What went wrong with Billy Bragg?

An online ding-dong is like a full complement of condiments at lunch; you wouldn’t want to live off it, but it certainly adds spice. I haven’t had a decent one in ages, but last weekend I decided to have some sport with Billy Bragg, whose decline truly reflects the culture wars which shape our times.  

A few words on Bragg for Spectator readers who probably think he’s that Geordie chap with the hairdo who used to present those arty shows on commercial television. He was born in 1957 in Barking – geography is sometimes destiny, as we shall see. Inspired by punk rock, he attempted a musical career at the age of 20; upon failing, he joined the army as a recruit aiming for the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. Here Bragg displayed a rare flash of originality and verve – people don’t generally career-shift from putative pop star to squaddie – but unlike those other soldiers turned singers James Blunt (who served in Kosovo) and Shaggy (the Persian Gulf) he bought himself out after completing three months basic training for a very reasonable £175. I’d like to say that soldiering’s loss was singing’s gain but I’m trying to be transparent here.  

Bragg then took up busking; we all know what sort of busker he’d have been – the kind you pay handsomely to stop murdering Streets of London one more time. He recorded a few demo-discs but was going nowhere fast – probably as he had a voice only a deaf mother could love – until one night he heard the repulsive but influential disc jockey John Peel mention that he was hungry. Bragg promptly scurried off to the BBC building with a mushroom biryani, leading Peel to play his song The Milkman Of Human Kindness ­– at the wrong speed. This pairing of currying favour with vile old men – which would later be seen in his sucking up to Magic Grandpa Corbyn – combined with a singing voice so unappetising that his records sounded equally grim, no matter whether they were played at the right speed or the wrong one, were to be twin constants in his career of ear-ache.  

Nevertheless, Bragg’s ascent up the ghee-greased pole began. He was capable of writing the odd decent song, such as A New England, which was covered by Kirsty MacColl and became a thing of beauty and a hit in 1985. But it’s telling that his best song borrowed key elements from better ones; the opening lines are identical to those of Paul Simon’s Leaves That Are Green while Bragg told an interviewer that he ‘stole’ the melody from Thin Lizzy’s Cowboy Song.  

When Bragg relied on his own talents, the result was not so sweet. In fact, it could be downright farcical. As befits the most unsexy singer who ever lived (and that includes Ken Dodd) his song Sexuality, which reached a majestic 27 in the singles chart in 1991, was about as sexy as mainlining bromide. As Gareth Roberts wrote:  

‘It has all the erotic allure of a GLC pamphlet – and before the first verse is out, it happens. The lyric that causes your entire body to convulse in embarrassment: “And just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away / If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find some common ground.” But what exactly does he mean by finding common ground? Sharing our animus for the Tories or some light frotting in a doorway?’   

This appalling ditty pretty much set the standard for Bragg’s output for the next two decades. When you heard him on the radio you’d mainly think, ‘Is Billy Bragg the longest-lasting novelty act in history?’ It seemed a fair question, considering that a singer supposedly inspired by Woody Guthrie possessed all the gravitas of Woody Woodpecker.  

Then Something Happened. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party and a lot of men who had been feeling their age came over all giddy, as though a temp in a very short skirt – her belly-ring visible through her T-shirt, the minx! – had come to work amongst them. They – Alexei Sayle, Stuart Lee, Damon Albarn – changed overnight from Grumpy Old Men to Grumpy Old Woke Bros. If Magic Grandad could be hailed as ‘The Absolute Boy’ what was to stop them identifying as young? That isn’t an exaggeration; I had a social-media scrap with a Remoaner who told me that my generation was done and his was about to take over – when I checked his age he was a year older than me.  

Part of this mid-life crisis involved throwing one’s weight behind the ‘trans struggle’. There was a quick warm-up scold of the Jews in 2018. When asked by a Twitter user if he believed that ‘British Jews have work to do’, he replied ‘If they want to build trust, I do… instead they make things difficult by coming out with accusations that are out of all proportion’. He then threw himself whole heartedly into the right of male bruisers called Belinda to use the ladies lavs. To put the chef’s kiss on the sumptuous banquet of Braggery, he changed the lyrics of Sexuality to the even more delicious:   ‘Just because you’re They, I won’t turn you away / If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find the right pronoun’, adding that: ‘The frontline is now trans rights.’

Like a lot of us oldsters, he discovered Twitter. I’m not saying that my finest moments have taken place on that forum, but I’ve definitely learned from my mistakes. For Bragg, however, it has become the sort of self-harm which social media specialises in. Gareth again: ‘Nowadays, Bragg no longer makes “passes at women of all classes”, but picks fights [on Twitter] with them instead, mainly by comparing sex-realist women’s rights campaigners to Nazis.’ It seems like an addiction, and one has to wonder whether it’s because his discs have bothered the charts so little?   

Things heated up last week when Bragg criticised a young musician called Louise Distras who had had the nerve to appear in the Daily Mail talking about how she had been cancelled by the notoriously sexist music industry for refusing to kow-tow to transvestites. She was wearing an attractive wrap dress. Billy ‘Wintour’ Bragg weighed in accusing her of being a sell-out for not being scruffy, like him. But then there are photographs of him in a suit sucking up to the late Queen. He then criticised feminists for writing for the Telegraph – even though he gave an interview to the Telegraph. This isn’t quite as delightful as the time he confused beta-blockers with puberty-blockers in a Twitter scrap, but as senior moments go, he was on a roll.  

At this point I couldn’t resist putting my oar in: ‘Does it ever occur to you that you have become everything you hated?’ I asked Bragg. After a good think he came back with a highly original line about the pot calling the kettle black. But I haven’t changed or betrayed my core beliefs since I was a young writer of 18.  I’m still a feminist, against men invading women’s spaces. I still support gay rights, believing lesbians don’t like penises. I’m still a Zionist, as I was when I dedicated my first book to Menachem Begin. Bragg, on the other hand, has done a complete 180, especially as he considers himself the worker-ist heir to Guthrie. As Brendan O’Neill noted recently, trans activists are the foot-soldiers of the boss regime. You can’t be for the workers and be woke; only a clown believes otherwise.  

I am not a pot, or a kettle; I am especially not a hypocrite, unlike Billy Bragg. I would not preach diversity and then choose to live in one of the whitest, richest counties in England. But if he can believe that penises can be female, Karaoke Corbyn can probably believe that Dorset is a vibrant multi-ethnic community. If he ever wishes to cover a popular political song and stand a chance of getting a hit record before he shuffles off this mortal coil, might I suggest the Temptations’ toe-tapper Ball Of Confusion – the perfect choice for this Barking bard.