Fairytale of New York
Me and Florence and the Machine singing Fairytale of New York, Live in Session for Rob Da Bank on BBC Radio 1.
Evidently Chicken Town
John Cooper Clarke’s Evidently Chicken Town in the style of Bob Dylan, from the November 2009 tour of Canada.
Steven Wells RIP
I don’t even know where Swells came from. He just appeared, like a force of nature, sometime in early 1980s, ranting his splenetic poems on stage with the likes of the Mekons and the Fall. He was part of the generation whose creative urges were ignited by punk rock and he retained that frenetic in-your-face attitude to the end. Shaving his head at a time when the only people who did so were skinheads, he chose an image that he knew would be confrontational and proceeded to subvert it.
The antithesis of the bonehead racist, he was in fact an articulate left-winger. And unlike the bullyboy, who only picks on those weaker than him, Swells chose to target the powerful, the popular, the hip and the cool. There was a time in the mid-Eighties when the Smiths could do no wrong in the NME. There were voices prepared to challenge this state of affairs, but only Swells could be relied upon to indulge in the merciless piss-taking of Morrissey, week after week. It comes as no surprise to learn that one of his last online columns for thequietus.com was a marvellous pin-pricking of the pomposity of Radiohead
However, anyone who really knew him would tell you that, no matter how he tried to come across as the cynical hard-man, his love of humanity in all its shitty glory would always shine through. He was possessed of a self-effacing sense of humour that would often overcome him at the apex of some raging tirade, leaving him and anyone within earshot laughing at his over-wrought hysteria.
His writing style was a kind of amphetamine steam-of consciousness that threatened to storm off the page and grab you by the throat. In his hands, metaphor took on a life of its own. The last para of his Radiohead piss-take consists of a single, 100-word sentence that takes a bog-standard music journalist cliché – the rock’n’roll rollercoaster – and forces its head down the toilet continuously until it begs for mercy.
His writing was a kind of performance art, a skill he picked up from his years as a ranting poet. They were a rum lot, the ranters, more wind-up merchants than poets if truth be told, taking on audiences with a bit of humour and a lot of balls. Swells excelled at the job. He was provocative, polemical and laugh out loud funny. Seeking to subvert the laddish world of rock journalism, he used the pseudonym Susan Williams for his first appearances in the NME in the 80s. Later on he also wrote reviews under the name of Seething Wells – his poetic pseudonym which he used onstage for his stand-up as a punk poet.
Politics were important to Swells. A supporter of the Socialist Workers Party, his critique of bands and colleagues was often couched in class war rhetoric, but he had too much of a sense of humour to be a real Trotskyite. He was at heart an iconoclast. Put anything on pedestal and Swells couldn’t resist taking a pot-shot at it. Nobody was spared. He was one of my earliest supporters in the music press, shared my idealism yet continually referred to me in print as Bilious Braggart, even when he was praising my output.
In later years, he surprised everybody by moving to Philadelphia, becoming a sports writer and getting married. He’d turn up backstage whenever I was playing in the city and often sent me links to his articles for the Philadelphia Weekly. A story he wrote for them detailing his battle with cancer was classic Swells - full of cock, arse, shit and piss references, except this time, horrifyingly first person. It was as if the graphic genital metaphors that he had liberally sprinkled through his writings had all come back to torment him.
Yet he still had the strength to fire a few back. In hospital, waiting to undergo another painful procedure, denied food for 24 hours, he writes ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a nun’s arse through some rusty railings’. I laughed out loud when I read that. Clearly his spirit was undimmed, even if he didn’t believe in such airy-fairy concepts.
“You don’t have cancer,” Ian Dury once said, “It has you”. It got Swells in the prime of his life, just as he’d bought a new house with his beloved Katherine. He seemed to have found his niche, firing off gonzo punk columns for websites and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. It has become clear in the past few days that there are a generation of music journalists out there who were inspired by his writing and touched by the generosity he showed towards them when they sought to follow in his footsteps.
If there is anyone out there who wishes to take up his mantle, they’ll need more than just a snarky sense of humour and a potty mouth. The comment sections of every website are full of posts from cynical jerk-offs who get their kicks from upsetting people. Swells could be hurtful in what he wrote, but his contrarian stance was never mere posturing. It was underpinned with an unswerving belief that things could be better – culturally, politically and globally. He just wanted people to feel like he did at the paucity of talent on display - outraged to the point of engagement. To that end, he was willing to take it further than many of us are prepared to go – in your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed.
Episode 14: Half Bragg Half Blokes
Mermaid Avenue is a success, but Wilco can’t tour with Billy to promote the album because their own album is running late. Billy tours first with ex-Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan, then with Mac and his Bump Band in the States, before forming an English band - The Blokes - to tour the Mermaid Avenue catalogue.
Eventually, they begin co-writing their own album - England, Half English - after Billy resists the temptation to make his temporary stint as a BBC Radio 2 disc jockey into something more permanent. A decision to write a book on English identity, which becomes The Progressive Patriot, leads to a five-year wait before work begins on another studio album.
Albums featured or referred to in this podcast include Billy Bragg and The Blokes Mermaid Avenue Tour official bootleg, England, Half English, Must I Paint You A Picture: The Essential Billy Bragg, and Billy Bragg Volumes 1 and 2 Boxed Sets. All available in the Billy Bragg Shop
Protest and survive
In March 1984, my debut EP had been knocked off the top of the indie charts by the Smiths’ first album. For the previous 12 months, I’d been travelling Britain trying to reinvent the idea of the political singer-songwriter. Now I had an opportunity to find out if my punk-edged songs had any relevance in a real political struggle.
Soon I was travelling to the coalfields, doing gigs to raise money for the miners and their families. I was surprised to find that traditional folk singers were there ahead of me, singing songs more radical than mine. I was also impressed by the sight of miners’ wives, forced into public speaking because their husbands were in jail or on the picket lines.
This summer, I will mark the anniversary of the strike by doing a series of gigs in Wales. This tour is not intended as a celebration, but as an act of memory, to commemorate the struggle of the people of Wales to defend their communities from destruction. It will not be an evening for nostalgia. Against the backdrop of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, this tour will be rooted in the here and now, evoking memories of the strike to remind people that we have not always meekly accepted cutbacks and redundancies.
There is still a culture of progressive resistance in Wales, something that has been lost in England, and although it does not burn so fiercely as it once did, it can still inspire. My hope is that we will blow on the embers of this tradition.
• Billy Bragg’s Welsh tour begins on 5 June in Blaenavon
This article was first published in the Observer Music Monthly on Sunday 15 March 2009.
Fair play in the music industry
By Billy Bragg and Dave Rowntree
Google’s decision unilaterally to remove the music videos from their YouTube network in the UK as a fee-negotiating tactic in a dispute with the Performing Rights Society is a stark illustration of the power-shift that has gone on with the music industry over the past decade. By choosing to take on the PRS, a society that collects royalties for artists rather than record companies, Google is hoping to bring to heel the last remaining outpost of resistance to the idea that music on the internet should be free – the creators of that music, the artists themselves.
Digital technology is the best thing that has happened for performers and songwriters since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and made it possible for us to earn a living from something other than live performance. Recent developments in audio technology have made it possible for anyone with a laptop and a connection not only to make their own music, but also to distribute it around the world.
The potential, particularly for new talent, is incredible.
Unfortunately for us artists, not everyone in the music industry shares this view. The major labels seem to see the internet as a threat, not just in their self-defeating attempts to criminalise our fans for sharing our music with others, but also in their determination to cling to the old way of doing things. Under the old business model, they took the lion’s share of the profits for doing the heavy-lifting of physical production and distribution of stock. Shamefully, some labels are still offering deals to new artists based on this notion. We live in a digital age but we’re stuck in an analogue music industry.
As long as artists allow the major labels to speak for the industry as a whole, this situation will not change. Later this year, Lord Carter will deliver his report to government (for details of his interim report, see here), setting out the framework for the development of digital technologies in Britain. He has invited interested parties to come and speak to him with their ideas. That is why we have chosen this moment to call on artists to come together to discuss issues, formulate ideas and ultimately speak with one united voice to the music industry, the internet service providers and to government at national and international levels.
We believe that the best way to ensure that we properly benefit from the new technology is for artists to assert their ownership and control of their rights. Only by coming together to speak with a single, powerful voice can we hope to unleash the full artistic potential of the internet, while ensuring that we get fairly paid for the content that we provide. Google’s dispute with the PRS makes this debate even more urgent. Their menacing attitude towards paying UK artists for content is a test case that will have ramifications around the world.
The Featured Artists’ Coalition, which launches in London on Wednesday March 10, is not a “pop stars’ union” – we already have the Musicians Union to represent everyone in our trade and we encourage our fellow featured artists to join the MU and uphold its rules. The FAC is a campaigning organisation that seeks to achieve fair remuneration in exchange for widespread access. Our target is not the music fan but the businesses that are making huge profits by exploiting artistic content for which they pay little or nothing at all.
Whether we like it or not, the old business model is broken and the decline in sales in the past few years has not been helped by the determination of the big labels to protect themselves at the expense of both artists and fans. Record shops have disappeared from our high streets and the big labels may go the same way, passing into the hands of asset strippers whose only interest is the bottom line. Yet, there is still clearly an audience out there for good music, and plenty of young musicians hoping to find them.
This is why we need to find our voice now – to ensure that the next generation of artists are able to earn a living in the new digital music industry that is busy being born.
Billy Bragg and Dave Rowntree are directors of the Featured Artists’ Coalition
This article was first published in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free section, Tuesday 10 March 2009.
How we all lost when Thatcher won
There is a bitter irony in the fact that the Bank of England chose the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the miners’ strike to fire off its weapon of last resort in an attempt to damp down the conflagration currently sweeping through global capitalism. The wry smile that passes across the lips of those who opposed the naked selfishness at the heart of the Thatcherite experiment will be mirrored by the disconcerted frowns of those who, having wholeheartedly embraced the free market, never thought that it would lead to this. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Thatcherism has turned on its creators.
Is there anybody out there willing to stand up – on this, of all days – and raise a toast to the wilful destruction of our manufacturing industry and its replacement by the financial services sector? Yes, there were unions who were resistant to change, but whoever came up with the idea that the solution to this problem was to import cars rather than make them ourselves sacrificed more than just the entire engineering skills base.
The forces that Margaret Thatcher unleashed in order to defeat the NUM destroyed whole communities before leeching into our society. Untamed by successive governments, these same forces now threaten to devour us all.
The housing bubble that has been source of so many of our recent difficulties, was kickstarted by Thatcher. Selling off council houses to their owners was a popular idea at the time, but by refusing to allow councils to build more stock, it ultimately forced up prices as demand rose. When the Tories slashed the state pension and people started looking around for a way of ensuring financial security in their old age, bricks and mortar seemed like a sound investment.
Without powerful unions to protect them, the wages of ordinary workers were held in check while the cost of housing began to spiral upwards. As it became increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder, a newly deregulated banking sector began offering ever more “attractive” loans. And we all know where that led.
Would any of this have been different if Thatcher had lost that titanic struggle in 1984?
She would have still been in power for another three years, but she would not have tasted blood. A chastened Conservative party might have realised sooner, rather than later, that the ultimate price of Thatcherism would be the brutalisation of society.
This article was first published in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free section, Thursday 5 March 2009.
Q Magazine - November 2008
There is something about standing around with an electric guitar hanging down by your groin that is attractive to boys in their mid-teens. The 14-year-old kid who lived in the terrace house next door taught me to play in the summer of 1974 and from that day on we were a gang, facing the choppy waters of adolescence together, protected by our commitment to one another and the music we loved. After recruiting a drummer from further along the street, the three of us whiled away the years waiting for punk to happen by blasting out songs by the Stones, the Who and the Faces in the back room of my parent’s house.
My father was supportive our efforts, but it was bewildering to him. Born in the mid-1920s, his own teenage years had been dominated by the war. Already into his thirties by the time Elvis appeared, rock’n’roll came too late for him. As a result, he had no interest in pop music, no understanding of how it might transport his son from the mundane routine of homework and exams into a fantasy world where me and my buddies were heroes with low-slung guitars.
I can’t help but sympathise with his predicament when I find my own 14-year-old son engrossed in another fire-fight on his Xbox360. Of course there is nothing really preventing me from picking up the spare controller and fighting alongside him as he battles the Covenant to prevent them activating Halo, but, to be honest, I just don’t get it. By the time the first Nintendo Game Boy became available in Britain, I was already well into my thirties. I see this gadget as a toy, rather than a means by which to escape into a fantasy world with your mates.
The arrival of Guitar Hero III blurred this line. Here was something Dad could understand, something he could even get the hang of, if it was explained to him slowly. In fact, for a while, my strumming action gave me the edge until the boy worked out how I did it and then took off, leaving me stuck on the easy setting, clunking my way through ‘School’s Out’.
Then something miraculous happened. While I was away on tour, a couple of his Guitar Hero-playing buddies came round with their new electric guitars, wanting to try them through one of my amplifiers. It was as if they had placed a real United Nations Space Corps rifle in his hands and sent him into battle against the Flood. He quickly got the guitar playing bug and, crucially, it was transmitted to him by his peers, not by his parents.
Over the summer holidays, his playing just got better and better. I showed him a few short cuts and introduced him to The Ramones. He soon had his mates playing ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ in the garage. They have little practice amps for their guitars and put the vocals through my old Fender Twin, which gave sterling service in its time, but was seeing out its twilight years as an obstacle to be negotiated when unloading groceries from the car.
Now his playing fills the house. What initially sounds like a big angry hornet trapped in a biscuit tin turns out to be him tearing through the chords of ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ upstairs in his bedroom. Sometimes, as I go around switching off lights and closing windows last thing at night, I hear him scratching out a tune on his unplugged electric guitar. And, somehow, he seems to have grown six inches since he picked up the damned thing.
He seldom starts up the Xbox these days, instead taking great delight in showing me the latest riff he’s learned. After one of his accomplices taught him how to play a rudimentary Chuck Berry intro, I spent a few hours playing rhythm guitar for him while he practiced his Johnny B. Goode licks. And when the great man himself played at a nearby festival, we went along, father and son standing together in a packed crowd on a dark Friday night to pay our respects to Chuck Berry, a child of the mid-1920s, just like my dad.
Been listening to:
The Rolling Stones - 12 x 5
The Skids - Into the Valley
Chatham County Line - IV
This article was first published in Q Magazine in the UK
Billy also presents a monthly radio programme for Q Radio.
You can listen to it on the digital TV platforms in the UK Virgin Media, Freeview, and Sky.
Also on DAB London Radio.
Worldwide listeners can tune into the online player here:
http://radioplayer.qthemusic.com/
You can also catch Billy’s show online for up to seven days in Q Radio’s Listen Again archive here:
http://qradio.qthemusic.com/qradio/2009/01/billy_bragg_2.shtml
Q Magazine - October 2008
I’m having terrible trouble with my piles. It’s all that sitting around in buses and airplanes on tour that causes it. Whenever you stop moving, there’s an overwhelming urge to get hold of something to help pass the time: a magazine, a book, a DVD or a CD. I’m particularly drawn to the latter. Hanging around in record stores looking for obscure albums is one of the great pleasures of touring America and with the exchange rate between the pound and the US dollar currently in our favour by a factor of almost 2:1, the sense that all these great records are half price is difficult to suppress. And when I get home, I find I have piles. After six months of touring my new album across Europe, America, Canada and Australia, there is hardly a surface in my office that doesn’t have something stacked up on it.
Eventually these piles disperse - the t-shirts to their drawer, the books to their shelf and the DVDs into that dark recess beneath the tv. The CDs however, just keep hanging around. They are slowly colonising the room, blocking the light like some creeping vine and making the room seem pokey. Worse, they are an affront to my sense of dignity. Until they are filed away alphabetically on the shelves in the corridor, I cannot claim to be their master.
That the CDs hold the upper hand is down to my own failure to find room for them in my collection. My two pine shelving units stand over six feet tall and can each hold 1100 CDs, yet of late they have been crammed full. One contains the general collection, from Albert Ammons to Warren Zevon, where brief sightings of the likes of Louis Prima and Mary Margaret O’Hara can be glimpsed between vast phalanxes of albums by Jackson Browne, Ronnie Lane or The Shangri-La’s.
The other is more specialised, with sections for folk, world music, classical and compilations. There are boxed sets there too and a ‘nursery shelf’ for new acquisitions not yet integrated into the collection. This is where my problems begin. Because the general shelves are full, the nursery has got badly backed up, overflowing onto the top of a nearby upright piano. The smart thing would be to transfer some of the less listened to CDs into storage in the basement, except – doh! – there are already five boxes of CDs in storage down there. My whole system has reached capacity. Something’s gotta give.
And so it was that last month, I began hauling the storage boxes out of the basement and laboriously going through each one, asking myself if I really needed to keep this CD or might it be more appreciated in another’s hands? In one ruthless afternoon and evening, I halved the number of CDs in the basement. Then it was time to bring the same pitiless eye to the general collection. Did I really need instant, 24-hour access to ‘What Is Hip: the Tower of Power Anthology’ or could I let it slumber in storage until I was taken by an irresistible urge to hear the unedited single version of ‘Oakland Stroke’? Soon, I realised that it was not CDs that were clogging up these shelves but sentimentality. Why was I giving space to ‘Christmas in the Harbour: Seasonal Songs from Newfoundland and Labrador’? The soundtrack to ‘Sweet Dreams’? And four CDs by Bis??
It was a hugely cathartic experience. I worked night and day over the course of a weekend, occasionally pulling albums out and playing them as I went, causing other members of the household to stuck their heads around the door and ask ‘what is that tune?”. The whole process led me to add hundreds of new tunes to my i-pod.
And now once again, I am master of my CDs. My surfaces are clear, sunlight pours into my room and the nursery shelf is empty, ready for cycle to start all over again. Yet the whole experience has left me with one nagging question.
How come I don’t own any CDs by Mott the Hoople?
This article was first published in Q Magazine in the UK
Billy also presents a monthly radio programme for Q Radio.
You can listen to it on the digital TV platforms in the UK Virgin Media, Freeview, and Sky.
Also on DAB London Radio.
Worldwide listeners can tune into the online player here:
http://radioplayer.qthemusic.com/
You can also catch Billy’s show online for up to seven days in Q Radio’s Listen Again archive here:
http://qradio.qthemusic.com/qradio/2009/01/billy_bragg_2.shtml
Welcome back the taxman
Watching the debate about the RBS bonuses over the past week, I’ve been waiting for someone to utter the T word. When the executives pleaded that any claw-back would penalise the vast majority of their high street staff who earned under £17,000 per year, I began shouting this word at the telly. When Vince Cable came on to condemn the bonus culture and didn’t even mention it as an option, I lost my rag.
It is some reflection of how much we have allowed the financial establishment to dictate the agenda over the past 20 years that not a single frontline politician from any of the mainstream parties was prepared to advocate an increase in taxation as the mechanism for giving the executive bonuses back to the taxpayer.
Previous Labour governments have not shown such timidity when confronted with the unacceptable face of capitalism. In the past, Labour chancellors introduced a surtax to curb earnings that were excessive.
Alarm bells will be ringing at the Adam Smith Institute at the sight of that last sentence and a flash mob of free-marketeers will doubtless assemble in the comments section below to parrot the old saw that we now live in a globalised marketplace and that our tax rates have to be low in order to attract the best talent. But that’s what we’ve been doing since the Big Bang in 1986, and where has it got us? The public mood is turning. Those who were handsomely rewarded during the deregulation boom must be seen to share the pain along with everyone else now that the bubble has burst.
Surtax offers an immediate remedy to excessive bonuses and, by linking it to average earnings, it could play an important part in setting the tone for the new economic model. The Treasury should set a limit on what we as a society believe to be the maximum that a person should earn in any single year – 20 times the average wage might be a fair place to start. Below that level, taxation would remain as it is now, but above the threshold, surtax would kick in and any remuneration would be taxed at 95p in the pound.
Those whose memories stretch back to the days before decimal currency might recognise this as the 19 shillings in the pound that the Beatles whined about having to pay in their song, Taxman. “Let me tell you how it will be / one for you and 19 for me / cos I’m the taxman,” wrote George Harrison on finding out where his earnings were going. Surtax was as much a part of the swinging 60s as the Fab Four, playing a key role in a decade that saw the gap between the rich and poor in this country narrow significantly.
Its reintroduction now would allow the banks to pay their contractual bonuses to employees, while only those earning more than £500,000 would be hit. Rather than attracting the kind of “talent” who have treated the financial markets like their own private casino, such a move might produce bankers who value that quintessential British characteristic of restraint.
This article first appeared in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free section, on 19 February 2009.
Q Magazine articles
Billy has recently joined Q Magazine, the British music publication, as a regular columnist.
We will be publishing his articles here as an archive.
Check out the Q Magazine website here
2nd November Asheville NC
JFK airport is full of people wearing medals they won for completing the New York City marathon yesterday, looking tired but happy. After three weeks and nearly 3000 miles in our Econoline van, I feel the same, buoyed by the fact that the best show was saved until last.
Asheville is a town in the Appalachian Mountains renowned for its activism. Across the road from the Orange Peel, a huge hoarding keeps a toll of the cost of the Iraqi occupation in dollars as well as Iraqi and American lives. I’ve been here once before, five years ago on the Tell Us The Truth tour, and have a strong memory of a well attended after-show discussion at a nearby squatted community café with most of the audience and all of the artists.
This time I had a little longer to check the place out. We got to town around 3pm and I took a leisurely stroll in the afternoon sunshine down to the venue past shops selling second hand clothes and American folk art. We even found our first Indian restaurant of the tour. Joy.
The gig was highly charged from the start, the audience responding as if it were Saturday night, not Sunday. They pulled songs out of me that I hadn’t been playing thus far, including the first US performance of One Love/Drop the Debt, along with all the arm waving actions. They seemed to be all ages, from earnest young beardies to old whiskery wobblies, and they knew most of the words too. By the end my voice was hoarse and my fingertips sore, but we’d all had a great time.
Back to the hotel for a farewell beer with the Watson Twins, who have been a wonderful support act, warming the crowd up for me with their southern harmonies and singing like the Staples Sisters every night on Sing Their Souls Back Home.
1st November Durham NC
Considering how many miles we’ve driven in the past three weeks, opportunities for roadside recreation have been far and few between. Early on, we diverted off of I-80 near Jenny Jump Mountain after seeing a sign inviting us to The Land of Make Believe. Our wise-cracks about it being full of Obama supporters were intensified when we drove through a little town called Hope, but when we finally got there, we found to our disappointment that it had been closed since Labor Day. Nothing looks sadder than a funfair out of season, so we headed back to the highway and our engagement in West Long Branch.
So imagine our delight at seeing a signpost inviting us to The Dismal Swamp on the road out of Norfolk, Virginia. Having no show to do that night, it provided us with a classic day-off detour. Of course, in the beautiful autumn sunshine that has blessed our tour, the swamp was far from dismal, but we still had a lovely time, like a bunch of schoolkids, climbing on rotten logs to cross ditches of brackish water. While huge buzzards soared overhead, Andy saw a snake, Grant tore his shirt on the brambles and Vaughn nearly fell off the log into the water. Meanwhile, Billy was busily recording all this on his blog.
Saturday afternoon we drove from Durham to nearby Chapel Hill to take part in an early voting drive. Concerned that their right to vote may be challenged on election day, millions of people across the USA have been taking advantage of the opportunity to cast their votes early, thereby giving themselves a chance to overcome any problems they might face at the polling booth. There have been reports of both Republican and Democratic party officials looking to exclude people who have moved house, have lost their homes due to repossession or simply do not have the relevant document to prove their identity. African American supporters of Obama have been particularly concerned, recalling what happened in Florida in 2000, when thousands of African Americans were denied the right to vote having been illegally removed from voting rolls by Republican officials.
At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, student activists have registered over 5000 new voters and are making a concerted effort to get them to vote early. Members of the band Superchunk organised a midday concert to get people down to the polling station and, as they heard I was in town, they invited me over to play a few songs. Looking at the assembled crowd, some of whom had brought their young children along, it seemed fitting to sing Laura Nyro’s ‘Change The Country’, with it’s line about ‘babies in the blinking sun/Singing we shall overcome’. The red and blue graphic designed by Shepherd Fairley, of Obama above the word HOPE is everywhere to be seen on this campaign and that audience waiting to cast their vote seemed to me to be the embodiment of that hope.
30th October Norfolk Virginia
The Attucks Theatre was opened in 1919 and is notable as the oldest remaining theatre in the USA that was entirely financed, designed, constructed and operated by African Americans. It seems entirely fitting that I should be appearing here as the country is alive with the possibility of electing its first African American president. The man himself seems everywhere, on tv, on the front pages, on lawn-posters, t-shirts and buttons. It’s physical too. He was in Norfolk so recently, his uniformed secret servicemen are still checking out of the hotel as we leave for the show, where the promoter shows me a picture on his phone of Obama and himself taken just the day before.
The sense of excitement has been palpable at the gigs too, from rural Pennsylvania to metropolitan midtown Manhattan, from New Hampshire in the north to down below the Mason-Dixon Line in Virginia. The relatively low voter turn-out at American presidential elections has served to undermined their claim to be the worlds greatest democracy. This time feels different. People are energised by the possibility of change. Both candidates have used the phrase to promote their campaigns, but the Republicans pitch is tarnished by the record of George W Bush, who has been the invisible man of this campaign season. How much genuine change can you expect from a candidate who time and time again voted with his president?
The Attucks, which takes its name from Crispus Attucks, an African American who was the first US citizen killed by crown forces in the War of Independence, is an old style theatre. Built before the use of amplification, the auditorium is taller than it is longer, ensuring an intimate gig. Sam Cooke features among the names of great artists who performed here in the past. Could it be that the change he yearned for is finally going to come?
