Billy Bragg in NYC having performed a solo acoustic set for WFUV, Jan. 2002. With Sean Coakley, WFUV's Rita Houston & Russ Borris, Tiffany Suiters, Jody Denberg - and up front producer Grant Showbiz & Lisa Michelson-Sonkin of Elektra.

Q: 107.1 KGSR. This is Jody Denberg. Billy Bragg has a new album out called "England, Half English." And Billy is on the road in the States this spring, but he's not going to make it to Austin, at least during his first leg, so we've made it to see Billy. We're in New York City. And oddly enough, it's the date of the World Economic Conference. And we'll talk to Billy about that a little bit later. We're going to hear songs from the new album, "England Half English." But first, we're going to hear a live song from Billy Bragg. This is St. Monday on 107.1 KGSR.

St. Monday (Song plays)

Q: Billy Bragg live on 107.1 KGSR. Thanks, Billy.

A: My pleasure, Jody.

Q: That was St. Monday, which is the first song on Billy's new album, "England, Half English." It is in stores as of March 5th. The song you just played, St. Monday, it sings of the pleasures of a four-day work week.

A: Hm-mm.

Q: How do you stay in touch with the thoughts of the working class when, you know, you've had a measure of success now. It's afforded you a bit of privilege.

A: It has, yeah. It has. Well, I mean, you have to remember, Jody, until I was 25 years old, I'd never even been on an airplane. You know, so It's not like I kind of like left school and sort of waltzed into being a rock and roll star. You know, I've had some terrible jobs, working in all-night gas station. I looked after a herd of goats once. I drove a tank in the Army. So you know, I kind of have -- still have that sensibility, I think, that comes from having a 9 to 5 job. And I feel incredibly lucky that I don't have to -- don't have to do those kind of things. But the reality of it is, my brother's a bricklayer, you know, and my mum's now sort of surviving on a state pension. And those kind of issues don't just go away. You can't sort of -- I don't think, anyway, you can just close those things out of your life. The whole point of, I think, being part of a society is that you keep in touch with those people that don't have as much advantages as you do. And in my country, those people, they're in my family. So it's not really -- I'm not really that far away from it at all.

Q: Which kind of leads me to my next issue. St. Monday, like a lot of the stuff you write, it combines the personal and the political. Is there a way, as a writer, to ever really separate the two?

A: Well, you can write personal songs and you can write political songs. But if you really want to touch people, then you have to try and mix the two. I'm interested where the two overlap. You know, I'm interested in where people's experience and their relationships are in some ways curtailed or dictated to them by their circumstances. You know, what's happening in society. Because I think that's the way the world is. So you know, I'd be I guess I'd be really bored if every single song on the radio was political. That would be really boring. But I also get really fed up with hearing just relationship songs all the time. So in those areas when the two do touch and the two overlap, I find that the most interesting area. And not just to work in, myself, but also to listen to.

Q: Well, let's get personal for a second. I think it was back in 1991 the album was "Don't Try This at Home." And you did a tour behind the record. And then we didn't really hear from Billy Bragg for about five years. You got married. And from what we heard, you were spending time with your family. Did domesticity change your work when, five years later, you put out "William Bloke?"

A: I think, speaking as a parent, if the experience of becoming a parent doesn't really change your perspective on everything, then you're probably not doing it right, because it does. You know, first of all, it certainly changes your perspective on sleep, for starters. You know, that suddenly becomes really important in your life. And, you know, you kind of like -- as you kind of get your life back again, the life you get back is different because you have different priorities. You're not the center of the universe anymore. And when you're out on the road and you're doing something that's vaguely strange and perhaps slightly dangerous, you don't just in the back of your mind think, what will my mum say if something happens to me. You now have responsibilities of parenthood to think about. So yeah, it has really changed my perspective.

Certainly my perspective on this job. It's one of those things that keeps my feet on the ground for doing this job, because beforehand, I didn't really have any commitments so I was just sort of winging it and having a great time. And you know, just carried on touring and carried on partying. Now, I'm trying to get a balance between my work life and my family life like everybody else. And you know, I'm in a situation where my work life, although it doesn't bring me all the way to Austin this year, brings me -- certainly brings me across the Atlantic. So I have to try and balance that up. I hope that this sort of world that I'm part of and the world that my son and my family can also be a part of. They came last year to New York with me. That he'll be able to see a bit of that world and it will be somewhere that's, you know, instead of somewhere daddy goes it will be somewhere where daddy works and sometimes if we get to go there as well. That's what I hope.

Q: You moved a while back from London to Dorset. Is that similar to in the States if someone moved from the city to the suburbs?

A: Yeah, it's kind of upstate England, Dorset. You could call it that, you know. It's about two-and-a-half hours from London. The important thing about it is it's by the ocean. And we British people, we're very fond of the ocean. You know, we live on a little island and the sea is very, very important to us. If you go to Australia everybody lives around the edge of Australia. That's because they all come from Britain. You know, they can't bear to be too far away from the ocean. It's a very meditative place, I find, the ocean. I once wrote in a song, Must I Paint You A Picture, there's a line in there that says, "This would never happen if we lived by the sea." Because the sea has that soothing, calming effect on people. And that's one of the great things -- because sometimes people say to me, "How could you live in the countryside with all that mud and that cow muck and all those people with their green-willy ideas?" And I say, "Look, I don't live in the country. I live by the ocean." And they get it. And they're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah. I get that. I can see that."

Q: We're talking with Billy Bragg today in New York City. Now, if I move from New York City to upstate New York, it would remove me a bit from the fray and the issues of New York City. Has your move from London to Dorset removed you from the issues that are at hand in London?

A: No. I don't think so. This is a paradox, because I thought it might do that. But when the general election came last year -- we had an election -- and I'd moved from an area which was kind of like Labor sort of heartland, London, into an area where Labor really have trouble getting in. So when the election came, I had to think, well, what can I do down here that's political activism? And I got involved in this great campaign of trying to get the Tories out and get Labor in, which ended up me having to dress up as a Roman centurion and appear dressed in this garb -- I won't go into the whys and wherefores. But it was great fun. And I would never have been that politically active if I'd have been in London, because there's no reason for that because, you know, the Conservatives don't have that hold in London.

And there's a few other things. I mean, like the local high school asked me to come and run a songwriting workshop every Wednesday, which ended up with us doing a concert with -- my band came down and we spent a week with these kids learning the songs they wrote. I would never get to do that in London. And a number of other things that I've been doing down there. Because what there is in Dorset there isn't in London is there's time and space. And those things, I think, are very, very important.

Q: That Billy Bragg stirs it up wherever he is. Wherever he goes, he stirs it up, I'm telling you. And, well, there's a song on the new album that may stir up a little talk at your house. It's called Jane Allen. It tells the story of an old lover. And I'm assuming it's an old lover of yours, because I always think songwriters are telling exactly from their own life.

A: Surely, they are.

Q: It's sort of an old lover of yours coming around to visit. And now that you're married, it's obviously a different situation. So is it proper for us to assume in this case that this is a first-person account, and what did your wife have to say about the song Jane Allen?

A: Well, it is a first-person account. And my wife -- I'm in a very lucky position that my wife and I have known each other for much, much longer that we've been together. We -- I've known her about eight years before we got together. So -- and she ran my record company in England. So she kind of knew all of my ex-girlfriends. Had met quite a few of them. So when I'm out on the road and I happen to bump into one of them, which is purely, you know, socially, "Hi. How are you? What are you up to? Here are my baby photos" kind of thing. I have to understand that, you know, that has an effect on Juliet and I have to take that on board. I have to accept the way she feels about it. There's no point in me standing around saying, "Look, there's nothing in it." I have to accept the way that she feels about it. So the way she feels about it is what I'm trying to explain to her in -- you know, in Jane Allen. That it's all in the past and I'm -- you know, this is what I'm doing now. And I'm glad we know each other from all that time because we have all those experiences in our life from before we got together. But yeah, occasionally, I do recognize it does kind of tread on her toes a little bit. So I have to be careful, but I always have to be honest, both with myself and with my wife.

Jane Allen (Song plays)

Q: That was Jane Allen from Billy Bragg's new CD. It's called "England, Half English" on 107.1 KGSR Radio, Austin. The first leg, at least, of Billy's US tour this year will not come to Austin, so I've come to New York to talk to Billy prior to the release of the album, which you recorded in Wales.

A: That's right.

Q: How far is that from where you live and why Wales?

A: Why Wales? Well, Wales is not London and it's not Dorset. So we were all out of -- we were all out of our own little pools there. And we were in a residential place in a studio called Monnow, which sounds like a type of recording. It's actually M-o-nn-o-w, which is the name of the river that runs through Monmouth. So we were backing onto the river. And we were just there, just living there and hanging out and playing songs. And the great thing about it was the spirit. Working with the Blokes was very similar to the spirit of working with Wilco on the "Mermaid Avenue" sessions. We sat around and we played these songs and just messed around for them and played different versions of them and turned them inside out and messed them up and down. And people threw in their two-penny worth. And it was great, because normally Billy Bragg records are a pretty solitary affair. It's me coming up with ideas, trying to explain it to people how I want it to sound and then trying to get that down on tape. Whereas, you know, if anything stops in the studio, one looks to me. Well, with the Blokes, it's more, you know, you can go in and you can go into town and do a little bit of shopping or walk up the hill and write the lyrics to the song, whilst the guys rearrange it for me to sing. And that's a great luxury for me.

But also, the spirit of it. I think working that way is much more organic. And that's the thing I really enjoyed about "Mermaid Avenue" is the organic aspect of it. And I tried to sort of engender that same sort of feel on "England, Half English."

Q: Now, the phrase "England, Half English," I read that this was first coined by a novelist from England, Colin MacInnes.

A: Uh-huh.

Q: Who wrote "Absolute Beginners." What does the phrase mean to you? Why did you co-opt it for your new album's title?

A: Well, MacInnes saw in the 1950s, he was kind of a generation older than teenagers in the '50s who were turned on by American rock and roll music. And he went to this concert and saw these English people dancing to American music, being sung by an Englishman with an American accent, playing electric guitar. And he just had this incredible -- it had an incredible effect on him. And he realized that with the arrival of the teenager, that from then on, English people would get their culture from anywhere they liked, instead of having to accept the culture of their parents and listen to English music and wear English clothes and eat English food, what a dreadful thought. They would be able to, you know, pick up their culture from wherever they liked. And that was the sort of the beginning. He was there at the very beginning, I suppose, of our multicultural society. He was witnessing the first changes in the teen generation, which has gone on and carried on. And you know, now, you can listen to music from all around the world by tuning in to radio stations on the internet, pick up stuff. And instead of having to accept the mainstream stuff that's force-fed to us, whether we like it or not, and adverts and soundtracks and movies and stuff like that, you can actually seek out those areas, those radio stations that are pointing out stuff that's actually quite really interesting. You may find something unfamiliar. That's one of the problems I find about mainstream media is the fear of the unfamiliar. Everything's got to sound the same, look the same, be the same. It's those stations, Jody, like yourselves, that are trying to find other things and the -- you'll get the feeling that the DJ's communicating enthusiasm to you, rather than just advertising. And that sort of stuff.

You know, that, to me, is the way the world is now. We can pick our culture from anywhere. And with the song England, Half English, we're using an Arabic folk song as the basis for it, rather than using something out of an -- from an English background. We're trying to make people understand as soon as they hear the song that we're talking about Englishness in a global, world music kind of sense by using this song. And I think that works better, because if you're going to talk about those nationalist things, you have to make sure people understand where you're coming from. And you can't get the wrong end of the stick and think that you're talking about how fabulous -- because I say at the end, "My country, what a beautiful country you are." But I'm not saying that because it's more beautiful than anybody else's country. It's beautiful and I'm sure there's parts of Texas that you'd like to show me that are absolutely beautiful as well. And we could -- you know, I can relate to that.

Q: Actually, I'm glad that you do love your country, because there's another song on the record about the Union Jack. I was starting to go -- does Billy love England anymore?

A: But that's -- The Union Jack doesn't represent my country. That's -- Great Britain isn't my country. Great Britain is a state of which I'm a citizen. But the country I was born in is England. I'm an Englishman. And, you know, it's a strange concept. I recognize that, but you know, our neighbors in Scotland and our neighbors in Wales are getting the strongest sense of their identity and who they are. We English have not really made that leap yet, which is a shame because we're quite -- we're quite a multicultural society. I'm quite proud of that.