CG: Who are the main musical influences in your life and how has your songwriting\u00a0evolved over the years? What was the spark that got you interested in the first place?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: Well\u2026 I started out with Simon & Garfunkel & Pete Atkin\u2026 then I had the epiphany that was Ziggy Stardust, which was the gateway to Lou Reed & the Velvets, & Iggy & the Stooges. These are still pretty much my default setting; I still find I am likely to end up playing Velvet Underground bootlegs if I can\u2019t think of anything else to listen to! I was at the Patti Smith Roundhouse gig that practically everybody who was anybody in UK Punk went to. I saw Tom Robinson in a pub in Hounslow, which was just the best gig ever, possibly. But by the time punk rock officially happened, I had accidentally stumbled upon folk clubs & acoustic music, & through that I became deeply in love with the work of black American musicians, blues singers like Howling Wolf, & that\u2019s when I met my other default setting, Billie Holiday. It wasn\u2019t until London Calling that I listened to the Clash, & realised what I had been missing.<\/p>\n
There are other significant artists I should mention; one way or another I have been inspired by \u2026Victor Jara, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday, Francis Cabrel, Bruce Cockburn, Wolf Biermann\u2026 & Chumbawamba, & Mick Farren (& thereby the Deviants & the Pink Fairies) have shaped my understanding of popular culture<\/p>\n
I think the basic narrative of my songwriting has been firstly early punk rock\u2026 acoustic folk & blues & jazz\u2026.music from a diversity of cultures (before it became WORLD MUSIC – then I started listening to South African guitar bands in the 80s cos I was involved in anti-Apartheid gigs & activities, & also living in West London I started listening to bhangra bands, & being involved in Central American Solidarity groups \/ Nicaragua Solidarity. I listened to music from that region, including the fabulous Godoy brothers) \u2013 then I discovered the chanson, & that really moved my songwriting along I think. I also think it probably hammered the final nail into the coffin as far as any likelihood of popularity goes!<\/p>\n
All those people & song forms have been sparks that have excited me\u2026I suppose I grew up with the great legacy of Popular Song (my grandad had a piano that you pedalled to play music hall melodies\u2026 my dad played Hoagy Carmichael records, & loved Stephane Grapelli & Django Reinhardt) that then fed into the sixties & pop culture\u2026 it was just (to me) so obviously the cultural language you would use to make sense of the world. Plus it was obviously OURS. All you had to do was play a guitar & you could communicate. I am sure that I have always wanted to write \u2013 I enjoy trying to make the objective code of words express my ideas & maybe also formulate those ideas in beautiful structures. I found myself reciting Andrew Marvell\u2019s \u201cTo His Coy Mistress\u201d in my head the other day. I have always believed that had they been born in the 20th Century, poets like Andy, & Billy Shakespeare & Charlie Dickens would have learned 3 chords & formed a rock group rather than write poems, plays or novels.<\/p>\n
There is also the alternative narrative that, having had the misfortune to go to an all-boys school, playing the guitar seemed the easiest way to get to talk to girls.<\/p>\n
Your question has got me thinking though, about how someone who started off wanting nothing more than to play \u201cSweet Jane\u201d comes to write 3 CDs worth of stuff about his dad & the Second\u00a0World War & the welfare state. I suppose there is a link. I have always thought Lou\u2019s \u201cBerlin\u201d a work of genius. Most \u201crock operas\u201d & \u201crock musicals\u201d are utterly awful. \u201cBerlin\u201d isn\u2019t\u2026 it is a song suite \u2013 what\u2019s the difference between a rock musical & a song suite?<\/p>\n
The glib answer is that rock operas are awful & song suites aren\u2019t\u2026 I think it is more something to do with the ambition of form\u2026 classic musicals – & indeed musical theatre \u2013 at their best have a nuance & a subtlety that ROCK finds difficult to cope with. Musical theatre \u2013 it is interested in songs\u2026 rock musicals & operas are fatally limited by the feeling that they need to ROCK!!!! I love rocknroll. But it is what it is – 3 chords & a backbeat, basically. Rock musicals are like folk rock, the very worst of both worlds. But \u2013 listening to the sort of songs you hear in musicals & in chanson, you get a greater sense of what SONG can do. It doesn\u2019t have to do it all the time, but it is possible to use songs to freight both meaning & narrative \u2013 & sometimes also poetry & nuance, & complexity, too.<\/p>\n
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CG: Ordinary Giants offers a fascinating perspective on the social and political issues faced by ordinary people over the last 100 years. What inspired you to write it, and how did you go about structuring the narrative and developing the various themes?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: Thank you for the kind appreciation. I think a significant function of art & entertainment is to engage with the social & political issues faced by ordinary people. The tradition of music generally labelled \u201cfolk\u201d is particularly well-situated to do this as it is \u2013 or ought to be \u2013 the unmediated creativity of ordinary people that is independent of court, corporation & Simon Cowell. When you look at these issues from the perspective of ordinary people rather than from the perspective of court, corporation or Simon Cowells, you usually find a narrative that challenges the dominant version of events.<\/p>\n
I hope that Ordinary Giants is not an exercise in \u201cfolk\u201d nostalgia, but a retelling of what happened over these last 100 years that both challenges the oversimplifications of the official history imposed as the popularised version of events, & also provides a context within which you can better understand contemporary developments. That all probably sounds a bit ambitious for a bunch of songs & monologues\u2026 but the inspiration was probably significantly generated by that kind of awareness of what songs can do, & by the writing I had previously done where songs joined up to create a narrative.<\/p>\n
I always try to think of albums \u2013 not just if they are conscious song suites \u2013 as being more effective if they have a sense of structure, a beginning \u2013 middle \u2013 end that makes some sort of journey. The obvious reference point though is the Gentle Men song suite, about my grandfathers & WW1. I was asked to write something based on the experiences of my grandfathers, who both were present at the 3rd<\/sup> Battle of Ypres, for the 1997 Passchendaele Peace Concert that marked the 80th<\/sup> anniversary of that murderous lunacy. Having written about my grandads & WW1, it seemed logical that at some point I would write about my father & WW2.<\/p>\nFor a long time I didn\u2019t want to start this \u2013 I sensed it would be a challenging piece to write, & I didn\u2019t want to get it wrong! Then last year, in February 2017, a combination of events made me decide to start writing. Firstly I found myself with an appointment opposite the school where my dad was a headteacher, & secondly I thought if I started now, the album would be out in time to contribute to the political debate in the run-up to the 2020 election. A month later, clearly having got wind of this, Mrs May promptly called a snap election for June.<\/p>\n
Initially, I structured the narrative as a series of songs that dealt with significant events or characteristics of my dad\u2019s life. I decided on the title \u201cGiants\u201d as an ironic reference to Beveridge\u2019s \u201c5 Giants\u201d, the social ills of Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance & Idleness that were seen as impacting upon the lives of the people in the 30s, & that the creation of the Welfare State was intended to eradicate. Later that evolved with the addition of the categorical, contradictory adjective \u201cOrdinary\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, as the writing progressed, I found myself pursuing ideas & inventing & pursuing a wider cast of characters than I had initially anticipated. My dad grew up in the 30s in Heston, in West London. West London enjoyed a period of relative growth in the 30s, so I found that I wanted to invent a chorus that would reference the wider social conditions that my dad wouldn\u2019t have experienced. I created monologues for a character I called Lou, based very loosely on my great aunt Gladys, who was the only member of my mum\u2019s family who voted Labour. I decided Lou would need to be balanced by a right wing chorus, so I invented the Utterswines, a line of Daily Mail readers that end up by 2010 in UKIP.<\/p>\n
I found myself pursuing characters too; the song about my dad\u2019s first years as a teacher featured a character that I called Tony Smith. I then wondered what might have happened to those children like Tony Smith, the working class kids of Brentford whose lives the Welfare State was designed to improve. Tony apparently moved to Bognor, & brought up his granddaughter Daisy, & she then gets to reprise in 2009 the song of my grandmother in 1929, \u201cSlow Progress\u201d. I thought it would all be over by Christmas, but songs kept on emerging\u2026 one of the benefits of taking so long to write \u201cOrdinary Giants\u201d was that I could reflect on its shape & dramatic structure, & add in songs accordingly.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how Boff\u2019s song \u201cHere Comes Mr Gandhi\u201d originated: I decided there needed to be a song that reminded the audience that Churchill was viewed by pretty much everyone as a political disaster in the 20s & 30s, so I combined that with a song that moved the narrative out of the south to give the industrial north a voice. Just when the recordings were all but finished, my mum talked about a holiday in Eastbourne & day trip she took with her cousin to France in the summer of 1939, which ended up with their boat being caught in a storm. The song all but wrote itself.<\/p>\n
It was very difficult to stop writing. I think I did become a bit obsessed with it all; I remember catching myself walking up the stairs to go to sleep after finally fixing up a date for Swill to sing yet another last song, chuckling weirdly to myself.<\/p>\n
CG: The song suite features a great cast of contributors. Over the years, you\u2019ve worked with an impressively diverse range of musicians. How do you think your music benefits from this collaborative approach?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: \u201cOrdinary Giants\u201d depends very much on the contributors. I found myself \u2013 as well as chuckling weirdly \u2013 writing for singers & performers. For example, Swill, Phil Odgers, was just so brilliant as my dad, I kept adding songs & extra bits for him to sing. & Miranda Sykes as my mum, again, absolutely brilliant, so I wanted to write more songs for her to sing. They worked so well together; I had suggested they might try one song could be a duet \u2013 their voices interacted perfectly, so we turned another song into a duet, & Swill added beautiful backing vocals to Miranda\u2019s song where the happy poppy 60s turn into the fragmented 70s.<\/p>\n
I think competition is not conducive to either creativity in particular or society in general. I am appalled at the way the Right have re-introduced unnecessary & damaging ideas of competition into everything from education to cake-baking. Competition \u2013 like grammar schooling \u2013 is always presented from the perspective of the \u201cwinners\u201d, whereas in fact the majority of participants end up losers \u2013 the percentage of us ending up with second class secondary modern education being about 80%.<\/p>\n
As a musician, I delight in the process of interacting with other musicians. Magic happens when musicians play together, when voices sing together. I am very fortunate to have worked with lots of lovely creative people. Usually this has been around the songs that I have written, & I am always honoured by people choosing to sing them. These people \u2013 particularly singers like Barb Jungr, Roy Bailey & Maggie Holland \u2013 have also helped develop & encourage me as a writer & a performer. Working with musicians from different genres or cultural backgrounds has expanded my very self-taught understanding of music. Everybody brings their own perspective, experience & skills to those moments of collaboration. I suppose my songwriting tends to be quite an isolated process \u2013 working with different people helps to overcome my individual limitations.<\/p>\n
I think effective cooperation & collaboration doesn\u2019t mean we all do the same thing; like the concept of equality it isn\u2019t effective if it is just envisaged as making everything the same. It is much more about contributing strengths together & compensating for each other\u2019s weaknesses. Everybody has these attributes; competition \u2013 to return to the education analogy \u2013 simply tests what the test has arbitrarily decided to value. Cooperation involves engaging with you as a fully-rounded, 3 dimensional human-being. This seems to me a much better \u201cchallenge\u201d than obsessing over who gets most votes on television. Of course, people might say \u2013 ah, but in the decades when pop music was such a vibrant cultural phenomenon, it was organised around the weekly publication of the pop music charts. But the culture wasn\u2019t all only Top of the Pops. Top of the Pops was the muzak bizz\u2019s attempt to re-present what was essentially a culture that they could only exploit rather than \u2013 as nowadays \u2013determine & control. The Deviants & The Clash never appeared on Top of the Pops….<\/p>\n
I nearly forgot \u2013 working with the Anti-Capitalist Roadshow, we developed a non-hierarchical collaborative way of performing\u2026 we sit in arrow on stage, we all take turns performing a song, & co-operate & join in or sit out if that is more appropriate to our individual skill set – & that I think is a very empowering way of performing. If I get the chance, I try to suggest this way of co-operative working (rather than sticking the \u201cbiggest\u201d name\/ego on last) in other performances too. Artists co-operating? No-one being the biggest show-off? Dangerously subversive or what?<\/p>\n
CG: Culture is a key site of political and social struggle, which offers a powerful platform to challenge the prevailing neoliberal culture. We are very interested in what an incoming Labour Government would do to develop arts and culture policies which work for ordinary people, assert our common humanity against the divisions of class, gender and race caused by capitalism, which facilitate grassroots cultural formations and activities, and which inspire people to fight for a better world. What are your views on the culture policies that Labour might include in their manifesto?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: I think Corbyn\u2019s commitment to returning creativity to the school curriculum is the most effective long term strategy. It\u2019s encouraging to see this in the manifesto \u2013 the arts pupil premium. Us humans are by nature creative & cooperative. As an Early Years teacher I saw this at first hand, & then a school system organised around measurable outcomes, a restricted curriculum & competition grinds those attributes out of us & trains us to be passive consumers of processed bilge rather than active, reflective creators.<\/p>\n
Recently there has been something of an increase in cultural initiatives that obviously link entertainment to ideas, to politics \u2013 there have been the Stand Up For Labour gigs, & the wonderful grass-roots (is that becoming a bit of an overworked term? How about the more descriptive small-scale & local) We Shall Overcome nationwide collective of performers & performances. Labour\u2019s decision to hold a festival last year was another interesting & empowering event (am I biased because I mc\u2019d it? I don\u2019t think so) which involved a really good mix of performers & a lively amount of discussion & debate too.<\/p>\n
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So these are healthy indications of a healthy resurgence of elements \u2013 participation & political consciousness \u2013 that have been missing from popular culture. I think festivals need to be treated with caution however; by their very nature they have a tendency to reinforce an unhelpful distance between performer & audience, & a tendency to celebrate the conventional. With all that investment that everybody is making, no-one wants to risk trying something that doesn\u2019t work \u2013 which is why small-scale gigs & supportive situations (not another fucking open-mic session where the pub gets free entertainment all night & performers turn up hoping to be discovered & bugger off once they\u2019ve had their go) are so important. We need spaces where as a performer, you can try something out, see how it works, for real, not just in your bedroom. As an audience, we need those spaces too, where we aren\u2019t simply passively responding to a screen or a stream, but interacting with other people. For real.<\/p>\n
I have just had a quick re-read of the \u201cCulture For All\u201d section of the Labour manifesto, & it seems a promising document. From my perspective, it looks like a set of proposals that may provide cultural workers engaged in those areas of culture where I work with an increase in venues & opportunities to be creative. It supports the idea that creativity is cultural work that ought to be appropriately remunerated \u2013 which is a better model than the present one whereby cultural work is the exclusive province of over-remunerated media-approved celebrities. I think that revitalising local communities & creating & supporting opportunities & spaces for performance (like the way the manifesto recognises the importance of pubs as community resources) will probably be more effective than anything administered by The Arts Council \u2013 but then that might just be me & my dislike of filling out forms & ticking somebody else\u2019s boxes.<\/p>\n
CG: The media often sneer at \u2018protest\u2019 singers, which I take to be a mark of their success! How do you personally combine your music and your politics, and what do think the role of musicians is in society today?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: Indeed \u2013 I agree wholeheartedly: you know you\u2019re doing something good when the capitalist bizz & media do their best to ignore &\/or rubbish your work. Me & music & politics\u2026 well, that\u2019s probably quite a complex question because \u2013 having somehow got this pigeon-hole \u201cpolitical artist\u201d that\u2019s primarily only what people hear, & what people expect to hear. Of course, what this really means is \u201cleft\u201d or oppositional ideas \u2013 no-one ever talks about the politics of Rod Stewart\u2019s work, because it subscribes to or can be recuperated by dominant conservative political values.<\/p>\n
I suppose that my life experiences have confirmed in me an understanding of the world that considers every element of the human world is political, & freights political significance. When I was a student in Brighton, my friends in Hounslow who I played in a band with thought my interest in politics was something that was a consequence of my being a student, & that I would grow out of such views once I returned to the \u201creal\u201d world. Partly this was true \u2013 being a student allowed me to develop my thinking about the world, & afforded me more opportunity for reflection than my previous occupation, working in the carpet department & then as a toilet cleaner in Hounslow Co-op. But I had already joined USDAW, & had an instinctive dislike of the local Tory MP. & when I did finally get a job as a teacher in the \u201creal\u201d world, I found all the theoretical understanding of class & inequality operating for real upon the life chances of the children & the families I was working with.<\/p>\n
So these perceptions started filtering into my songs. Thatcher & issues like apartheid & Nicaragua certainly accelerated this process; there were benefits, strikes, picket lines to play on\u2026 & in this context, pop\u2019s perennial obsession with adolescent trouser-action seemed increasingly irrelevant. I mean\u2026 at the start of the pop culture social revolution, sex was subversive; now it just sells newspapers. And there is the problem of how do you continue writing pop songs if you DON\u2019T die before you get old?<\/p>\n
So \u2013 I mustn\u2019t grumble: a capacity to write songs with a conscious political dimension isn\u2019t all that I do, but it does mean I have kept writing & performing, hopefully refining & developing my craft, without ever having been limited to the expectations attendant upon fashionability or popularity. I think the function of musicians is simply the function of all artists \u2013 to create work that entertains (in the sense of it engaging & rewarding your sustained attention) & that expresses the artist\u2019s perceptions in a way that inspires & moves & delights & empowers the beholder. Music has a particular language & effect &\u2026 portability that is distinct from \u2013 say \u2013 theatre or cinema or painting\u2026 you can\u2019t dance to a painting, & you can\u2019t sing along to a film, & you can interact with your audience directly in a way a playwright or novelist doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
CG: What are the sort of gigs you like doing best<\/em>?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: Pubs! Well\u2026 I like playing in Belgium too; it\u2019s not just the beer, it is the fact that audiences \u2013 a generalisation \u2013 aren\u2019t so tied to genres, but seem interested in a variety & diversity of musical languages. In the UK, you sort of get folk audiences or punk audiences or rock audiences\u2026. which is also one of the reasons why I like pubs; people turn up, & there you are, like Robert Johnson, playing in the corner, doing your best to entertain people without insulting their or your intelligence (well, that\u2019s my aim anyway). I have always been impressed by that kind of model, where there is not this massive distance between performer & audience, where the<\/em> music is part of the audience\u2019s weekly world, not some massive expensive annual festival where you\u2019re stood at the back looking at the video screens with insufficient toilet facilities, or something disposable you watch like a far distant galaxy on television, or download, tinny 2D & disposable, onto your mobile phone.<\/p>\nOh & of course, I like well-organised & well-paid gigs too, where people listen attentively. & I enjoy playing at Tolpuddle, & I enjoyed Labour Live, so I am not averse to larger venues. But I am happy playing schools, kindergartens & OAP homes too. I played Broadmoor a couple of times too. It is always much appreciated to be appreciated. Really, I just like playing & singing & \u2026 in my own little way.. entertaining people. All sorts of people, all ages. Without anybody\u2019s intelligence or integrity being insulted. I like the sort of gig where you feel you have done the work to the best of your ability.<\/p>\n
CG: What are your plans to tour Ordinary Giants?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRJ: Hmmmm\u2026 well, it\u2019s a tricky one. We could tour a reduced cast version (full participants obviously 99.999999% recurring impossible) but it would be\u2026 ridiculously expensive, let alone difficult to co-ordinate. As indicated above, I think appropriate remuneration is due to cultural workers, & I also believe that everybody should be paid the same amount (here, equality does mean the same, to me, if you are playing in a band situation). Friends suggested I apply for an Arts Council Grant. I am always a bit reluctant to do this \u2013 folk music \u2013 it stands or falls on its own two feet, surely? It is not the province of kings or CEOs of Lottery Funding, surely? The Pink Fairies & The Clash never got lottery funding, maaaaaaan.<\/p>\n
So I looked at the forms. I even made a start at filling them in. A fortnight later, when I binned them, the headache stopped & I got on with writing songs. I thought \u2013 Dickens didn\u2019t finish \u201cBleak House\u201d & think: right, now I must stage this with a cast of well-known BBC actors\u2026 I would love to see it presented as a stage performance, but \u2013 that\u2019s certainly NOT my job at the moment. So I am back to my usual practice of emailing people & phoning people & asking for solo gigs & generally being ignored. But we are sort of sorting out a few gigs for next year that get as far east as Thuringen, including Belgium, & as far west as Vancouver Island, with Lewes & Leeds & Bolton & Glossop along the way.<\/p>\n
Robb Johnson,\u00a0Ordinary Giants: A Life and Times, 1918-2018, is released on\u00a0Irregular Records.<\/em><\/p>\n
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