BILLY BRAGG
While some artists found it difficult to pick up a guitar during the national lockdowns of 2020, Billy Bragg was making his first album in eight years, entitled The Million Things That Never Happened. He’s always been one of the most distinctive, unflinching yet compassionate voices in rock. Emerging from the busking scene, songs like A New England from his 1983 debut album, Life’s Riot With Spy Vs Spy, confirmed him as a laureate of the London streets with an unvarnished ‘chop and clang’ style on guitar that matched the energy and honesty of his lyrics.
His main squeeze back then was a rare Burns Steer semi-acoustic that’s still by his side today – along with a cherished collection of National Resonators and Gibson flat-tops that partly reflects Billy’s interest in old-school country music and Americana, an influence that has grown like a wildwood flower in his music since the 1998 album with Wilco, Mermaid Avenue, which saw Bragg set previously unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to music for the first time. In fact, charting the connections between Americana, youth politics and the nascent British rock ’n’ roll scene of the 50s became a bit of a mission for Billy, inspiring him to write the book Roots, Radicals And Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World, published in 2017.
We joined Billy among his books and guitars to talk about his new album, go-to instruments and learn why, without Lonnie Donegan, there would have been no British Invasion of the 60s.
What spurred you to make The Million Things That Never Happened?
“Well, I got round to thinking about making an album. And after
