Polemicists don t come much more forthright than Billy Bragg. Apart from Woody Guthrie, perhaps. Which must be why they make for such strangely comfortable bedfellows: Bragg, an East Londoner whose brash and combative attitude to Thatcherite politics was one of the few lights at the end of a very dark tunnel during 18 years of Tory rule; Guthrie, the quintessential American folk hero, author of the alternative national anthem, This Land Is Your Land , and spiritual godfather to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and all who came after them.

Mermaid Avenue Vol. II has just been released. It s a second collection of Woody Guthrie songs captured by Bragg and Wilco during their Dublin recording sessions back in 1997. Play it side by side with its predecessor, Mermaid Avenue, and you ve got two and a half dozen previously unrecorded Guthrie songs, breathing new life courtesy of a lad from Barking and a quintet of decidedly ungovernable lopers from middle America. Woody would surely have smiled at the contradiction of it all.
With a Grammy finally awarded him this year, Woody Guthrie seems to have finally sidled into the mainstream some 33 years after his death.
Woody s always been there, Bragg insists. If you look at Rolling Stone, he s always been in the periphery, on the edge. People mention him in their interviews: Springsteen, Beck, but he s never been centre stage. He s never allowed the real doyen writers, like Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh, to reassess him and put him back into the core until now. If you look at singer/songwriters as a family tree, all roads lead back to Woody. All roads.
Bragg noticed a chasm of difference in the response of European and American audiences to the Mermaid Avenue project.
If people know Woody Guthrie in Europe, they know him through Bob Dylan, he says, whereas, in America, you have to understand, they sing This Land Is Your Land every day at school. Woody Guthrie is there. Whereas over here, he s known through the work of other people. And I ll be honest with you, all the Woody Guthrie songs that I know, I learned off other peoples records. I learned Deportees off of an Arlo (Guthrie) record, I learned Pretty Boy Floyd off a Byrds record. If you listen to enough singer/songwriters, you kind of accumulate Woody by osmosis.
Woody Guthrie s reputation was built on those dust bowl ballads. The Mermaid Avenue albums uncover an entirely different side to the boy from Okie who was a long time resident of New York city and who died in 1967 at the height of flower power. Did Bragg encounter any resistance from diehard Guthrie fans anxious to cling on to the one-dimensional cardboard cutout they d been sold by the record companies?
No, not at all, Bragg says, shaking his head. If anybody asks me: do you think Woody would ve done it this way? , I turn to the lyric sheet to My Flying Saucer , and on the upper left hand corner, he used to write the tempos. On that one he wrote Supersonic Boogie , so if Woody Guthrie himself was thinking that, nobody can suggest we ve been unfaithful to him.
My remit has never been to make a tribute record to Woody. My remit has been to collaborate with him. And how do I do that? Do I try to write songs like him? No, that s imitating him. I collaborate with him by bringing the music and influences from my life, the backdrop that I see Woody against, and working with that.
Despite this recent incarnation of Bragg as Guthrie s heir apparent, the Barking bard is still the passionate political animal he always was, though his views have changed somewhat, fuelled by the transformation in the political environment over the past five years.
We no longer live in an ideological society, he avers, because we don t have ideologues like Margaret Thatcher. We don t have the Cold War. When you think of the things that I wrote about in the eighties, that made complete sense. If I wrote a song about apartheid, about Ronald Reagan, about the Soviet Union: those things have gone, and I m glad they are. There are other things to write about, like what happened in Seattle (the demonstrations at the WTO summit last November). There was a lot of anger and frustration there, but what s the ideology? It s not clear.
What s going to be the most potent political negative force in the next election in my country? I think it s going to be the Euro and the forces of nationalism, English nationalism and xenophobia. The Conservative Party is going to try to drum up support over that, and how are we going to counter it? See, I can and I have tried to write about identity and Englishness, but what does that mean to someone in Dublin? The politics are different, and I m trying to focus on those things in society which give us a sense of who we are as a nation.
Bragg betrays a surprising degree of tolerance for the current Labour Party, and is unperturbed by accusations that Blair has simply sold-out on the back of slick sound bytes and copious doses of melodrama delivered on cue.
It depends to me where you look, he says. If you look at the way they ve treated asylum seekers, yeah, it s very depressing, but if you look to Northern Ireland, it s encouraging. If at the end of this government there is a genuine lasting peace in Ireland, then to me this government will be the most significant government in the last 30 years, perhaps the most significant since 1945. That is a genuine lasting achievement, which I will never, ever regret voting for. I will stand up and say I was proud to vote in a Government who then led to the Irish people to vote on Articles Two and Three of your Constitution. I m not saying that forgives them everything, but it s really fucking important.
Even when I was in Red Wedge, I had criticisms of the Labour Party, and I criticised them when I thought they deserved it, and I encouraged them when I could. The only thing that s different now is that I ve suspended my cynicism. I think the enemy of all progressive politics is cynicism.
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II is out now on Electra