to be, you know, sort of like...
Guest:In your shadow.
Guest:No, why would he want to do that?
Guest:I respect that.
Guest:I do respect that.
Marc:Yeah, I've had a couple of wives that felt the same way.
Marc:What do I got to be associated with you for?
Marc:Everywhere I go, I'm your wife.
Guest:I don't have any kids.
Guest:He's cool.
Guest:He's cool like that.
Guest:And so I'm kind of like vicariously living it all through him again, which is great.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Yeah, it's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's cool.
Guest:So you're 16.
Guest:I always imagine that we'd kick a soccer ball around together.
Guest:He was never interested in soccer.
Guest:When his primary school, this is before the age of 11, his school won the local school championship.
Guest:There were 12 boys in the class.
Guest:There's 11 kids in a football team.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every kid was in the team except him.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, I'm okay with that.
Guest:I'm not going to say nothing.
Guest:I didn't say nothing.
Guest:Are you a soccer freak?
Guest:I am.
Guest:I'm a big soccer freak.
Guest:I never said a single word about it because it's him.
Guest:There's no point in me doing that.
Guest:Anyway.
Marc:You go out in front of the house and kick a ball around by yourself waiting for something?
Guest:No, we used to
Guest:kick around but he just used it as a and it's used to kick me and get me on the floor and jump on me which is fine but one day we were driving somewhere and Moonlight Mile by the Rolling Stones came on and at the end there's a great bit I'm sure you're familiar with where Keith Richards plays a riff on the string section
Guest:join in and they get louder and louder and i was saying this to him you know listen to this how this and he's like oh it's incredible it's like almost like he's leading the yeah it's brilliant and there was a sort of like a pause and a bit of silence and we drove on and i said you know jack i never had this conversation with my dad and he said yeah it's great and i thought okay this is who we are this is where we're gonna meet this is where we're gonna meet and it's been great i have to tell you it has been great over a moonlight mile well i
Guest:No, but that's great.
Guest:I mean, I'm kind of proud, but sorry to say that all the music on his iPad is my iPad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He doesn't, you know, he says some great things to me.
Guest:Are you familiar with the song Father and Son by Dom?
Guest:By... Harry Stevens.
Guest:Oh, Cat Stevens.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, all my life, that to me is a song about me and my dad.
Guest:He never understood me, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's some great lines.
Guest:It's a beautiful song.
Guest:It's a beautiful song.
Guest:And he says, you know, if they were right, I'd agree, but it's them they know, not me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now I know I must get away.
Guest:I mean, it's so been about me and my dad.
Guest:What's the chorus about that?
Guest:What's the chorus of that song?
Guest:It's just a kind of narrative.
Guest:It's a narrative.
Guest:Right, right, right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Beautiful, beautiful song.
Guest:Anyway, one day he came home from college.
Guest:I picked him up in the car and he...
Guest:He said, oh, I heard this great song on the iPod today, Dad, Father and Son by Cat Stevens.
Guest:Have you heard it?
Guest:And I'm like, yeah, I've heard it.
Guest:He said, God, it's so about me and you.
Guest:I bumped the car up the curb.
Guest:I bumped up the curb.
Guest:I was like, really?
Guest:You think so?
Guest:I was heartbroken.
Guest:But that's what we bond over there.
Marc:Isn't that the beauty of that song, that the timelessness of the dynamic is just a dynamic?
Marc:It's not specific.
Guest:And the great thing is now, whenever I hear it, I think of him and my dad.
Guest:I think of both of them, the two most important guys in my life, who sadly never met.
Guest:So that's the great...
Marc:So was your dad, did he live long enough to see your success as a singer?
Guest:No, he passed away when I was 18.
Guest:I mean, he saw me play in the back room with a band, but he never saw me be successful, sadly.
Guest:So it's a real shame because none of the people that I loved dearly, you know, my partner, my son, my dear friends, you know, none of them knew him.
Guest:So to me, that's the great, the worst, the saddest thing in my life is that my dad never met my son.
Guest:That was the one thing that would, if I could change anything, I would have wished that they could have met each other because it would have been a great thing for both of them.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:So when you started playing, you know, when you were 16 or 17 and you were starting to get the hang of it, I mean, did you did you just walk in or did it was that it?
Guest:And you kind of I was writing a lot of stuff.
Guest:You know, I was writing before I was writing songs before I could play the guitar.
Marc:So you didn't go you didn't have to take it.
Marc:You did the shipping job.
Marc:You didn't do anything else.
Guest:Yeah, I did the shipping job, and I went to France and bummed around France for a couple of months.
Guest:And then I came back from there, and Dad got ill.
Guest:And then that was 76.
Guest:Dad passed away in 76.
Guest:And then in the winter of 1976, punk happened.
Guest:And that just changed everything.
Guest:All of a sudden, I threw out all my Eagles records, cut my hair, chucked away my flares.
Guest:This was it.
Guest:This was it.
Guest:This was year zero.
Marc:What was right before punk, really?
Marc:What was going on?
Marc:Because out of all people, I talked to Huey Lewis.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And he had gone over there with sort of a Roots band.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:uh clover yeah and uh and like and then well the weird thing i mean they played on one of the key records from that period that's that's that's clover yeah there was a thing going on in london called pub rock right which never really broke i mean there were bands like you know probably the high point was graham parker and the rumor
Guest:Bands like Brinsley Swartz, which had Nick Lowe.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I've had Nick Keith.
Marc:I've talked to Nick, yeah.
Guest:It's basically bands like Clover coming over and playing in pubs in London and turning on people to sort of like what you might call in America bar music.
Guest:We didn't have that scene.
Marc:Because you can hear some Grant Parker.
Guest:Dr. Feelgood.
Guest:Dr. Feelgood were really powerful in it.
Marc:You can hear Grant Parker in Elvis.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In the early Elvis.
Guest:But he's just got a bit more edge to it and he's got a bit more sort of blood and blunder.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Blood and Thunder, is that what you call it?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, whatever it is.
Guest:I like that, though.
Guest:Piss and Wind, I don't know what you want to call it.
Marc:No, Blood and Thunder is good.
Guest:He's got a bit more edge than Paco.
Guest:I love Paco, by the way, but I think Elvis is out.
Marc:But you can hear the influence, I think, early on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, okay, so Pub Rock is sort of trying to- That's happening at grassroots.
Guest:People are connecting with music at grassroots.
Guest:The Rolling Stones are playing Earls Court Stadium.
Guest:It's the beginning of stadium rock in the UK.
Marc:76.
Guest:In 76, I saw the Stones at Earls Court and the Who at Charlton Football Ground within a week of each other.
Marc:So they're huge, and I'm trying to think, what album would the Stones be touring on in 76?
Guest:Black and Blue.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, Black and Blue.
Guest:No, I saw that tour.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:So it was almost a resurgence.
Guest:Yeah, it was Woody who just joined.
Marc:Oh, man.
Guest:You love him, right?
Guest:Yeah, being a Faces fan, we thought that was great.
Marc:It took me a long time to come around to the faces just because I couldn't get past Rod Stewart.
Marc:But, you know, once I got past Rod Stewart.
Guest:Well, you know, if you focus on the Ronnie Lane aspect, Ronnie Wood.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:I mean, Ooh La La in some ways.
Guest:Great.
Guest:The last album is a great record because Stewart's not on it so much.
Guest:Yeah, it's a great record.
Guest:Yeah, great record.
Marc:All right, so that's what's going on in the stadium.
Marc:Who are you two are probably?
Guest:Probably, yeah.
Guest:I'm not sure exactly what tour it was, but it was still with Keith Moon.
Marc:But those are the dinosaurs.
Marc:Literally the dinosaurs.
Guest:No, no, they were the bands we really liked.
Guest:But they were very established.
Guest:But they were moving away from the public.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And they're getting the jets.
Guest:And Led Zeppelin were flying around America.
Guest:Zeppelin.
Guest:And pub rock was kind of like right in at the roots.
Guest:And punk kind of came out of that circuit.
Marc:So pub rock was more of a literally a roots rock thing too, right?
Guest:Your local boozer.
Guest:Go down your local boozer and see it.
Guest:Country driven a little bit?
Guest:Yeah, there was a big country influence.
Guest:It was kind of like roots music.
Guest:R&B.
Guest:There were bands that were playing like Southside Johnny Asbury Dukes type music.
Guest:It was a kind of back to basics movement, which is what punk also was.
Guest:At the same time as that was happening in the US, the Ramones were playing CBGBs.
Guest:Exactly the same thing.
Guest:Dr. Feelgood were doing the same thing.
Guest:Back to R&B.
Guest:But no one knew them yet.
Guest:No.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No.
Marc:But something was percolating with the Dolls and everybody.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, those bands were really only broke because they were taken seriously in England.
Marc:The New York Dolls.
Guest:Yeah, the New York Dolls.
Guest:You know, the Flaming Groovies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they were bands that broke out first in England.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Blondie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Television, Talking Eds.
Guest:Why do you think that is?
Guest:Well, I think we were more ready to hear something different.
Guest:I mean, if you think, you know, in 1976 was the year of Frampton Comes Alive.
Guest:So, you know, Rumors.
Guest:Ooh, baby, I love your way.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Rumors was a pretty good record, though.
Guest:It was a good record, and that's where music was at the time.
Guest:It was in California.
Guest:So some dirty, growly, you know, sort of Richard Hell and Voidoids coming in.
Marc:Oh, yeah, man.
Guest:You know, that's not going to really...
Guest:that's not really going to sort of like get the beards at Rolling Stone, the long ears, coming in and saying, you know, everything you know is wrong.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's not going to cheer anybody up, is it?
Guest:So that's a kind of year zero idea.
Guest:And that really struck a chord with me because everything we liked about The Who,
Guest:um was in the jam yeah and they were our age yeah everything we liked about the stones was in the clash right they were our age so suddenly it was as close as us as i am to you now and that that was and you felt the greatness yes you felt the moment you felt this was our generation's moment you know because we'd had to put up with the hippies and they'd had to put up with the the rockers right you know and the hippies attempted to overcome the the the greasers yeah and we were now trying to sweep away the bloody hippies who promised peace and love and delivered us nothing except petulio and caftans
Guest:I like patchouli on you.
Marc:Well, you know, what you do in your spare time is your business.
Guest:But there was something more exciting in speed and amateur.
Marc:And was it informed, like at that time, could you feel that it was operating against the politics almost immediately?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, punk in the UK was very political because at the same time as that, there was a movement on the far right, particularly centered in London, called the National Front.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And their argument was to round up all people of color and send them in inverted commas home, even though some of
Guest:been born in london it's a ridiculous idea but at that time there was so few people of color that it was actually i think i certainly thought it would they could do it i really believe they could do it and what that meant to me was a huge loss in my culture yeah i love and also the idea that fascism could happen in england at that time yeah and that you know that did something equivalent those guys were
Guest:It's always around in every country.
Guest:Right, but when you feel that... Each generation has to find a way to deal with them.
Guest:In my generation, we dealt with them by mixing punk with reggae and coming up with Rock Against Racism.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's what politicised me.
Guest:The first political activism I ever took part in was going to see The Clash at a Rock Against Racism gig in London in 1978.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And that...
Guest:I came away with a different perspective of the world from that gig.
Guest:I mean, one of the things that happened there was that the guy who was top of the bill was a guy named Tom Robinson who had a song called Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay, which now sounds a bit trite, but back then you could get your head kicked in for even suggesting that you were gay.
Guest:He was a very brave guy.
Guest:When he started singing,
Guest:These guys around us began kissing each other on the lips.
Guest:Now, you know, coming from a working class background, I'd never seen an out gay man before.
Guest:So it was a bit of a shock.
Guest:And then my initial feeling was, why are these guys at Rock Against Racism, it's about black people.
Guest:But by the end of the day... Don't they have their own thing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:By the end of the day... What's all this about?
Guest:By the end of the day, the penny had dropped that the fascists were against anybody who was in any way different.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I sort of made a commitment to be with the different people.
Marc:So that's where you connected the politics of the people.
Guest:With the audience, though.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:This is the real thing.
Guest:It wasn't the music.
Guest:It wasn't the band.
Marc:But I think it's interesting that that moment where you realize that something like the National Front could actually succeed...
Marc:is really the difference.
Guest:But we could fight them with our culture.
Guest:That was the key thing.
Guest:We could fight them with our culture.
Guest:The thing that bound us together was that we all liked Desmond Decker.
Guest:Yeah, and the Israelites.
Guest:Yeah, or whatever.
Guest:It's simple as that.
Guest:It's as simple as that.
Guest:There's been very little music to come out of the islands that I was born in that's not been influenced by the music of black America.
Guest:One way or the other.
Guest:I mean, Bob Marley and the Whalers, hugely influenced by the impressions.
Guest:Hugely influential to us, you know.
Guest:Desmond Decker and the Israelites, you know, big fans of Curtis Mayfield and those guys.
Guest:So, you know... So it came around that way.
Guest:Everything comes around, goes around.
Guest:Between, you know, the exchange between the British Isles and the United States of America has been nothing but...
Marc:positive but that reggae beat was sort of pure to the caribbean though it was but they were initially if you listen to the harmonies on the whalers records yeah they're they're going for the impressions that are there but in a way in a way that the beat was played you know motown so you're saying that some some part of what made them you know popular was taken from uh their american black culture their inspiration but that beat that became the the the ska beat yeah that's purely theirs
Guest:It's like the Beatles.
Guest:The Beatles were purely British, but they started out playing black American music.
Guest:And the Everly Brothers.
Guest:I only played English music.
Guest:My father grew up in an England where you could only hear English music, only eat English food, and only wear English clothes.
Guest:I mean, imagine.
Marc:How awful that was.
Marc:I don't even know what that music would be.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Do you?
Guest:No.
Guest:I dare not think what it might be.
Guest:But, you know, it's that cross-pollination, that cross-cultural pollination.
Marc:And that was the British.
Marc:Along that time, though, the British ska resurrection happened as well, right?
Guest:That kind of came in the wake of Rock Against Racism.
Guest:That was – 78 was Rock Against Racism.
Guest:79 was Two-Tone.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my partner, Juliet, who now manages me, she managed one of the bands.
Guest:She managed a selector.
Guest:I remember them.
Guest:A great band.
Guest:I just found some photographs of her as a 22-year-old managing them around America.
Guest:I mean, they're incredible.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:sort of photographs and she just looks so great i put them all on facebook for people to see so that's kind of like in deep in our family now that whole two-tone kind of thing so when you started playing with the who was who was in the outfit when you your first band guys i went to school the kid next door yeah you know we were in a little punk band we put out a record on chiswick records didn't go nowhere but we might you know if it had just been that if i just put one punk record out in 1978 i'd have been happy i'd have got it out the shed to show people you know every 20 years yeah grandpa was a punk rocker
Guest:I'd have been happy with that.
Guest:But as it was, when... Was it just guitar, bass, drums?
Marc:Or two guitars?
Guest:Two guitars, bass and drums, yeah.
Guest:And I was the main songwriter.
Marc:And singer?
Guest:Yeah, and rhythm guitar.
Guest:And when that all kind of went tits up and... Why did it go tits up?
Guest:Because punk kind of ran out of steam.
Marc:It did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Within two years?
Guest:It got replaced by guys with synthesizers and interesting haircuts.
Guest:Thomas Dolby.
Guest:Yeah, Tom Dolby, Pitch Shop Boys, all those kind of guys.
Guest:And there wasn't really any room for us.
Guest:So I thought to myself, you know what?
Guest:I'm going to press the eject button on this life.
Guest:So I joined the British Army for a while to learn to drive a tank.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What party you thought that was a good idea?
Marc:I remember what my career officer said to me.
Marc:Really?
Marc:And it just came back around.
Marc:So you were young enough, you were politically informed at this point, and you thought that music had a purpose and that things could change and you had power and a voice, and you opted for that.
Guest:The British Army is a volunteer army.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And there's always been a great sponge for white working class lads who just want to get away from the reality of their home.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I did my basic training.
Guest:I was pretty good at it, but I realized that actually it really wasn't the answer to my problems, but it kind of fired me up with an urgency to go back and have one more go.
Guest:And the scariest, most exciting way I could do that I thought was to do it solo with an electric guitar.
Okay.
Guest:Yeah, that's a pretty adventurous way to do it.
Guest:And I felt, you know, because I'd done everything the army asked me.
Guest:But what did you do in the army, though?
Guest:What exactly were you doing?
Guest:Tank driver.
Guest:You were just a tank driver.
Guest:In the Royal Armour Corps, yeah.
Guest:And did you go anywhere and drive the tank?
Guest:No, not really, no.
Guest:I did my basic training.
Marc:So you just got to drive a tank around.
Guest:Well, not much.
Guest:I don't let you straight on the tank.
Guest:You've got to do basic training first.
Guest:You've got to do the fitness, the machine gun, the grenade, the skin of rabbit.
Guest:And the simulators?
Guest:No, it's not like that.
Guest:It's agricultural.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Two forward, pull one back, and a small tank.
Guest:I mean, they didn't really let us anywhere near them.
Guest:That was the next bit.
Guest:But the sad truth is when you've driven one tank, you've driven them all, really.
Guest:So I bailed out of that.
Guest:But it put me back on the streets with a huge sense of confidence because I thought, you know, I've shat the British Army out.
Guest:I can certainly deal with a couple of drunk headquarters.
Guest:You can just leave?
Guest:Well, you can buy yourself out.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because it's a volunteer army.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:now if you sign up for nine years and they teach you to be a telecommunications expert yeah and you leave after three years you have to pay them a shitload of money right but if you've just done your basic training it's 175 pound and they don't pay you during basic training they give you 250 quid at the end of it so yeah you know i'll cash you my chips thanks very much i was interested it was like a sabbatical really that's the effect it had on me it sort of like made me think i could do anything
Marc:But was there any sense of a recollection of the experience you had seeing the auto factory?
Marc:Was there any connection to the army that became like, well, this is a killing machine or any of that?
Guest:You can't really think about that when you join the army.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But in retrospect.
Guest:At the time, actually, I thought the Cold War was going to heat up.
Guest:It was around the time of solidarity in Poland.
Guest:Brezhnev had died.
Guest:Reagan had come in.
Guest:thatcher was in they were ramping up the cold war i thought the whole shit house was going to go up in flames and i just didn't want to be sitting on my ass at my mom's house when i wanted to know and be there and just fucking do it you wanted to be part of it no i just wanted to know who was coming and not be living a stupid little life doing a stupid little job in a stupid little town right uh so you figured why not be in a tank and be up front
Guest:It seemed like a good idea.
Guest:I don't recommend it.
Guest:I don't recommend it to anyone.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So you leave.
Marc:You're full of the beans.
Marc:Blood and Thunder.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You got your guitar.
Guest:What kind of guitar was that?
Guest:It was a Les Paul Jr.
Guest:copy made by a subsidiary of Gibson called Arbiter.
Guest:And the great thing about it was...
Guest:yeah no it was a double cut away but they liked that thing it had it had an original p90 gibson p90 pickup on it can dirty that thing up really good i think they got them oh when i it was they started building them around the time they stopped making uh es125s uh-huh and i think they had all these p90s and they put them on these cheapo european guitars just left over yeah yeah and they sounded great oh yeah you can make yeah yeah like that like that does well it's like those and that's how you sort of played the first couple records right
Guest:Yeah, that's what I'm playing on the first album.
Marc:But you hit the streets?
Guest:Yeah, I started doing gigs.
Guest:I started opening for anyone who could and would.
Marc:But that's sort of a unique approach to take an electric guitar that sounds filthy or has a good distortion to it.
Guest:Well, the thing was, if I'd have took an acoustic guitar, I would have ended up playing in folk clubs to twee little audiences drinking real ale.
Guest:Did you consider yourself a folk singer?
Guest:No, I consider myself a punk rock and I still do.
Guest:i think that's what made you like it big taking the world yeah you know do it yourself right you know i'll pay for this new album that was a spirit you know that's just come out i pay i'm paying you know i'm paying for that great big tour bus parked down the road no record company paying for it right right right for nothing diy saying that was uh punk is an attitude it's not a haircut right but you were really the first guy to do that
Guest:Yeah, it sounds like a no-brainer now, but it's absolutely true.
Guest:I was the first person to come out with an electric guitar.
Guest:And when I came to America, the first time I came to America, I was mad.
Guest:Echo and the Bunnymen put me on the back of the tour bus.
Guest:And actually, the real support was the flesh tones, but they put me on in between the flesh tones while they changed over.
Guest:I wasn't announced.
Guest:Nobody heard me.
Guest:I came out.
Guest:I cranked up this little amp, and I just blew people's minds.
Guest:Like, what is this guy doing?
Guest:You know, sort of...
Guest:70% of the audience thought I was awful, but the other 30% are still with me.
Guest:They were blown away.
Guest:They couldn't believe it.
Guest:They found the record.
Guest:They come and see me every night.
Guest:Someone comes up and says, I saw you in 84 with the Bunnymen at XYZ.
Guest:And I'm like, yeah, that's a crazy trip.
Marc:And they remember, and that's where the seed was planted.
Guest:Because it was such a weird thing.
Guest:a guy with a you know at the time I had a really short air white t-shirt turn up Levi's and boots and a guitar I was kind of like almost like sort of action man guitar hero thing you know I don't know why I was dressed like and I had this kind of contraption that strapped on with an amplifier on my back not on stage but for doing promo stuff and a couple of speakers I used to burst into record shops and stuff like that and burst into CMJ when it was when it was first on when it's still a lot of fun still raw CMJ yeah
Guest:Where, like in Austin?
Guest:In New York.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And was that something that you used to play on the street with or you just built it to... No, it was just that it was a total PR stunt.
Guest:But people remember that as well.
Guest:More people remember that than you'd ever believe.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It was such a stupid thing because it was like a backpack and it...
Guest:Went around your diaphragm and you couldn't sing because it was, you know, this huge car battery on your back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And these great big speakers.
Guest:If you went for a doorway, it fed back.
Guest:I don't know what the acoustics are.
Marc:So was this a preference to you?
Marc:I mean, having had, you know, fairly little experience with playing with a rock outfit or with backing, you know, musicians.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:did you feel that well the sound is obviously unique and nobody was really doing it and the passion of it that's the one thing you notice when you listen to especially well all your records and but those young ones you're just you're full of the fire man well i mean i remembered because i've been a dylan fan i remembered the power of the single individual standing alone telling his or her truth yeah and that kind of got lost somewhere in the 80s it kind of disappeared there wasn't anybody in punk
Guest:In fact, you know what?
Guest:That Rock Against Racism gig, there was a guy called Patrick Fitzgerald who came out and sang punk songs on an acoustic guitar, and he got bottled off.
Guest:And I remember thinking, what an idiot coming out solo in a punk gig, you bloody fool.
Guest:Three years later, there was I, but I didn't make his mistake.
Guest:Let your guitar?
Marc:Yeah, and I cranked it.
Guest:I cranked it.
Guest:The audience got noisy.
Guest:I cranked it another notch.
Guest:You know, nobody, ain't nobody going to get one over on me.
Marc:So, okay, so when you toured with Echo and the Bunnymen, that was after, like... 84, that was.
Marc:So you did two records already.
Marc:That was the second record?
Marc:Just around the time the second record was coming out, yeah.
Marc:And when did you sort of... What broke you out?
Marc:Was it... A minor strike.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A minor strike.
Guest:In 1984, the National Union of Mine Workers went on strike, and for a year...
Guest:engaged in a really, you know, a form of class war through boycotts and picket lines with the Thatcher government.
Guest:And the Thatcher government brought to bear the entire power of the state on them and brought them to their knees.
Guest:And in the context of that, because, you know, because I thought about...
Guest:Dylan and Phil Oakes and those guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now I was in a position to see.
Guest:Oh, to do it.
Guest:Well, to see.
Guest:Not to do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But to see if pop music could make any kind of difference.
Guest:To actually go into the cold foods.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because I was solo.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, my contemporaries had big bands and big entourages.
Guest:But I could jump on a train literally with a little amp.
Marc:Do the Woody Guthrie thing.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Do that.
Guest:Take the news up there.
Marc:With an electric attack.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Bring the news back.
Guest:What would happen?
Guest:And that kind of defined me, I think, for a lot of people.
Guest:And I don't have a problem with that.
Guest:That's what politicized me.
Guest:Because obviously before the minor strike, I had strong humanitarian principles because I'd been involved in the anti-racist struggles.
Guest:But I didn't really have classic politics.
Guest:I had to, because I was kipping on their floors.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the miners' families wanted to know, you know, what were my politics?
Guest:Why was I doing this?
Guest:Was I just a pop star doing it for publicity?
Guest:Or did I actually believe?
Marc:But were you a pop star at that point, really?
Guest:No, I wasn't.
Guest:But, you know, someone up from London, you know, they're bound to want to know.
Guest:And you're going into, you know, you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you're going into severe working class conditions with an electric guitar with people that are not necessarily.
Guest:But they're my people.
Guest:They know really different, you know, the place where I came from.
Marc:But they don't know punk rock.
Guest:well necessarily not really no right no they don't really so you got a message you got a guitar it might be a little loud for them but they want to know where you stand why are you here yeah which is fair enough so i had to develop my own you know in i had to develop something that i could articulate to them in their terms so i ended up you know sort of
Guest:Thinking of myself as a socialist, as a democratic socialist, as opposed to a revolutionary socialist, an up-against-the-wall-and-shoot-them socialist, a socialist who believes that if everybody has a say through the ballot box, things will be better.
Guest:Because for me, socialism, if it means anything, has at heart to be a form of organized compassion.
Guest:You can't be there to look after the sick and to help the poor and to educate the kids.
Guest:But you can pay some money through taxation to employ people that do that, that take that responsibility to ensure that you make your contribution to a better society.
Guest:You've benefited from it.
Guest:You put some in this world, they benefit from it.
Guest:That idea of socialism is something that's always appealed to me.
Guest:And again, I say it's not an ideological thing.
Guest:It's a more of a humanitarian idea.
Guest:But, you know, it makes sense in the way that we talked about politics in the 20th century.
Marc:And it also makes sense in the sense of government accountability for the betterment of the people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we're all accountable in the government is the is the mechanism through which we express our responsibility.
Guest:They're not the enemy.
Guest:Yeah, not necessarily.
Guest:I mean, they do do terrible things.
Guest:Shouldn't be, shouldn't be.
Guest:I mean, that famous Ronald Reagan saying, what's the worst thing you can ever hear?
Guest:I'm from the government.
Guest:I'm here to help.
Guest:You know, it's easy to say that until your street is flooded.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Everyone's a libertarian until their street's flooded.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, until the cops don't come.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, you know, how do you think they put that machine on Mars that's just discovered dust on Mars, you know?
Guest:You think the private enterprise did that?
Guest:No.
Guest:Who put man on the moon?
Guest:Probably the amazing thing that happened when I was a kid.
Guest:You guys went to the moon.
Guest:You think private company did that?
Marc:No.
Guest:You think?
Guest:No.
Marc:They are now.
Guest:Well, let's see.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's see if they manage to do it.
Marc:Maybe you can take the guitar.
Marc:Maybe Richard Branson can fly you to the moon and he can play up there.
Guest:I'm not going up with anything he owns.
Guest:Forget it.
Guest:I've heard tubular bells.
Marc:But even that, even discussing socialism with minors during a strike, I mean, did they find... How were the audiences for that?
Marc:When you got up there and played... Well, they were pretty fired up.
Guest:You're mostly fundraising for them.
Guest:Their wives, they would be on the picket lines or they would be in jail.
Guest:Their wives would come and speak.
Guest:They were pretty fiery women.
Guest:And you learn some amazing things.
Guest:One of the first shows I did, I went up there with my fiery punk rhetoric, and there was some 70-year-old guy singing a cappella old minor called Jock Purden with his finger in his ear, singing songs that were much more radical than my songs.
Guest:So I had to recalibrate from punk rock back down to realise that
Guest:I was... By standing up with the miners, I was joining a tradition that Jock Purden was part of, and before that, Woody was part of, you know?
Guest:And I was, like, ready for that.
Guest:I was ready to be part of that, to see if it is possible to change the world through music.
Guest:And then, on the back of that, when the miners were defeated...
Guest:I got together with a load of other musicians to support the Labour Party in an attempt to defeat Margaret Thatcher at the 87 election.
Guest:We had a little organisation called Red Wedge, which was another way to push.
Guest:Because one of the things about the clash, one of the reasons why I think they failed to change the world was they never engaged with mainstream politics.
Guest:They held their nose and wouldn't go near it.
Guest:Why do you think that was?
Guest:Just a musical decision?
Guest:A bunch of fucking posers.
Guest:But I love them dearly, but they were, you know, too much style over not enough content sometimes.
Guest:That's, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It pains me to say that, but I learned more from their mistakes than I did from their victories.
Guest:So, you know, we came together with people like the Style Council, the Smiths,
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Madness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We went on tour.
Guest:We brought MPs into the foyer to talk to people.
Guest:It was a real attempt to see if music and politics do mix and if it can end up with anything.
Guest:Well, Thatcher won in 87.
Guest:That's not our fault.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I just look back and say, well, look, when it pushed, came to shove, I did the absolute most I could do.
Guest:I couldn't have done any more.
Guest:I pushed it as far as I could.
Guest:It's to the next generation now to see how far they can take it.
Guest:But I came away with some...
Guest:Some very important observations that music can't change the world, but it can change your perspective.
Guest:It can give you another perspective of the world, but ultimately the responsibility for changing the world is with the audience, not with the performer.
Marc:You can plant seeds.
Guest:The best thing you can do is make people go like, I never thought about it that way.
Guest:Not only that, but also...
Guest:We played in Phoenix, Arizona last night, where you're probably aware there's a pretty heavy situation there with the local sheriff.
Marc:Immigration?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, with Joe Arapayo?
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Yeah, he's the real character, that guy.
Guest:Well, last night we probably had all the lefties in Phoenix in one room.
Guest:How big was that room?
Guest:It was sold out.
Guest:It was sold out at Crescent Ballroom.
Guest:But, you know, it may be that some of those people work in a place where there's a lot of casual racism.
Guest:And maybe they work in a place where there's sexism, where there's homophobia.
Guest:And for one night, they come together and realize that there are other people in Phoenix who feel like they do.
Guest:And I'm the lightning rod for that.
Guest:And that's my gig.
Guest:To charge up their batteries and to send them away thinking, yeah, there is a community here.
Guest:And I'm not alone.
Guest:Although I may be in a minority in my workplace.
Guest:I'm not, because that's why when I went to Rock Against Racism, I worked with a bunch of guys who were really casual racists, so it was shameful.
Guest:But I was the office junior, so I thought I was in a minority.
Guest:But when I went to that Rock Against Racism gig and there was 100,000 kids just like me, I realized in my generation, I was in a majority.
Guest:And those guys, that audience... That you grew up with?
Guest:Yeah, they were my generation.
Guest:There was kids from all over coming to that gig.
Guest:But the key thing was, when I went back to work, they gave me the confidence of my convictions, the courage of my convictions.
Guest:Not the clash, who we went to see, but the audience.
Guest:And that's how it always is.
Guest:It's the audience, ultimately, that can be the only real vehicle for change, not the artist.
Guest:The artist does have an important role, bringing people together, helping to focus their solidarity during the minor strike, to raise money.
Guest:But the artist alone...
Guest:cannot change the world.
Guest:We can only reflect the world and offer a different perspective in the way that Fox News offers a different perspective.
Guest:The ultimate responsibility is with you in the audience, not with me on the stage.
Marc:So did the, what is it, Internationale?
Marc:Did that album come out of that?
Guest:It kind of did, because what happens next is that... Because now you're sort of defined a little bit.
Guest:I am, which is fine.
Guest:I have no problem with that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I'm good for that.
Guest:But the Cold War comes to an end.
Guest:The Berlin Wall goes down.
Guest:And all of that rubbish totalitarianism and Stalinism is swept away.
Guest:And I'm glad of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With a few bricks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Destroyed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But at the same time, the baby in the bar fort is trying to be forced down the plug.
Guest:Our leftist tradition is also going out the window.
Guest:So it was time, I felt, to rewrite the words to the internationale to reflect a more forward-looking 20th century idea of a greater compassion.
Guest:progressive yeah it all happened with Pete Seeger at the Vancouver Folk Festival where he wanted to sing the International and he told me to sing the English lyrics which are just tosh arise ye starvelings from your slumbers arise ye criminals of want for reason and revolt now slumbers and here ends the age of count it doesn't even rhyme
Marc:Well, I think that's interesting what you're saying, that with the idea that Russia is done, that because, you know, we don't, the politics, it doesn't seem as immediate sometimes here, or maybe I wasn't activated, but that meant that, you know, whatever communism represented had somehow, you know, metaphorically, that that means the left is useless too on some level.
Marc:You know, like, well, everything's solved.
Marc:You know, what do we need leftists anywhere anymore for?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and that's what I was trying to push against.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Because it's not about that.
Guest:The end of the incredible change in 1989, and we owe a huge debt of thanks to the German people for resolving that without the Third World War.
Guest:They did an amazing job, both the East German people and the West German people doing that.
Guest:We could have easily had another configuration there.
Guest:That was basically the end of the First World War.
Guest:That period that started in 1914 and ended in 1989 was a period of absolute cataclysm for Europe.
Guest:It delivered us Hitler.
Guest:It delivered us the Holocaust.
Guest:It split the continent down the middle.
Guest:It left millions of people living under totalitarian rule from Moscow.
Guest:It was a very, very bad period, and it's celebrations all around.
Guest:Anybody on the left who misses those days is not a leftist at all.
Guest:They're a Stalinist.
Guest:They're a totalitarian.
Guest:They're going to put you up against the wall if you disagree with them.
Guest:So you won't see me complaining about that.
Guest:But our tradition, our culture, it didn't mean that capitalism had won.
Guest:That's not what it was really about.
Guest:It meant that people had won.
Guest:And capitalism is not an ideology.
Guest:It's merely the way that we organize exchange.
Guest:And we can organize it in different ways.
Guest:One of the problems I have with the revolutionary left is that they don't think you can do shit unless you first overthrow capitalism.
Guest:We're trying to save our library from being closed.
Guest:Well, we've got to overthrow capitalism, mate.
Guest:No, we're trying to make sure that old people have money to get them through the winter for heating.
Guest:Well, yeah, we'll have to overthrow capitalism.
Marc:But those guys aren't doers.
Marc:They're talkers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They're armchair guys.
Marc:They're sending the newspapers to you.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I've never had much time for those guys, I'm afraid, you know, because I believe ultimately that we shape the world as individuals.
Guest:And we in Europe recognize that the individual...
Guest:is the key aspect of society, but that unless each individual is provided with free health care, free education, decent, affordable hours, and a proper pension, only the rich and powerful will get to express their individualism, and the rest of us will be exploited by them.
Guest:And that's why we have those things in place, okay?
Guest:Now...
Guest:That doesn't mean we're better than you.
Guest:And by Christ, you know, we have to fight every year to keep those things because the Tories and the right and the free marketeers are trying to chip away at those public services.
Guest:It's not an easy thing to get.
Guest:You know, my people went through the cataclysm of the blitz.
Guest:to realise that bombs fall on the house of rich people and poor people the same.
Guest:So it's not an easy thing to do.
Guest:It's not a simple thing to do.
Guest:But morally, as an idea, that we are all supported by the community.
Guest:I don't see why Americans don't grasp it.
Guest:Are you familiar with the tradition of barn raising?
Guest:That's a completely an American tradition.
Guest:And that is what socialism is about.
Guest:But what?
Marc:Right.
Marc:But what happened here that when, you know, the middle class exploded in the baby boom and the suburbs started to become built is that, you know, people got away from that.
Marc:They got away from the community.
Marc:They got away from, you know, city centers.
Marc:They got away from a collective sensibility.
Marc:And everybody was just sort of isolated in these places, and they went to a mall, and their religious organizations were no longer bringing people together in that way.
Marc:That's true.
Guest:And everything got very desperate.
Guest:The promotion of individualism through the medium of consumerism has been quite pernicious, I think.
Guest:I have no problem in people buying whatever shit they want to buy, provided they've paid their taxes, provided they've paid their whack into society.
Guest:What you did with your money is your responsibility, but you must first accept.
Guest:That's not the thing you try to get out of.
Guest:No.
Marc:Yeah, you first accept.
Guest:You accept that you have a responsibility.
Guest:Civic duty.
Guest:I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, he's spot on.
Marc:And yes, because like if you don't do that, what ultimately ends up happening is those people that are rich enough to outsmart the tax system.
Marc:You know, they don't end up paying it.
Marc:And then, you know, they're just they're up in their libertarian castles, you know, shooting poor people from a turret.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Metaphorically or literally.
Guest:Depends on what they do in their pastime.
Marc:And I think that what you see here a little bit, certainly with the Occupy movement, but also when it comes right down to responding to what you're saying, is that you've got a lot of people on the left that talk a lot.
Marc:But the people that actually do the real work are people that do it on a community level.
Marc:They do it on a sort of grassroots level.
Marc:How can we get this school working properly?
Marc:How can we get this neighborhood working properly?
Guest:Those people who talk a lot about the theory and the sit in the armchairs, one of the things they really hate is religion.
Guest:But if you go down to the soup kitchen and find out who's giving out the free food...
Guest:I can assure you, you'll find more people of faith there than you will find Marxists.
Guest:When I see those people who are motivated by their faith to do that kind of work, I find the attitude of Richard Dawkins to say to those people they're stupid or they're ignorant because of their faith.
Guest:I find that a form of fundamentalism that I'm not comfortable with.
Marc:No, I won't do it either.
Marc:I won't go there either because, you know, look, if someone's got faith and they're not bothering you and that's what they hang their hope on and it gets them by every day, you know, shut the fuck up.
Guest:But the Pope telling him, there's no way the Pope is going to tell me what to do with my genitalia.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:Forget it.
Marc:But that's barely faith.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's a political system that has outlived almost any of them.
Guest:Of control, yeah.
Guest:Of control.
Guest:I mean, what's going on in the Supreme Court at the moment, where they're attempting to uphold or decide on a law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman?
Guest:Surely that's discriminatory in America.
Guest:Of course it is.
Guest:Surely in America, where you have the right to do whatever you choose.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Surely that is discrimination.
Marc:We'll see how that falls.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it's an interesting thing because at this juncture in history, you would think that they'd be like, all right.
Marc:Just because a bunch of you are uncomfortable with this, shut up.
Guest:It's none of your business.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:If two gay people decide that getting married in a church makes them happy, who are we to say, you know, I'm sorry, we're going to have this incredibly narrow definition.
Guest:It's like swimming.
Guest:If it's good for you, it's good for you.
Guest:It's not good for you if you're...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Straight and not good for you if you're gay.
Guest:It's a good thing.
Guest:And I happen to think that anything that promotes a stable relationship... Is good.
Guest:A loving relationship.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:If people feel they need that, it's not necessarily something I subscribe to.
Marc:Feel free to try it.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Have a go.
Guest:See what happens.
Guest:I can't guarantee... No, I know that.
Guest:It comes with no guarantees.
Guest:But, you know, people...
Marc:you know people love dressing up for a nice day and having their photographs taking all that shit and going around in a white limo you know and who are we to say oh no you can't do that just because you're you're not yeah the same sex yeah yeah absolutely so now uh we got to fast forward a little bit to do you know the because i what what do you think your big you know the the song if you're going to you know track to a song what do you think would the song that broke you
Guest:Oh, I would think probably in the UK it would be something like Between the Wars, which was during the minor strike.
Guest:But here in America it would perhaps be sexuality.
Guest:That was the initial sort of first.
Guest:And waiting for the Great Leap Forward?
Guest:Great Leap Forward as well.
Guest:But then what happens is there's a second phase when I hook up with Woody Guthrie and Wilco for Mermaid Avenue.
Guest:Well, that's who I want to talk to you about.
Guest:And that was a really good thing to happen to me.
Marc:Because all the people that knew you in the 80s, they were all established.
Guest:Yeah, it kind of brought in the younger Wilco fans, but also all those old greybeards who were hanging out with Pete Seeger, which was just brilliant.
Guest:Did you meet Pete Seeger?
Guest:Of course, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I did a very early on.
Guest:I mean, I didn't really know a huge amount about Woody.
Guest:I knew who he was and why he was important, but you couldn't find his records in England in the 70s.
Guest:So it was only when I came to America.
Guest:i was able to buy his records and early on at one uh folk festival in canada vancouver yeah they said to me a couple of months before you know would you like to take you're coming to do the main stage would you like to do a workshop you know where you sit down with four other artists and take it in turn to play songs yeah i said that sounds interesting well we're doing a woody guffrey workshop and i thought
Guest:I know a couple of Woody Guthrie songs, you know, because you don't have to play three songs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like goes round.
Guest:It's a round thing.
Guest:And so, you know, I don't think anymore about it.
Guest:I turn up on the day and the other three participants in the Woody Guthrie workshop are Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie and Rambling Jack Elliott.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I think to myself, my arse is toast here.
Guest:This is really bad.
Guest:Because I'm like, suppose they play the three songs I know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then I look on Ramblin' Jack sat next to me.
Guest:And on top of his guitar, he's got, as an Aidan memoir, he's got a bit of paper with loads of titles.
Guest:And I'm looking at it and I think, oh, yeah, I know that one.
Guest:Oh, I can busk that.
Guest:Yeah, fuck, I'm all right, actually.
Guest:and I get away with it until at the end Seeger stands up like a tall you know Californian Redwood and begins to sing this land is your land and the audience sing the first verse with him and then Arlo stands up and sings the second verse I'm thinking oh shit yeah
Guest:Because we don't sing it in England.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Then, you know, Rambi Jack, Jack sings a verse, and they throw it to me, and I'm like, listen, guys, you know, I'm really sorry, but this is one of those songs we don't do in England, this land, you know.
Guest:I just don't know the geography.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I'm really sorry.
Guest:Did you get a laugh?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:I got a lot of sympathy.
Guest:And eventually, Nora Guffrey, you know, gave me a seat at that table.
Guest:oh yeah by inviting me to to make mermaid avenue yeah yeah she actually kind of i'm a kind of made man oh good good good it wasn't because of that but yeah but her her trust and her inviting us into the into the archive to look at the songs it's interesting because the song on that record that i you know sort of resonated with the most because of the melody was uh a california yeah what a great song i fucking love it amazing you know and it's the most sort of like it's just a poetic thing
Guest:And he wrote loads of songs about that.
Guest:I mean, he wrote a song about wanting to shag Ingrid Bergman on an Italian volcano.
Guest:He wrote a song about riding a flying saucer.
Marc:But that was part of the folk tradition is telling personal stories, right?
Guest:Well, he was just a songwriter.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:The thing is, the songs that we know him for, he actually wrote in the 30s.
Guest:And recorded them when he came to New York in the 40s.
Guest:But the songs he wrote in the 40s were much more like pop songs.
Guest:I mean, he was living in New York when it was perhaps the most exciting, vibrant cultural city in the Western world.
Guest:You know, bebop was being born there.
Guest:R&B, as we know it, was happening there.
Guest:And he was hip to all this stuff.
Guest:He was into all that sort of stuff.
Guest:And it reflected through what he wrote.
Guest:You know, he was a populist songwriter.
Guest:He wasn't just a folk songwriter.
Marc:Right, and how did you get along with, or how did it get hooked up with Wilco?
Marc:Why would you?
Guest:Well, they'd made an album called Being There, and it was a really great record.
Guest:And I just sort of thought they would be ideal for, you know, they played in a lot of different styles, and I thought they would be ideal to play on this project.
Guest:So you reached out to them?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:I knew Jeff Tweedy from Uncle Tupelo.
Guest:That's a good band, huh?
Guest:Yeah, they were a great band, and I knew Jeff.
Guest:And I thought he would get it.
Guest:If I explained it to him properly, he would see the opportunity to collaborate with one of the, you know, the greats.
Guest:I mean, I put Woody halfway between Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think that's where he fits into the American pantheon.
Guest:He's a bit Walt Whitman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's a bit Bob Dylan.
Guest:But he's, you know, unlike those, he's not from the North.
Guest:He's from, you know, he's from the Dust Bowl.
Guest:And there's something really powerful about that.
Guest:I don't know what it is.
Marc:Kind of defined America.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:In a lot of ways.
Guest:He's kind of like there with Lead Belly.
Guest:Give it a voice.
Guest:Give it a voice.
Guest:He's right on the edge of folk music, where just before it disappears into, we don't know who wrote that song.
Guest:He's right on the cusp.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So how'd you get along with Tweedy?
Guest:I got along fine.
Guest:While we were doing the recording, it worked really well.
Guest:When he went home, they wanted to produce the whole record, but that wasn't the agreement we had.
Guest:We just kind of ironed that out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, you wanted to produce some.
Marc:They were going to produce some.
Guest:No, basically, the songs we wrote, we produced.
Marc:Oh, OK.
Guest:And I don't think he'd ever had that done like that before.
Guest:And I certainly hadn't.
Guest:So obviously, it was bound to be a bit of a little bit of a, how are we going to do this?
Guest:But it worked out fine.
Guest:And we did the second volume.
Guest:And they recorded another five tracks for the second volume.
Guest:They were totally into it.
Guest:And we just put out a third volume last year, the complete session.
Guest:So we recorded about 50 tracks.
Guest:That's great.
Marc:So the new record.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, like, one thing I noticed, like, I listen to it is, like, you know, you're 55.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you've lived a life.
Marc:I have.
Marc:And there seems to be some of that wisdom coming through.
Guest:I hope so.
Marc:I'd like to think.
Marc:Well, swallow my pride to it.
Marc:Like, I listen to that, and I'm like, yeah, fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I better call her.
Yeah.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:We've all been there.
Guest:We've all done that.
Guest:We've all done it.
Guest:I mean, I've been in a loving relationship with my missus for over 20 years, but there have been periods where we didn't speak to each other for two weeks.
Marc:Yeah, that's a long time.
Marc:That seems uniquely British to me.
Guest:Yeah, to the point where you couldn't remember why we had the argument in the first place.
Marc:Yeah, it didn't matter because all you're holding on to is that the reckoning,
Guest:yeah there was a tone i don't know if i've heard you do before it almost felt like uh you know they had a growl almost like a spring steam well my voice has dropped over the last couple of years joe henry who produced the album here in pasadena he spotted that and he encouraged me to to sing down there and to use use that voice and i've been using it live and it's been very effective
Guest:That must be interesting to have a new voice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've been really getting off on it.
Guest:And it's not something that before, I mean, I'm not the world's most technical singer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that's, you know, it's worked really well for me.
Guest:You know, it's sort of allowed me to try new types of song, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Instead of just a sort of punk yelp.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's got me into a bit more, I wrote a song, I tried to write a gospel song.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, in a kind of sort of thing Johnny Cash or Elvis might sing.
Marc:That's great, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I like a bit of that.
Marc:And so we were talking before, so you got the vinyl coming out?
Guest:Yeah, well, we got it on vinyl, yeah, really thick, 180 grams.
Guest:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:And you get a free download with it.
Marc:And you were telling me before we came in here that your 19-year-old son only buys records.
Guest:Yeah, he does.
Guest:Yeah, he buys mostly second-hand records, yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Someone's trying to get me.
Guest:Is that you or him?
Guest:It's probably him ringing up, asking for some more money to buy some more vinyl.
Guest:Bless.
Marc:But isn't that interesting that you have that resource where when we were kids, we bought vinyl.
Marc:That was all there was to buy.
Guest:Yeah, that's all there was to buy, yeah.
Guest:But now he's going in junk shops where there's loads of 70s and 80s vinyl.
Guest:He's picking up on all these artists that he's like Neil Young.
Guest:That you grew up with.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he's coming and bringing them in to me.
Guest:And I'm like, yeah, I've got that record.
Guest:I don't know why you bought that.
Guest:I've got an original copy.
Marc:Why don't you send them?
Marc:Where do you keep your records?
Guest:Well, they're in the library.
Guest:They're not hard to find.
Guest:They're all there.
Guest:He just doesn't want to wade through them.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I'll wade through them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so what do you want to play?
Marc:A couple off the new record?
Guest:Yeah, why not?
Marc:We'll set it up.
Guest:Let's do that.
Guest:Go ahead.
Guest:Here are the photos that I keep.
Guest:Here's the empty bed where I lay my head to sleep
Guest:I dream about you But my dreams will not come true Till I swallow my pride Get back home to you Tell myself I'm in the right
Guest:That won't keep me warm through another lonely night.
Guest:I can't live without you even though you make me blue.
Guest:Got to swallow my pride and get back home to you.
Guest:Your love for me runs deep But I'm the man who makes you cry yourself to sleep How can a man be strong
Guest:They can't even lift her Telephone and say he's wrong If I want you back again Then I know what I must do Got to swallow my pride And get back home to you
Guest:Swallow my pride and get back into you
Guest:Nice.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:You a Keith fan?
Marc:You are, right?
Guest:I am, yeah.
Guest:Big time.
Guest:Big time, yeah.
Guest:He's the man.
Guest:Yeah, it's one of the good things about my son.
Guest:He's a big, big fan of... Stones?
Guest:Not just the Stones, but particularly those sort of like...
Guest:70s, you know, late 70s, late 60s, early 70s Stones, where it keeps really hitting the mark, you know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Tumbling dice and that sort of stuff, you know.
Guest:Have you met him?
Guest:No, I've not met him.
Guest:You're going to be playing with him, though?
Guest:Huh?
Guest:You're going to be playing with him in Glastonbury?
Guest:Possibly, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I'm on the same day.
Guest:I'm only playing on the same stage, but on the same day, yeah.
Guest:What would it be like to meet him now?
Guest:I think he'd be pretty cool.
Guest:So this is Handyman Blues?
Guest:Yeah.
Go ahead
Guest:I'm never gonna be the handyman around the house my father was So don't be asking me to hang a curtain rail for you because
Guest:A screwdriver business just gets me confused It takes me half an hour to change a fuse And when I flick the switch the lights all blue I'm not your handyman
Guest:Don't be expecting me to put up shelves or build a garden shed But I could write a song that tells the world how much I love you instead
Guest:I'm not any good at pottery so let's lose a T and just shift back the E and I'll find a way to make my poetry build a roof over our heads.
Guest:See what I did there?
Guest:I know it looks like I'm just sat here reading the paper But these ideas I'll turn to gold dust later Cause I'm a writer not a decorator I'm not your handyman, yeah
Guest:Thank you, Billy Bragg.
Guest:Pleasure, Mark.
Guest:That was great.
Guest:I enjoyed it.
Guest:Thanks for having me.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:Thank you, Billy, for playing those songs and for being here.
Marc:It was just uplifting and an education to me, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that guy.
Marc:Get all your WTF Pod needs met at wtfpod.com.
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Marc:Do what else?
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Marc:Have you had so-and-so on?
Marc:Probably.
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Marc:And I think I'm okay with Michael Ian Black.
Marc:I think I am.
Marc:And I think I saw Boomer.
Marc:But I'm going to have to let go of that shit.
Marc:He's down the street.
Marc:But he would have come back here.
Marc:He would have come by here.
Marc:But now I'm driving around that house down there.
Marc:How am I going to explain that to the cops?
Marc:Yeah, I've been circling the house because I think that's my cat.
Marc:Why don't we go have a look?
Marc:No, that'll ruin it.
Marc:Don't harsh my hope, Buzz.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you