Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall gear up for the New Year party in Edinburgh

Published on Sunday 26 December 2010 14:10

As Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall prepare to toast Hogmanay in Edinburgh, Paul Lester discovers several similarities that work for this seemingly unlikely pairing

• Twice the fun: above, Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall perform at HMV on Oxford Street in February

They may seem like an unlikely pairing – the old firebrand and the young singer-songwriter – but Billy Bragg and KT Tunstall, who are both performing at this year's Hogmanay extravaganza in Edinburgh, are having no end of fun. As the photographer snaps away, she plays with his deerstalker while he tells an on-tour anecdote, hardly suited to a family newspaper, that takes in Boney M's Rasputin and a bowel-opening episode backstage.

It's not the first time they've met. That was in 2005 when they both performed at London's Barbican for a tribute show called Talking Bob Dylan Blues. Since then their paths have crossed several times: there was the gig at the HMV store on London's Oxford Street to celebrate five decades of British music during which they duetted on versions of everything from Cliff Richard's Move It to The Human League's Don't You Want Me, and there was the occasion they appeared at the same venue in Portland, Oregon, on consecutive nights. Bragg even played a brief but moving set at Tunstall's wedding in 2008 as she married her band's drummer, Luke Bullen, on the Isle Of Skye. There, his rendition of his song I Keep Faith went down almost as well as his tartan trousers and cowboy shirt.

They share a sense of humour, but on a more serious note, they both have a reputation for using music to address political issues – Bragg's espousal of causes has long been a matter of record while Tunstall's environmental awareness is such that she has created not one but two eco-friendly homes, one in London, the other in Hungerford. Not that either is particularly happy to be labelled "political".

"What we have in common," offers Bragg, "is that we're both songwriters – we've both managed to get where we are by the strength of our songwriting. That's what I admire about KT. It's an incredibly powerful thing."

"Politics has never inspired me directly to write," says Tunstall, although she was sufficiently enraged by Proposition 8 – a ruling in the state of California against same-sex marriages – to denounce it from a stage in San Francisco. And there are, she admits, certain subjects about which she feels strongly – "climate change and democracy, for sure" – even if she doesn't feel she has the necessary knowledge to speak out about them (Bragg has appeared on BBC1's Question Time; Tunstall doesn't feel confident enough to do the same).

Bragg is quick to defend Tunstall – "the stances she's taken and things she's spoken about in interviews are as feisty and political as anybody's" – and her generation, incontestably a less vociferous one than his, which saw the likes of Paul Weller and Jerry Dammers nailing their colours to numerous masts. "You can't expect people to have political views in a political vacuum," he argues, "and we've been living in a cultural-political vacuum for the last 20 years."

"There's an apathy now – it's not inspiring," adds Tunstall, who was in two minds about the use of her hit single, Suddenly I See, by Hillary Clinton during her election campaign: she was pro-Democrat, but is generally against the idea of a too close and cosy alignment between political party and musician. The word she uses to describe it is "dodgy". Bragg, similarly, bemoans the demise of rock as something "oppositional to the establishment culture".

They agree the recent student riots over tuition fees have seen a resurgence of youthful pro-activity. "Being 'kettled' will radicalise kids," decides Bragg, while for Tunstall it was last year's expenses scandal that had, for her, the most powerful galvanising effect.

The vapidity of popular culture gets her equally wound up. "It's so anti-intelligent," she says of the preponderance of reality TV programmes. "I'm just waiting for the point where they take people off Death Row and they go (adopts blankly dramatic American game-show presenter voice], 'Instead of being killed, why don't you go into this gladiator ring – you may be killed publicly, or you may survive!'"

Bragg is disheartened by the way coverage of reality TV "seeps into the national discourse" and pushes "real stories" off the front pages of the newspapers.

They have each made a stand about reality TV pop. Tunstall was critical of the medium even if she did eventually allow a contestant on American Idol to sing one of her songs, Black Horse And The Cherry Tree. "I've never been a fan of those shows so I had to make a judgment call," she says. "Forty million people watch it – I'd have been a total knob-end to say no!"

As for Bragg – who feels fairly certain that Simon Cowell won't be contacting him any time soon for permission to hold a "Billy Bragg night" on The X Factor – he recently formed impromptu outfit Cage Against the Machine with, among others, Imogen Heap and members of Orbital and The Kooks to record a "version" of avant-garde musician John Cage's 4'33" composition of pure silence as a statement about the inanity of reality TV pop. "It was a Situationist prank," laughs Bragg, who had to record his "silence" on a mobile phone from the M74 where he was trapped in snowy conditions for ten hours in a traffic jam between Hamilton and Motherwell.

Cage Against The Machine didn't quite make the Christmas number one slot, but they did generate a lot of press. As did the news earlier this year that Tunstall's half-Chinese birth mother (Tunstall was adopted just after she was born, and raised by a family in St Andrews) was married to David Orr, a "right-wing fanatic" (according to the Daily Record) and member of the BNP. It was Bragg who Tunstall contacted for support when the story appeared in the papers. "It was obviously massively distressing," she says, not least because it gave free exposure to a political party whose name she refuses to repeat because she finds them "sickening". She has only seen Orr a handful of times, she says, and wants nothing to do with him.

On a happier, more festive note, she is, at the time of the interview, looking forward to a "pretty traditional UK Christmas" with her family and a "big chomp". Bragg's Yuletide celebrations will, he says, include his son Jack's birthday tomorrow (and his own, which was on 20 December). Then there is the annual Medieval pageant in Dorset where the East Londoner now lives, which involves "sword fights from pub to pub and a bunch of locals dressed up as crusaders like something out of Monty Python".

As for New Year's resolutions, Tunstall doesn't have any – she has "intentions", and her primary one is to continue to enjoy a career as a working musician, despite the fact that "touring isn't as easy as it was because no one's got any bloody money". Bragg plans to read more books: he's got an autobiography of Band drummer Levon Helm he wants to start, as well as a fun little tome entitled 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. As for bad habits that he resolves to give up, top of the list is "voting Liberal Democrat", which he did in the last election – for tactical reasons, he hastens to add.

And we're back where we began, assessing Bragg and Tunstall's shared values as outspoken musicians in an age when politically motivated performers are rarer than a right-wing skinhead at a Red Wedge reunion bash.

"I don't mind being labelled a political songwriter but there's a lot more than politics at my gigs," says Bragg, who describes himself first and foremost as "a soul singer".

"I'm not a soapboxer," declares Tunstall, "but I am the poster girl for not needing to take any of your f***ing clothes off to get somewhere."

"That in itself," considers Bragg, "is a political act, in an era when Rihanna, one of the most famous singers on earth, has to go on The X Factor in her bra and knickers to sell some records. That's why I have the greatest of respect for KT."

Tunstall wonders whether female artists of the calibre of Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith would be allowed to happen now. "I don't know," she says. "I hope they would. They would if I was in charge of the record labels." She is dismayed by the lack of control afforded artists these days. "That's why gigs are so special," she says. "You create a community for an hour and a half with people who have never been together before. You can't 'sell' it."

The rock gig, they agree, remains the one thing that lies outside the domain of the record company marketing department, and as such it retains an almost revolutionary quality. Or, as Bragg says of our digital, instant-gratification culture, "You can experience a download, but you can't download an experience"– a soundbite so neat he and Tunstall grin as though all their Christmases have come at once.

• Billy Bragg supports Biffy Clyro at West Princes Street Gardens on Friday as part of Edinburgh's Hogmanay. KT Tunstall headlines the same stage on Saturday www.edinburghshogmanay.com