Thurs. June 28

 If it’s an election year, it’s a good bet Billy Bragg will be  mong us, doing what he can to stir the left wing to action – and, oh yes, play some of that clamorous/gentle/abrasive electric folk-rock. He’s doing so at the Somerville Theatre June Thursday June 28. I’ve got a lot of Bragg stories, going back to meeting him in London in 1985, when he was emerging from street busker to leading activist punk protest singer. Several years later, I introduced Bragg and Howard Zinn. Bragg had been reading Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” on his tour bus and was flat-out flabber-gasted/glowing when, to his surprise, he met one of his heroes at a gig at Tufts. For the record, Zinn dug the set, too – it was the late BU professor emeritus’ first exposure to one of punk rockers that would  soon put him and Noam Chomsky back into the youth culture conversation.
   Here’s a story from 1988. I was in Philadelphia with Bragg. He settled into the chair in his hotel suite, readying himself for the interview.

"Don't be gentle," he told me.
Fair enough. Favorite food?
"Warm food, hot food," says Bragg.
Favorite color?
"Oh, red," says Bragg, smiling. "That's easy."
And, already, we're into politics -- red being the color identified with the socialist cause. Bragg, wearing blue jeans and a red T-shirt, is quite willing to jump into it. At the moment, he's preoccupied with the belief that Christianity has been co-opted by the right wing and his dismay that so many left wingers have no use for it.
"I don't have much of a religious background," Bragg says, "but the New Testament is full of socialist rhetoric -- throwing the money lenders out of the temple, a camel passing through a needle's eye. If Marx was around today, I don't think you'd find him saying, 'Religion is the opiate of the masses.' He'd probably think it's the old fishtank up there." Bragg gestures to the television.
"I think our ideology, on the left, socialism, is based on equality, freedom and understanding, whereas theirs on the right is based on greed and selfishness. We know that we're morally right. Why not take the ultimate moral source, from which all our laws are based, and use that as well? Why be so shy?"
Shy, Bragg is not. On stage or off, he enjoys rattling his sabre. The previous night, from the stage at Irvine Auditorium, Bragg sang songs of conflict and strife; he rewrote "Days Like These" to include a line about the presidential election ("selling democracy down the tubes with the adman's expertise"); he rewrote Elvis Costello's anti-imperialist "Oliver's Army" to damn Oliver North's army; he warned in "Help Save the Youth of America" that in a nuclear war America's cities will burn alongside Europe's; he stated that he lives on what the US administration "considers an unsinkable aircraft carrier." Racism, sexism and capitalism all took it on the chin; Bragg, who cofounded England's Red Wedge, an artists' socialist alliance, is the most radical voice in the rock mainstream, even if he's playing on its edges.
Off stage, though, Bragg will almost always opt for self-deprecating comments, such as "I've got the most humiliating story in the world to tell you."
Not long before we spoke, Bragg had scored a No. 1 hit in Britain for his version of the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home." It was included on a special album of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" covers done by a number of British acts to benefit agencies for abused youths. Bragg's contribution appeared on the flip-side of Wet Wet Wet's "With a Little Help from My Friends." The Wets' song was clearly the hit among the singles-buying set, but Bragg's tune was pulled up along the way. So he was invited to play on England's popular TV show "Top of the Pops."
Bragg doesn't like "Top of the Pops" much and they don't like him. "Top of the Pops" wants performers to lip-sync, and Bragg despises the process. He'd been on once before, in 1985, for the bittersweet, politically charged ballad "Between the Wars," which he insisted on playing live. Shortly after the performance, he described it as "a blemish in the audience's afternoon entertainment, someone confronting them with a view of reality."
Bragg insisted on playing "She's Leaving Home" live, too. One hitch: He'd only sung the song once before in the studio before and didn't know the words. So, as Bragg and his backing group -- pianist Cara Tivey, bassist Wiggy and accordionist Dave Woodward -- took the "Top of the Pops" stage, Bragg taped a sheet of paper with the lyrics to the floor in front of him.
"A nation watches, we're No. 1," recalls Bragg, "and unbeknownst to me, coming slowly across the ground is this chemical fog, the world's most insidious dry ice, which is coming at me ankle high and thick as clouds. By the end of the first verse, my little bit of paper's gone. I rambled through the words. Also, some guy walked behind us and dropped this steel ladder -- clank.
"This was taped live, to go out two or three hours later. At the end, I go, 'Don't worry, they'll let us do it again.' They didn't. They said, 'You wanna play live, you take the consequences. Off!' I was made to realize, for all my feelings about working popular culture, how trivial pop music actually is."
Trivial to some, perhaps. Setbacks aside, Bragg takes his job quite seriously. A while later, he says, "You just have to think to yourself: If I ain't gonna get and do this, who else is? I have the opportunities to state my ideas in music, short of being a politician, I wouldn't really have. I really should be using this for something other than just meeting women, seeing the world and making meself incredibly rich and famous. There has to be more to it, and, as far as I'm concerned, that more isn't changing the world, but coming out and being honest about the failings in all of us, and the hopes in all of us, trying to make some sense out of it all.
"I don't think it's my duty to change people's minds," he continues. "I don't think it's my job. The most we can do is to begin the debate, to focus the debate. Rock music can be the catalyst or medium through which ideas are channeled."
 In 1983, Bragg's motto might have been "Have clanging guitar, punk-rock ethos, left-wing cause, will travel." Bragg, a refugee from a little-known punk band called Riff Raff, decided to be a "one-man band who still thinks he's the Clash." He'd already changed his name from Steven to Billy ("When I was in school, every Tom, Dick and Harry was called Steven and there were two Stevens in Riff Raff. Also, it's punk, isn't it? Billy Bragg sounded a lot better"). He chose to sing in his own, coarse Cockney accent rather than adopting a more palatable voice. He played a decidedly abrasive, slash-and-burn style of rhythm guitar. He played anywhere and everywhere, opening for Link Wray, for Echo and the Bunnymen in the States, headlining benefits in England.

He'd play in the streets, spitting out terse, short sets; he'd get himself kicked out of New York's New Music Seminar for not having the proper credentials.
The old motto could still fit, even if Bragg's profile in the music world has risen. He is a tireless worker and his shows routinely run two hours. Musically speaking, his songs are more fleshed out. Bragg occasionally uses added instrumentation on record, and during this tour Tivey and Wiggy join him on stage sporadically, as do Shocked and Weddings, Parties, Anything. His vocal skills have grown, and he's writing more introspective songs these days; they are, in fact, the

core of his new album, "Workers Playtime." There, the focus shifts from the political to the personal; songs such as "She's Got a New Spell," "Must I Paint You a Picture," "Little Time Bomb" and "Valentine Day Is Over" suggest evidence of a wrenching breakup.
"Doing this job is a bit like a confessional," says Bragg. "If you're going to try and plumb the depths of what you feel, the deeper you can go, the better point of contact you can have with people. You should try and look for the things in all of us that you don't talk about all the time. When you go out and play and people applaud, they're not just applauding the song; some of the response is their acceptance of your mistakes or what your perspective is.
"Going out night after night does take the pain away. I wouldn't have said this a year ago. But I don't think there's anything to be gained by walking on stage being that pained-hurt person. I'm not like that, really, anyway. I'm someone who has his pain and hurt but generally deals with it by laughing about it, or going out and getting drunk."
The emphasis on more personal songs also had to do, says Bragg, with the feeling "we were getting a bit one-dimensional with all the politics, and I felt that there's just more to the job than just the political side. There wasn't really a conscious decision; it was more like, the majority of the songs I'd written were personal."
Everyone wrestles with contradictions, big and small. Bragg's struggles are more public, because of who he is and what he represents. Consider this small one: In Los Angeles, recently, the backstage beer the promoters supplied Bragg and his entourage was Coors. Because of its antiunion history and the right-wing activism of the company's owners, Coors has been targeted for much left-wing protest over the years. It's a company Bragg continues to knock on stage.
What did Bragg and company do?
"We drank it."
Or, consider this larger one. Bragg works in what he terms a "capitalist-intensive industry."
"Record companies are run by accountants," says Bragg, who records for Elektra, "and that's why I'm banging my head on a brick wall."
And always will be.
"Yep. There's no such thing as an ideologically sound record company."
Against his record company's wishes, he put the slogan "Capitalism is killing music" on the front of his new album. It was a response to the music industry's slogan-position -- "Home taping is killing music" -- with which Bragg vehemently disagrees. Anyway, Bragg raises the obvious contradiction himself: If he's such a concerned socialist, why charge a prohibitive-to-some admission price to his concerts?
"I recognize that as the old either/or," Bragg says. "If you're in a capitalist system, then you've got to give away everything, which is like saying socialism is about poverty and you're expected to leave the capitalist system before it's been overturned. As far as I'm concerned, I think capitalism is immoral and I have to deal with it all the time. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not the respect of your peers and the understanding of other people and the dissipating of information; it's money, money, money and more money."
On stage, Bragg makes the conundrum a joke: Fans, he says, can buy a "Capitalism is Killing Music" T-shirt for $35. Such is the irony of the business of music.
Bragg had some fine rough skills when he began plying his have-cheap-electric-guitar-and-rough-voice, will-travel trade in the mid-'80s -- a punk rock sense of urgency, melody and passion. He had heart, but not a lot of finesse. At times, he came up short on the melody front. Occasionally, dogma and didacticism would raise their heads, overwhelming other aspects of his songs.
There's never any questioning Bragg's politics -- or his ability to inspire. His version of Leon Rosselson's "The World Turned Upside Down," about brotherhood and solidarity, brings chills. "There Is Power in a Union" sings the praises of the original (and English) ideal of unionism. "Help Save the Youth of America" linked the fates of European cities and American cities if the nuclear bomb ever fall. That is, we're all buried in the rubble. And still, for all his acumen as a protest singer, Bragg writes eloquently of the complexities of relationships.
But is Billy Bragg always the political animal?
"I can turn it off," he says. "If you can't it'd be really horrible. Last night at a party, no one knew who I was and it was great. I had a load of beers with everyone, shook hands, had a chat. If it wasn't like that, I'd feel intensely pressured."
Bragg smiles. "You do step away from feeling the need to point out to people that they're being ideologically incorrect .”

Tix: $36.50 and $31.50. Show nearly sold out, starts at 8.

55 Davis Square, Somerville,617- 625-5700 www.somervilletheatreonline.org