Billy Bragg
I just saw Billy Bragg play a typically storming set here in Montreal. What an inspriration. Tonight's show was just him and his electric guitar. Billy Bragg is an English singer-songwriter who came to prominance as a protest singer during the Thatcherite years. He's heavily influenced by the folk song writing traditions as passed on through America's Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
It's incredible how a middle aged man with a cockney accent, basic chord progressions and no accompaniment can keep an audience rivited. It's all in the honest, powerful songwriting. I'd seen him play in Canberra about in 2001 with a full band behind him. I think that just Billy and his guitar is more affecting. His in-between song banter is hilarious as well. He's serious about his politics but doesn't preach too much.
He played a number of newies and two encores, the second of which featured almost all the classics off the first record like 'New England' and 'To Have and to Have not'. The first encore contained one of the Woody Guthrie, 'Mermaid Ave' tracks. It was disappointing not to hear arguably his best - 'Levi Stubbs Tears.'
One treat was his interpretation of an old Leadbelly Song called 'Bourgeois Blues'. Leadbelly was an African American artist who was first discovered writing songs in prison. He wrote 'Bourgeois Blues' after playing a show in the 1930s in Washington DC when he had to go across the border to find a place to sleep because there were no hotels where black people were allowed in DC at the time.
The main message Billy was sending us tonight was that we all have to get out there and *engage* with life if we want to make this world a better place. It doesn't matter how small our role is. The enemy is not conservatism or capitalism as such, but rather cynicism. If we sit by and let things happen, the negativity of others will keep things headed downhill.
So really, it's not what you do out there in the trenches each day that's important, but rather how you do it.
Viva la revolution.
"Just because you're better than me
doesn't mean that I'm lazy.
Just because you're going forward
doesn't meant that I'm going backwards"
- Billy Bragg
MG
It's incredible how a middle aged man with a cockney accent, basic chord progressions and no accompaniment can keep an audience rivited. It's all in the honest, powerful songwriting. I'd seen him play in Canberra about in 2001 with a full band behind him. I think that just Billy and his guitar is more affecting. His in-between song banter is hilarious as well. He's serious about his politics but doesn't preach too much.
He played a number of newies and two encores, the second of which featured almost all the classics off the first record like 'New England' and 'To Have and to Have not'. The first encore contained one of the Woody Guthrie, 'Mermaid Ave' tracks. It was disappointing not to hear arguably his best - 'Levi Stubbs Tears.'
One treat was his interpretation of an old Leadbelly Song called 'Bourgeois Blues'. Leadbelly was an African American artist who was first discovered writing songs in prison. He wrote 'Bourgeois Blues' after playing a show in the 1930s in Washington DC when he had to go across the border to find a place to sleep because there were no hotels where black people were allowed in DC at the time.
The main message Billy was sending us tonight was that we all have to get out there and *engage* with life if we want to make this world a better place. It doesn't matter how small our role is. The enemy is not conservatism or capitalism as such, but rather cynicism. If we sit by and let things happen, the negativity of others will keep things headed downhill.
So really, it's not what you do out there in the trenches each day that's important, but rather how you do it.
Viva la revolution.
"Just because you're better than me
doesn't mean that I'm lazy.
Just because you're going forward
doesn't meant that I'm going backwards"
- Billy Bragg
MG
posted by Matt G at 8:56 PM
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