Aaron Peters speaks to Billy Bragg about the recent wave of Occupy movements and escaping from a generation of cynicism.

Speaking to The Student when Occupy LSX was just beginning, Billy Bragg was noticeably excited to seeSpeaking to The Student when Occupy LSX was just beginning, Billy Bragg was noticeably excited to see a new mood of protest in Britain. I asked him whether he had any advice for student protesters. “The world changes all the time. We’re coming out of a period of our children having better standards of living than our own. I think your generation is gonna be at the front line for the economic problems that we’re facing. Already unemployment among under 24 year olds is higher than it’s been for a long time and the way to respond to this is to get organised, to start to try and articulate your anger in a positive way. a new mood of protest in Britain. I asked him whether he had any advice for student protesters. “The world changes all the time. We’re coming out of a period of our children having better standards of living than our own. I think your generation is gonna be at the front line for the economic problems that we’re facing. Already unemployment among under 24 year olds is higher than it’s been for a long time and the way to respond to this is to get organised, to start to try and articulate your anger in a positive way.

“I’m very encouraged that there was no violence at Occupy over the weekend. In fact they seem to have rejected that option, because, the truth is, you can’t change the world by breaking windows, but you can change the world by engaging in the political process. And I speak as someone who didn’t bother to vote when I first had the vote ‘cause I didn’t think it made a difference. And what happened was Margaret Thatcher got elected. So I soon got a rocket up my arse and realised that I’d actually made a mistake there. So I would encourage young people not to give into the cynicism that surrounds them and to actually overcome that and to try and find a way of engaging with the debate and talk about the kind of world they want to live in, rather than leaving it to someone else to create.”

Billy’s early albums contain many protest songs about high unemployment rates and sleazy, hypocritical media. So he has a bit of experience to share with today’s protesters.

“They’re not gonna change the world just by being there, but I think, I hope, that their aim is to set the agenda for the debate about the economy, because at the moment our mainstream political parties don’t really seem interested in talking about the real issues behind the economic situation. They’re not interested in suggestions of a Robin Hood tax coming from Europe. We own 85 per cent of RBS - why is it not nationalised? Why are we not using it as a national investment bank? Why are we not taking control of this situation by utilising something that we’ve paid for? It seems to be that none of the mainstream political parties wanna talk about this. So hopefully the Occupations will help set the agenda around this world."

Billy Bragg’s albums are a mixture of half love songs, half protest music, with the lines between the two sometimes blurred. I asked him what it is about political songs that he finds effective. “At the bottom line I’m a communicator, whether I’m writing a song or writing in the NME, or even talking to you now and putting my ideas out there for you and your audience to comment on. What I’m trying to do is not change the world, ‘cause you can’t do that with music, but I’m trying to offer different perspectives.”

About political music, he says, “I think you hear it, and it makes you feel like you’re not the only one who cares about this issue. And also, when you’re at a gig, and you’re there with your fellow students and you’re cheering together, you think ‘OK, there’s a community of us here who feel strongly about this’, and it gives you the strength to carry on. It’s not easy remaining politically motivated, there’s a lot of cynicism out there; anyone who puts their opinion on the internet is in danger of being shot down immediately by cynical arseholes who just wanna have a go. Some of the responses I got to tweets from Occupy LSX were just so base, it’s unbelievable, I’ve been hardened by years of having to put up with people having a go at me, I’m sure if I was a new activist with some new ideas, I’d take all those tweets personally, rather than just ignoring them.

“There’s a lot of distractions that weren’t around when I was first doing this, like Facebook and Twitter and your own blog... In the end it’s not a matter of how many likes you can get for an idea, it’s actually about inspiring people and bringing people together so they feel that they’re not alone and music is a pretty good way of doing that, so I am hoping to inspire people with this Left Field tour, that’s the main aim of it.”

With a new compilation out, covering the past ten years of his own protest music and entitled Fight Songs, I asked what he thought looking back over some of those songs.

“Since I started giving away music for free on the internet in 2002 with The Price of Oil, I’ve felt a little bit like I’ve been pissing in the wind, so to speak, that the ideas that I’ve been putting out there have not really been in keeping with what’s going on in the music industry. But the last couple of years, since the crash in 2008, I think the idea of polemical songs has become more and more relevant, so it now seems like a good time to collect these together and make them available for people who may only have tuned in a few years ago.”

The album includes Billy Bragg’s haunting update of a Bob Dylan song “The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie” about the tragic death of the American student killed while protesting the demolition of Palestinian houses. I wanted to know what it was about a specific situation that drives him to write about it. “There are some issues that don’t get a lot of mainstream attention: one is the lack of genuine rehabilitation available in British prisons, and another is the issue of the Israeli Defence Force bulldozing Palestinian houses, so I try to write about those issues, rather than perhaps the more obvious issues that more people are willing to write about, such as environment, or children dying in Africa, you know, people are always going to support that, and I support that too, but there are some issues out there that don’t have a huge amount of support among my community, and I think it’s always worth trying to engage with those ideas, and bring those ideas to the fore.”

This is what he has been doing for almost 30 years now. His song “Never Buy the Sun”, released just after the demise of The News of the World, has a lot of parallels with his 1984 song “It Says Here”. I thought that it might bother him to still be campaigning about some of the same issues after so long. “I think it’s the nature of the game, I’d be foolish if I thought just ‘cause I wrote a song about it, it would get resolved. It happens more with the songs I wrote about the Falklands War. People were listening to them during the First Gulf War, soldiers were writing to me, they were listening to tracks like “Island Of No Return” while they were going out to the Gulf. So if you do write topical songs they do have a propensity to become topical again.”