Billy Bragg – The Powerstation: Feb. 26, 2023

Billy Bragg performed at Auckland’s Powerstation last night. The 13th Floor’s Robin Kearns and Chris Zwaagdyk were on the scene with a review and photos.

This visit by the ‘Bard of Barking’ had been Covid-delayed, adding a sense of anticipation and relief. Riffing off his recent album, Billy Bragg said Auckland was almost among the Million Things that Never Happened.

Erny Belle

It can be both an honour and a tough gig to open for someone well known at a bar-based venue like the Powerstation.

Erny Belle (Aimee Renata, Ngāpuhi) released her album Venus is Home in early 2022. She valiantly took the stage amid the clamour of expectant fans awaiting the main act and presented eight songs mainly from that debut release. Her voice wavers between delicate and strong and at times was a little reminiscent of Nadia Reid. Her delivery seemed a little emotionally flat, possibly related to the challenge of connecting to a less than engaged audience.

Belle shared the stage with a Tiare Kelly who played able sitar and bass guitar. The former instrument’s atmospherics complemented Erny’ voice beautifully. Or as much as was discernible amid the plague of loud talking. Inventive use of a prayer bowl gong added atmospherics.

Highlights were the waitata, Wawata and the set-closing protest song, Nuclear Bombs, a segue of sorts to Billy Bragg’s activist repertoire.

Overall enjoyable but deserving of a more attentive audience or a smaller venue.

Billy Bragg

The loquacious ‘Uncle Bill’, dressed in black with a smart grey jacket, is now white haired and bespectacled. Special thanks are offered to those who’d bought tickets back before their hair similarly became white.

Opener is his 1984 song A Lover Sings (“You and I are victims of a love/That lost a lot in the translation”). This sets the tone for the night: a deep dive into his back catalogue and a focus on the subtle politics of the personal. Yes, we get the anthem Power in a Union later on, fresh from Billy standing on the picket line with Calendar Girls dancers in Wellington (“you may not agree with their work but that’s not the point. I don’t agree with coal mining but I’ll still stand with miners”). But climate and gender loomed large.

There’s plenty of reflection on the strangeness of the years since he was last here (a three-night run at the Hollywood, Avondale). Lockdown allowed him time to read widely (“I’m a curious little bastard who goes down worm holes”) and watch a lot of YouTube clips. But he resisted one called 10 Mysterious Photos that Can’t be Explained, writing a song about it instead.

His casual style and London accent easily disguise the razor-sharp intellect of this regular writer in The Guardian and author of a number of books. He swaps between two guitars (a “spit amp set up”)  and played such that it feels there’s a an entire band on stage. In a sense there is: a band of two.  He’s joined by Neil Anderson on keyboards. A generation junior to Bragg and with slicked back hair, he could have had a bit part in Grease. Fittingly, Billy quips there should be a disco section of his set.

It’s an evening of acknowledging those who had walked before him: Woody Guthrie and Rambling Jack Elliott were imaginatively beamed in from a retirement home at Lake Tahoe, two of the former’s songs making the setlist. Kirsty McColl was remembered for her version of A New England.

Throughout, we are addressed as kin, as if in the presence of a secular preacher having our politics revived (“Bring your wounds down to the front brothers and sisters”).   Before Sexuality, he has a dig at Morrissey (“He deserves all he gets”) the song’s lyrics tweaked to embrace respect for those who are trans and non-binary. “There are too many geezers my age who just don’t get it”, he says. Mid-century Modern addresses “the gap between the man I am/ and the man I want to be”. Valentine’s Day is Over completed this bracket reflecting on gender.

Climate concerns entered the setlist with the searing King Tide accompanied by a lesson in oceanography: water expands in the heat and in Florida there are summer floods with no rain. (“The ocean connects us all/ we can’t just build a wall”, he sings). Hawkes’ Bay gets a nod, as does what lies ahead for Britain when the Gulf Stream fails. So does rampant individualism (“People want to be libertarians till the brown water floods their homes”).

The folly of anti-vaxxers gets a prod too, with his advocacy for the common good a theme running through the ominous Freedom Doesn’t Come Free, replete with ominous imagery reminiscent of the Handsome Family

Someone calls out a request. Quick as a razor cut Bragg responds” You only have to remember the title, you’re asking me to remember the lyrics? I’m 65. Fuck off”. Fair enough.

Billy digressed on all manner of matters. Like his time in Auckland and going to café at Britomart that “sounds like a shitty English supermarket”. A tacit challenge to the cultural politics of naming. Go Billy.

Entertaining and provocative. He has two ‘settings’ he tells us: Joe Strummer (of The Clash) or Max Miller (the great English comedian).” If I lean too far to the latter and you get an evening of stand-up”, he says.  Mercifully, we got two hours somewhere near the middle.

Music, he tells us doesn’t itself have agency. Despite its assertion, Woody Guthrie’s guitar didn’t kill fascists. But music does have the power to make you believe the world can be changed. And armed with that belief, it’s then up to us as listeners.

He ends with Waiting for the Great Leap Forward. Somehow each time Billy Bragg performs, that leap is a little less daunting.

Robin Kearns

Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Chris Zwaagdyk.

Billy Bragg:

Erny Belle:

Billy Bragg Setlist

1. A Lover Sings
2. The Million Things that Never Happened
3. Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key
4. Ten Mysterious Photos
5. Levi Stubbs Tears
6. All You Fascists Bound to Lose
7. Sexuality
8. Mid-century Modern
9. Valentine’s Day is Over
10. Freedom Doesn’t Come for Free
11. Greetings….
12. King Tide
13. I will be your Shield
14. Milkman of Human Kindness
15. To Have
16. Power in a Union
17. Tank Park Salute
18. Great Leap Forwards

Erny Belle Setlist:

Bowman

Baby Blue

Hell Hole

E Wawata

Island Time

Unchained

Burning Heaven

Nuclear Bombs