Billy Bragg and Johnny Flynn: where have all the protest songs gone?

As many young people become political and take to the streets, musicians Billy Bragg and Johnny Flynn reflect on the dearth of protest songs to accompany them
johnny flynn and billy bragg
Johnny Flynn and Billy Bragg discuss the lack of political pop to soundtrack the new wave of protest. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Linda Nylind for the Guardian



The young people involved in the student protests and Occupy movement are strongly political. But why is this not reflected in the music they listen to? Billy Bragg talks to folk musician Johnny Flynn, with Emine Saner.

Billy Bragg: When I started to make music, there weren't many ways for someone from my background to articulate ideas. There was no internet, I didn't have access to the mainstream media. The best way was to pick up a guitar, write songs and do gigs. The internet and social networking sites have replaced that urge – you can make a film, a blog.

Johnny Flynn: It's confusing to know where to put your energies now. I don't have a Twitter account, because I want to keep it a bit more how you had it, and put my creative energy into writing songs.

BB: Songwriting is about communication. For people who have something to say, songwriting is a great medium. You can make something happen in that club you play, in that town, that you can't really do on the internet. We had the student demonstrations last year, we have the Occupy movement, and it is predominantly a younger generation of activists who are trying to deal with these subjects in a different way. Rather than storming the Bastille, they seem to be taking a moral stance. Do you feel this is something you should be engaging with in your music?

JF: Yes. The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people's creative energy that I think it gets abused. A record label might hold on to an album so as to not compete against Christmas or whatever, and the sentiment can be lost. When the riots happened, I thought, I can't ignore this. I think it was simpler when punk happened. I think young people could more clearly see where right and wrong existed … but there are so many issues around the riots, or the Occupy protest.

BB: Unfortunately, it never really was like that. Punk came out of riots in west London, where black youths were fighting police, and ostensibly it looked like vandalism, but now you can see that was the beginnings of our multicultural society where black youths said, "We belong here too." I recognise that your generation don't have the ideological politics as a backdrop that we had. Punk happened within 10 years of the summer of '68, which was the high point of political creativity and there were still, in the music industry then, people in positions of power who had been inspired by '68. Those people expected you, as a young musician, to have a political view. Now, I think the opposite is true – if you do, you get stick from the mainstream music press, or you're dismissed as earnest or whingeing.

JF: It's not in the mainstream media, but across towns it is amazing how there are small groups of people getting together and forming artistic collectives – they may not be being overtly political but I'd say by channelling their energy into community projects, that's a valid political statement. I tour to places where I get loads of people coming up to me and telling me the things they're part of. It doesn't create friction, but if you put your energy into something positive and community-based, that gathers an energy and wins people's hearts.

BB: But surely our job is to create friction, to confront people with the situation as we see it, and the time has never been more fractious than it is now. This isn't like the miners' strike, this is an international movement. I accept it's harder to get a grip on it because we live in a less ideological period, but surely as artists we're still capable of seeing who is holding us back. Occupy is a good example of that – they haven't come out with a set of answers, but just by being there they are posing important questions. Artists don't have to do any more than that. We should be asking questions that make people's ears prick up.

JF: That's happening as well. My favourite record this year is PJ Harvey's album, and it's really challenging about what it is to be from this country and what people are doing in our name.

BB: I meet a lot of people from your generation who don't feel comfortable talking about politics. I didn't. It was the miners' strike that was an education for me. You're not going to get on the mainstream, nobody is going to sing your songs on X Factor, but the energy you get from audiences when you do this kind of stuff, you've got to channel that.

JF: I went on the antiwar demos, and I was excited to be part of the stand against something. I think there is a despondency among young people and it is disappointing. Westminster politics is very unattractive and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning – there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself.

BB: There is so much snark out there now. All I had to worry about was snarky reviews in the music papers and the odd nasty letter in the NME. Some of the shit I get on Twitter is unbelievable. If I was starting out trying to make my first political expression and I was getting that sort of shitstorm, I would think twice. Our biggest enemy is cynicism.

JF: I'm not that politically educated. I'm left-wing and probably have some of the same references and heroes as you, but it's not as cut and dried now. My direction, what I'm drawn to, is overcoming cynicism, but in a more abstract form.

BB: If you look at my first album, the politics are broadly personal. There is no big ideological heaviness, but the miners' strike focused my ideas and gave me the confidence to express them. I think that time is coming again. Your generation is about to enter a very steep learning curve. You are possibly the first generation to be worse off than your parents since the war. What's happening at Occupy is new and exciting and we need people from your generation to communicate what is going on to everybody else. The language I speak is protest songs – it's about any song that seeks to speak truth to power.

Emine Saner: Have the people in the charts changed? There was that extraordinary statistic last year – 60% of the people in the charts had been to public school, whereas in 1990 it was 1%.

BB: You've got to be careful about that. If you had thrown all the privately educated people out of the punk bands, there would only have been me and Paul Weller left probably. Articulate people have always come from many different backgrounds. The edgiest music is in hip-hop, and I can't help feeling that's because this is their only chance, the only way to change their lives. This generation faces record unemployment. Being rejected by society does help to give your output some edge, whether it's writing or making songs or films.

JF: Where people come from has no relevance. It's another cynical thing to put the boot in about that.

Johnny Flynn is in Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre until January. The Left Field in Motion tour featuring Billy Bragg, King Blues, Akala and Sound of Rum starts in Edinburgh on 13 November.