Live Review: Billy Bragg, Jordie Lane

Like most great folk musicians, Billy Bragg is a storyteller. He tells stories in his songs, and, on stage at a gig, he tells plenty of stories in between as well. So, in the tradition of folk music, there was almost more talk than playing at his gig at the Astor, with Bragg resting his guitar in between almost every song to make way for long spates of stories, dense with jokes and banter. Jordie Lane played the support slot which showed the Aussie singer-songwriter is as adept opening for the main man as playing alongside him when the set rounded off nicely with a duet.

From there the main part of the evening was broken up into two parts. In the first, Billy Bragg played the unrecorded Woodie Guthrie songs from the Mermaid Avenue recordings, and in the second he played his own. For the first, he was seated, acoustic guitar on his knee, and there was a sense of significance to the proceedings. Among a few off-colour moments, Bragg regularly honoured Guthrie in his stories, acknowledging the enormous contribution and influence the late musician has had on folk music. The songs he played were uplifting (he made a point about how Guthrie hated music that brought people down), and he even played – and taught us the chorus to – one of Guthrie's kids' songs about not wetting the bed. “This is a song about nocturnal incontinence,” he announced by way of introducing it.

Judging by their reaction to the first song of the second set, it seemed to be Bragg's own songs the punters had been waiting for. He has been such a formative musician for so many, and nowhere is this more obvious than at one of his gigs. All Bragg had to do was pace the stage playing the guitar licks in between the chorus lyrics for The Price I Pay;  the audience did most of the singing. He was standing for this set, and the guitar on the strap around his neck had switched to an electric. Even though Bragg was obviously worn out, admitting that “Things get a bit weird at the end of a tour” (and don't we Perth audiences know it), it was a show to motivate its crowd. He made the point that certain political persuasions aren't the problem with the world, cynicism is, and then he sang us a song about it. He said that music can't change the world, and feathers ruffled, but then he qualified that with the insistence that it's the crowd, individuals and people on mass that change the world. After one more duet with Lane, a Gram Parsons song this time, he finished up his set and then played a slower encore, closing the night and the tour with a beautiful, crowd-sung New England.