Billy Bragg welcomes new UEA protest song project
Billy Bragg has praised a new academic project to catalogue the history of the English protest song from 1600 to the present day, saying that songs “can’t change the world” but can “bring people together”.A website catalogue of about 750 songs in the Our Subversive Voice project has been produced, presented alongside interviews with key songwriters.The University of East Anglia (UEA) project includes Royalist songs from the English Civil War up to modern entries like Grace Petrie‘s 2016 song ‘I Wish The Guardian Believed That I Exist’.Bragg himself has two of his songs in the catalogue – ‘Between The Wars’ and ‘It Says Here’, among tracks the artist has previously covered including Florence Reece’s ‘Which Side Are You On?’ – and told the BBC that the project was important to show the political tradition of songs in England.“People think political pop music was something invented in the 1970s, but traditionally song has been used to get messages out, without them being edited by the government or establishment,” he said.“When I took part in the miners’ strike in the 1980s, I was a little punk rocker guy… the folk singers were already there and their repertoire was more radical than mine and much of it had been written in the 19th Century.”Asked about the impact of protest songs, Bragg said: “It can change some things, but it can’t change the world. What it does is it brings people together in solidarity – for example to raise money for a cause.