Thinking Popular Culture by Tara Brabazon

Author:Tara Brabazon [Brabazon, Tara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9781351879491
Google: pQqoDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T04:31:08+00:00

Play ‘Great Leap Forward’, you bastard

Play ‘Great Leap Forward’, you bastard.

Fan/heckler, Billy Bragg concert encore, 2003.

The final concert of Billy Bragg’s Australian tour was held at Perth’s Concert Hall on 24 September 2003. It was the archetypal cold, wet and windy night that the city produces before the stark, scorched summer that stretches out for half the year. Entering the auditorium from the September chill was an audience composed of (way too) many greying buzz cuts and sensible shoes. A near-sell out crowd of 40 and 50-somethings came together once more to celebrate the revolution that never was, and commemorate a social democracy that is further away now than during Bragg’s mid-1980s peak. His band, composed of The Blokes and The Small Faces’ keyboardist Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan, produced such smooth renditions of well-known songs that they almost made Billy Bragg appear cool – at least until he danced. He still moves with the subtlety of a postit note on a tiled floor. Thankfully, he is one of the great post-punk rhythm guitarists, which gives him something to do with his hands.

I was among the youngest in the crowd. For me, Bragg’s Worker’s Playtime album is invested with mid-teen angst and hopes. The singer represented what a man should be: socially just, politically attuned, intelligent and funny. The first time I ever heard of Antonio Gramsci was on the back of a Billy Bragg album. His ability to combine emotion and politics, personal relationships and social change, probably led me into my current career in media and cultural studies. As an academic rather than a school girl, his concert performance was not only nostalgic, but intensely sad. Billy Bragg’s music hot-wires melody to melancholy. Old Lefties believe in Billy. For example, the late broadcaster, John Peel, offered an appealing portrayal.

A genuinely decent man in an often loathsome business. Unless he has deceived me – and many thousands of others – there’s something about Billy that is immensely reassuring. As a pretty much unreconstructed old Labour type myself … I admire Billy’s politics too. Politics that are prone to ridicule these days although they rest essentially on the proviso that you do as you would be done by.1

It had been ten years since I had seen Billy Bragg live. In that decade, he became a better singer and guitarist, and the all-star band provided a luminous backdrop. Hearing those songs, I realized how much we have lost during the 2000s. Two decades ago, Billy Bragg fought a political battle that – even in 1983 – was already lost. Thatcher’s victory in the Falkland Islands, which was compounded by ‘victory’ over the miners and the destruction of the coal industry on which Britain was built, signalled an end to a particular form of political challenge and social organization. Bragg’s songs and mid-set monologues offered alternatives in a time of no alternatives. Even now, when the battles of the 1980s have been lost in ways we could not imagine at the time, his words

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